The U.S. ranked No. 1 globally in 24 indices of leadership in the Internet ecosystem, according to more-detailed information that the Media Institute released Wednesday about its Net Vitality Index. The original report published in April and written by Stuart Brotman of Harvard Law School, lists the U.S. as one of the top five nations in the Internet ecosystem and provides extensive global rankings by country across 52 indices -- including the amount of top digital startups and highest-valued digital startups, access to information, top web browsers and investment in telecommunications. It ranked no lower than 13th in any measurement. South Korea, France, Japan and the United Kingdom were identified as the other four countries in the Internet ecosystem's leadership tier.
Four individuals were arraigned Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, on charges they smuggled tens of thousands of counterfeit Apple and Sony products from China for sale in the U.S., the Justice Department said in a statement. Charged in a 31-page indictment with importing and trafficking illegal goods were Andreina Becerra, 30, a Venezuelan national; Roberto Volpe, 33, an Italian national; Jianhua Li, 40, a Chinese national; and Rosario La Marca, 52, an Italian national, DOJ said. They’re also accused of international money laundering to cover their tracks, DOJ said. The indictment estimates the defendants smuggled in more than 40,000 fake Apple and Sony goods between July 2009 and February 2014 that would have fetched more than $15 million in sales had they been the genuine articles. No information was available Thursday on whether the four defendants entered pleas, and attorneys for the four didn’t comment.
Trading began Thursday on Nasdaq and over the counter of Liberty Global's new tracking stock for its Caribbean and Latin American operations, the LiLAC Group. The company said in a news release Wednesday that the LiLAC Group stock was created to allow shareholders to invest directly in its cable business in Chile and its majority interest in a Puerto Rican cable company, Liberty Cablevision, which it and Searchlight Capital Partners bought in June.
Amazon Web Services will house infrastructure for its cloud computing platform in India beginning in 2016, a company news release said Tuesday. Its cloud services are used by businesses in India, but a lack of infrastructure presence there had clients asking for the company to create one in the region, said AWS. India will become the company's 12th global infrastructure region, it said.
Broadcom signed memoranda of understanding with Chinese companies, including two for the development of Ultra HD equipment, it said in a news release. Its joint development agreement with Inspur Group, a systems integrator, is aimed at fashioning a new DOCSIS 3.0 Ultra HD set-top "that can power an entire digital home system,” Broadcom said Thursday. The goal of a separate pact with Beijing-based pay-TV operator StarTimes is to jointly define and develop set-top offerings for Africa, Broadcom said: “Both sides will invest engineering resources to develop a series of low-cost set-top boxes and high-end Ultra HD home gateways.”
A massive low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of Ku-band OneWeb satellites is planned to be put into orbit starting in 2016 that will tie into Intelsat's geostationary orbit satellite network to create a worldwide high-throughput network. OneWeb announced the planned network of more than 600 satellites Thursday. It said it hired Arianespace to do 21 Soyuz launches of its satellites and Virgin Galactic for another 39 using its LauncherOne. It also said it has raised $500 million from a group of companies to help develop broadband technology including the terminals that will allow its LEO satellites to interoperate with Intelsat's GEO satellites. Those investors are Airbus Group, Bharti Enterprises, Coca-Cola, Grupo Salinas, Hughes Network Systems, Intelsat, Qualcomm and Virgin Group.
Globalstar now operates in Africa. It said Thursday its gateway in Gaborone, Botswana, is operational, opening the door for it to offer its Simplex data services across the continent jointly with Broadband Botswana Internet. Globalstar said it's targeting offerings at such applications as commercial trucking fleet; mining and construction equipment tracking; and livestock and endangered species monitoring.
The BBC took a “simple low cost brainwave reading headset” and developed a “Mind Control TV” prototype for its iPlayer streaming service, Cyrus Saihan, head-business development, said Thursday in a blog post. It allows users to open an “experimental version” of iPlayer and choose a TV program to view “using nothing but their brainwaves,” Saihan said. For now, it’s an “internal” BBC prototype designed to give program creators, technologists and others “an idea of how this technology might be used in the future,” he said. In its first trial run, 10 BBC staff members all were able to launch iPlayer and start viewing a program “simply by using their minds,” he said. Though it was “much easier for some than it was for others,” all who tried it “managed to get it to work,” he said. BBC researchers envision using the technology “to help users with a broad range of disabilities who cannot easily use traditional TV remote controls or other conventional interfaces,” he said. For example, people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis “may increasingly be able to use brain-computer interfaces to get a better experience of digital and media services than they currently do, potentially opening up the online world of information and experiences that the rest of us now take for granted,” he said. “Our proof-of-concept is only an experiment and just a toe in the water, but it helps our initial understanding of how we might be able to control devices using our brainwaves in the years to come.”
SES is rolling out a video content management service, FluidMedia, aimed at video producers and distributors. FluidMedia is being unveiled at ANGA COM 2015, continuing through Thursday in Cologne, Germany, and allows for control of ingestion, transcoding, quality checks and delivery to the Internet or VOD platforms, as well as the management and customization of metadata such as licensing information or trailers, SES said in a Monday release.
Level 3 and Telefonica Business Solutions said they reached an interconnection agreement for "their public IP networks." Both companies "will add capacity and establish new interconnection locations between the two networks to stay ahead of growing traffic demands, thus offering flexibility for each network while improving performance and reliability for their respective customers," a joint release said Monday.