Russian WiMax operator eyes GSM handover, WiMax 2 tests

Russian WiMax operator Yota will soon begin offering its customers a WiMax terminal that can make VOIP calls - and hand them over to a GSM network when the caller wanders out of the WiMax coverage area. However, that device cannot be used to make VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls. Last November, the company introduced a terminal from High Tech Computer (HTC) that can make calls over GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks and connect to WiMax data networks.

Yota President and CEO Dennis Sverdlov showed a prototype of the new GSM phone with VOIP-over-WiMax at a news conference on the sidelines of the ITU Telecom World exhibition in Geneva on Tuesday. It was in 2006 that Samsung first announced plans to release a dual-mode GSM-WiMax phone. Sverdlov refused to name the manufacturer of the prototype, but it was engraved with the words "not for sale" and a MAC address beginning with the code 00:1B:98, which identifies devices manufactured by Samsung Electronics. Samsung supplies Yota's network infrastructure, and on Tuesday the companies also announced they have begun testing WiMax 2.0 network equipment, based on the IEEE's 802.16m standard. Yota plans to put the first WiMax 2.0 units into service by the end of next year, a rapid rate of development for a company that only began offering service last year. The companies expect it to operate up to four times faster than the current generation of WiMax products, which are based on the IEEE 802.16e standard.

Initially the service was free, with the company finally winning a license to operate commercially in June. Three of those, like Ufa, have a population of around 1 million, while the fourth is Sochi, the host city for the 2014 Winter Olympics, said Yegor Ivanov, Yota's director of business development. It operates in three Russian cities, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ufa, and is deploying its network in four more cities. The company hopes to offer service in 180 Russian cities with a population of over 100,000 by the end of 2012, he said. The company is also expanding abroad, having just won licenses to operate WiMax networks in Belarus, Nicaragua and Peru.

Yota will install around 20 base stations in each city, depending on the terrain, and aims to sign up around 5 percent of the population within its coverage area. Yota expects to have a trial network in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in operation by December. Although Nicaragua is poorer than Russia, Yota's existing subscription rate of US$28 a month for unlimited data with no speed cap will seem good value to Nicaraguans, he said. That will consist of just 10 base stations because the city is very flat, said Ivanov. That's because today they pay around $60 a month for a 3G (third generation) mobile data subscription at 1M bps (bits per second) with a limit of 2GB of data.

Still no Internet or SMS allowed in China's Muslim region

Nearly four months after deadly ethnic riots in China's Muslim region led authorities to shut off the Internet there, local residents are still barred from sending text messages and getting online. The rioting between Uighurs, a mostly Muslim minority group native to Xinjiang, and Chinese Han, the country's ethnic majority, also led China to block various social networking Web sites nationwide. The clampdown on telecommunication in China's western Xinjiang province, where rioting claimed nearly 200 lives in early July, has hurt local businesses and cut residents off from many nongovernment sources of news and other information.

Twitter, similar Chinese services and Facebook all remain inaccessible in the country. Observers have cited a series of sensitive anniversaries this year as a reason for the blockages, but those dates, including China's 60th anniversary of communist rule on Oct. 1, have passed. "The unfortunate truth is that the Chinese government can impose and sustain this kind of Internet service disruption ... for as long as it feels it's necessary," said Phelim Kine, a researcher in Hong Kong for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "The government is impervious to concerns from the business sector and certainly those of ordinary citizens." Some companies have been allowed to communicate via a regional network in Xinjiang, said the marketing manager for one local company when reached by phone. China has blamed communication on such Web sites for helping lead to the riots, which were sparked by an ethnic brawl in far-away southern China. The manager predicted that regular Internet access could return in around one month. "It's relatively calm on the streets of Xinjiang now," he said. The owner of another online store, which sells dried fruits, nuts and other snacks, said she did not know of any regional network in Xinjiang. The manager's company, which sells make-up and other cosmetic products online, is one of many that have had to relocate staff outside of Xinjiang to continue operations, he said.

Most of the store owner's staff remain in neighboring Gansu province, she said. China has given little sign of when it will lift the Internet restrictions but said it will gradually do so as Xinjiang stabilizes.

You've got questions, Aardvark Mobile has answers

Aardvark has taken a different tack with search. And now the people behind Aardvark are bringing that same approach to the iPhone and iPod touch. The online service figures it's sometimes more productive to ask a question of an actual person-usually someone from within your social network-rather than brave the vagaries of a search engine and its sometimes irrelevant answers. Aardvark Mobile actually arrived in the App Store nearly a week ago.

Aardvark Mobile tackles the same problem as the Aardvark Web site-dealing with subjective searches where two people might type in the same keywords but be searching for two completely different things. "Search engines by design struggle with these types of queries," Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla said. But developer Vark.com waited until Tuesday to take the wraps off the mobile version of its social question-and-answer service. What Aardvark does is tap into your social networks and contacts on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and elsewhere to track down answers to questions that might otherwise flummox a search engine-things like "Where's a good place to eat in this neighborhood?" or "Where should I stay when I visit London?" With Aadvark's Web service, you'd send a message through your IM client to Aardvark; the service then figures out who in your network (and in their extended network) might be able to answer the question and asks them on your behalf. The majority of questions are answered in less than five minutes. Ventilla says that 90 percent of the questions asked via Aardvark get answered. The iPhone version of Aardvark works much the same way.

