Immersion believes nearly 400 million cellphones using basic haptics have shipped to date without licensing the company’s haptics technology, CEO Vic Viegas said on an earnings call Thursday. That’s up from the more than 200 million he cited in August. “It’s those phones that we expect to monetize and turn into revenue,” Viegas said Thursday. Immersion revenue for Q3 ended Sept. 30 grew 10 percent year-over-year to $7.1 million. But its loss widened to $3 million, or 11 cents a share, from $1.4 million, or 5 cents. Immersion shares, however, closed 2.5 percent higher Friday at $4.55. Royalty and license revenue grew 8 percent to $6.4 million. Revenue from product sales jumped 53 percent to $529,000. Forty-nine percent of total Q3 revenue came from mobility, while 24 percent was from game products, 16 percent from medical products, 7 percent from autos, and 4 percent from chips and other products, said Chief Financial Officer Paul Norris. “As mobile device manufacturers increasingly recognize” the benefits of Immersion’s haptic technology solutions, “we are licensing new technologies, deepening our customer relationships and expanding our market presence in important new geographies including Japan and China,” said Viegas. Immersion continues to “penetrate the China smartphone market, primarily through our chip partners who are having success selling our solutions into this market,” he said. “As we have started ramping our efforts in the region, we've seen three OEMs in China ship over 5 million handsets” using Immersion technology so far this year, he said. In Q3, Samsung rolled out new versions of the Galaxy S III smartphone, which he said includes Immersion’s TouchSense 3000 software and Reverb technology for mobile gaming. Samsung also launched the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet that he said includes TouchSense 3000 software. Immersion continues to “engage in discussions with current and new customers to license basic haptics,” he said. While the “final result and timing of these discussions remains unknown,” he said “we continue to believe there is potential for Immersion to monetize unrealized opportunities for basic haptics in the current fiscal year.” Immersion still expects to report revenue of $32 million to $38 million for this fiscal year, he said.
Strong telecom investment is “a long-term way of life” and not “a fad,” Chanute, Kan., City Manager J.D. Lester said on an Institute for Local Self Reliance podcast released Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bnteba). The D.C.- and Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self Reliance is a 38-year-old nonprofit advocating for local communities. The town has 9,000 residents but offers broadband transmission speeds above 1 Gbps and 4G WiMAX Internet, the subject of a recent institute report that emphasizes the 26 years of patience in Chanute’s “proactive plan and vision” (http://xrl.us/bntebc). The town doesn’t want to be the retail provider of voice and video services, but would rather transport Internet Protocol packets, Lester said of his vision for an open access network. Chanute Utilities Director Larry Gates wants to leverage the fiber network with the community’s schools, hospitals and libraries and for public safety needs -- “any opportunity we can,” he said. The debate surrounding municipal networks “misses a key point,” the institute’s report said. “When a community is stuck with slow, unreliable, or high priced service from one or two monopolistic firms, both public and private suffer. When everyone has access to fast, affordable, and reliable broadband, the whole community thrives.” The two officials and Christopher Mitchell, a telecom director at the institute and the report author, discussed the Chanute network pricing models and the way the faster networks have served as an incentive for new businesses. One new business is bringing an estimated 125 jobs over the next two to three years, Lester said. The $250 gigabit connectivity fee is a “heck of a deal,” Mitchell said. “It’s a fun tool to have,” Lester said. The town’s new business is Spirit AeroSystems, a former division of Boeing, Lester told us. Spirit opened its 55,000-square-foot manufacturing center in Chanute last spring, that company said, citing infrastructure as a factor in selecting Chanute (http://xrl.us/bntewr).
There is overwhelming support for federal funding of public broadcasting, according to a Washington Times/Zogby Analytics poll conducted after the Oct. 3 presidential candidate debate. The poll of 800 likely voters showed that, 55 percent to 35 percent, “voters do not want cuts in spending to public television,” the polling company said in a research note (http://xrl.us/bntahg). The majority includes 32 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of white voters, it said. The public broadcasting industry and its supporters expressed concern last week when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said during the first debate in the election cycle that he'd zero out funding for PBS if elected president (CD Oct 5 p6). “Best for Romney to drop the Big Bird attack,” said Zogby CEO John Zogby. The survey group included 38 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans and 27 percent independents, Zogby said.