The service pings people for an answer, and sends you a push notification when there's a reply. Instead of an IM, you type a message directly into the app, tag it with the appropriate categories, and send it off to Aardvark. In previewing the app, I asked a question about affordable hotels in Central London-two responses came back within about three minutes from other Aardvark users. If you shake your mobile device when you're on the Answer tab, Aardvark Mobile looks up any unanswered questions that you may be able to provide a response for (while also producing a very alarming aardvark-like noise). "We think Aardvark is particularly well-suited to mobile, and especially the iPhone given how rich that platform is to develop for," Ventilla said. In addition to push notifications, Aardvark Mobile also taps into the iPhone's built-in location features to automatically detect your location-a feature that can help when you're asking about local hotspots. You don't have to already be using Aardvark's online service to take advantage of the mobile app.

Aardvark Mobile requires the iPhone OS 3.0. The free Aardvark Mobile app lets you set up a profile on your iPhone or iPod touch; Facebook Connect integration helps you instantly build up a network of friends who are also using the service.

Defunct airport fast-pass program may be revived

Tens of thousands of subscribers to a registered air traveler program, who were left feeling scammed when the company offering the service abruptly went out of business, may soon get a break. Subscribers to the Clear service, some of whom had signed up for two years or more of service just before VIP went out of business, will be offered a chance to continue their subscriptions after the deal goes through. A new investment group based in California has signed a letter of intent with Morgan Stanley, the defunct company's largest debt holder, according to the New York Times . Under a proposed plan, the investment firm will be allowed to buy the assets of Verified Identity Pass Inc. (VIP) and restart the Clear fast-lane security service, the Times reported, quoting the owner of the Emeryville, Calif.-based investment banking firm, Henry Inc. If an individual chooses not to, any personal data on that individual that had been collected by VIP for Clear, will be permanently destroyed, the Times said quoting the investment banker.

VIP was one of seven companies approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to operate a registered traveler program, which lets air travelers get through airport security checks faster. The news is likely to provide some comfort to thousands of customers of VIP who were left in the lurch when the company in June abruptly announced it could no longer offer the Clear service because it had run out of cash. It offered the service at 21 major airports, including New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, La Guardia, Boston's Logan International and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airports. To sign up for VIP's Clear service, customers had to submit to background checks and provide identifying information, including Social Security and credit card numbers, home address, date and place of birth, phone numbers and driver's license number. More than 200,000 customers had signed up for the service when the company went out of business.

They also had to provide fingerprints, iris scans and digital images of their faces. The company made matters worse by hinting that it would sell the data it had collected to fulfill its debt obligations. VIP's decsion to shut the service raised concerns about the fate of the data that had been collected by the company. Many participants were left feeling scammed when VIP announced that it couldn't refund their subscriptions because it had run out of money. The motion was in response to a lawsuit brought by concerned customers.

Days after the company's closure, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security asked the TSA to ensure that all information collected by VIP was properly protected and destroyed . In August, a federal judge in New York issued an injunction prohibiting VIP from selling, transferring or disclosing to any third-party the data it collected while operating the Clear service. The injunction, however, was later lifted on a technicality. For the moment, the purchase does little to alleviate the major complaint in the lawsuit, which is that VIP's customers didn't get a refund from their subscriptions. "That is something that they are entitled to regardless of whether or not other companies" purchase VIP, he said. Todd Schneider, an attorney with Schneider, Wallace, Cottrell, Brayton, Konecky LLP, a San Francisco law firm representing one of the parties in the lawsuit, today said he was unclear on the ramifications of the reported purchase of VIPs assets by the investment banking firm. A hearing in the case has been scheduled for Oct. 16, where Schneider plans to again ask the judge to bar VIP from selling its data assets to any third party.

News of the proposed purchase comes as the House Committee on Homeland Security is scheduled to hold a hearing today on the future of the registered air traveler program.

Twitter Adds Lists to Help You Get Organized

Twitter is testing a feature that makes it easier for you to organize the people you follow, by grouping them in lists. Get Organized Twitter is a great way to find out what people are talking about by following popular topics, finding people with common interests, or connecting with popular celebrities, athletes, or even your favorite product brands. Twitter has also added a social networking spin on the new feature, called Lists, that makes it easier for other people to see who you're following and subscribe to their feeds as well.

The problem is, once you're following more than a few hundred people, the endless stream of 140-character messages becomes unmanageable and the value of following so many people for news and information becomes lost. You can create a list for tech news, sports-related tweets, co-workers, college friends, and so on. Twitter's Lists feature will help you drill down into the wide range of people you're following and organize your incoming tweets by type. Once your list is created, it will sit on your profile page where other people can take a look and choose to follow all the people on your list or navigate to individual profile pages to check out specific people you're following. Besides, for the more private types there are options for creating lists already.

Lists Alternative If you want to keep your lists private, Twitter will let you do that too, but that sort of defeats the public nature of Twitter. Desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop have features (called Groups and Userlists, respectively) that let you organize your followers into separate columns. Lists will also be available in the Twitter API, meaning third-party clients can add the functionality to their applications. These applications also have the added advantage of incorporating other social networks into your feeds including Facebook and MySpace (Tweetdeck only). Twitter is currently testing the Lists feature with a small group of users, and says the new feature will be rolled out soon to all Twitter accounts. Twitter has been on a roll lately with adding new features.

In August, the micro-blogging service announced it plans on rolling out an opt-in geolocation service and an improved method for 're-tweeting' or reposting messages created by other users.