State regulators asked the FCC Friday to suspend an updated method of determining high-cost support from the USF (http://xrl.us/bnsr4j). The motion comes after months of debate and allegations from national and state entities that the year-old reform will hurt companies due to its unpredictability. “Clearly [the FCC model] is going to have the most impact on high-cost, rural-type carriers,” NARUC Telecom Committee Chair John Burke told us. It will impact states differently depending on how many such companies they have, he said. The FCC’s methodology of quantile regression analysis was introduced in its November USF/intercarrier compensation order, adjusted in April and determines more than 700 companies’ high-cost support as of this July. Other NARUC telecom committee members are “concerned,” Burke said.
Vringo remains confident as an Oct. 16 trial approaches over claims that Google infringed its search patents, CEO Andrew Perlman said Thursday at the Craig-Hallum Capital Group conference in New York. Vringo was expected to file Friday a reply to Google’s motion for summary judgment, setting the stage for what is expected to be a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson in Norfolk, Va. Vringo entered the fray in acquiring Innovate Protect, which controlled eight Lycos search patents granted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, two of which are at the heart of the Google case. The patents, which Lycos acquired form inventor Ken Lang, cover a means for organizing how a search engine ranks and displays results for a search request. Central to the process are “clicks,” with more clicks making one site more relevant than others to a search. Lycos sold the patents to Innovate Protect, which in turn sold them to Vringo earlier this year. In a suit filed last year, Vringo alleges that Google’s AdWords and AdSense platforms violate the patents and is seeking damages dating from 2007 and royalties going forward. “We feel good that we will win,” Perlman said. AOL settled a separate infringement suit filed against it for $100,000, relating to violations that occurred before it adopted the Google platform, Perlman said. Google invested $1 billion in AOL in 2005 and a development agreement between the companies was extended in 2010. AOL is a defendant in the Google case. Since the Google case began, legal expenses have been in the “mid-single digit millions” of dollars, Perlman said. In addition to the Lycos IP, Vringo also recently acquired more than 500 patents related to 3G, 4G and LTE cellular technology from Nokia, 25 percent of which are considered “essential,” Perlman said. The portfolio includes 432 issued patents and 75 applications, Perlman said. There are 126 U.S. patents and 42 in China, he said. Vringo bought the IP for $22 million using part of the $31.2 million it raised earlier this year in issuing 9.6 million shares to three unidentified investors. The agreement also requires Vringo to pay a 35 percent royalty on patent-related gross revenues of more than $22 million. Some of the Nokia IP relates to patents considered “essential” for GSM/GPRS infrastructure equipment and mobile stations that comply with European Telecommunications Standards Institute specifications. In light of those patents, Vringo sent a letter to ZTE, maintaining the Chinese equipment supplier didn’t have a license despite supplying GSM/GPRS infrastructure gear since 2002, the company said in an SEC filing. ZTE officials weren’t available for comment. While much of its focus is shifting to IP, Vringo also continues to market free and subscription-based video ringtones as well as Facetones, an automated video slideshow that uses friends’ photos from social media websites, primarily Facebook. Facetones has gained 1.5 million downloads and will be preloaded on Nokia’s Series 40 phones due in Q4. Verizon sells Facetones through its app store for 99 cents, but that represents a small percentage of the downloads, Perlman said. Vringo has 227,000 subscribers to its video ringtone service across seven carriers, the largest being 38,000 with Orange U.K., which launched them in February 2011, Vringo said in an SEC filing.
Broadband’s a civil right to Jesse Jackson, Sr., as are prison payphone rates, he said Tuesday in an annual ethics in telecom lecture. He cited many concerns voiced a day before by FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on what prisoners and the people they call must pay. “Access to broadband at home and school is not a magic bullet” to solve a gap in education between minorities and other Americans, Jackson said. It’s “a civil rights issue” because “the technology is being positioned as a primary driver of economic opportunity” and social change, he said at the Washington event.
Sprint Nextel’s conduct in awarding contracts for its wireless backhaul business “conclusively disproves” its claims that there are no alternatives to traditional ILEC special access services, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) argued in a letter to the FCC Wednesday. The data, which Verizon determined by using the latitude and longitude of each cell site, should guide the commission as it prepares its upcoming mandatory data request on the special access market, Verizon said. Special access purchasers criticized Verizon’s data as “backwards looking,” and questioned whether Verizon took into account “competitors” who are merely reselling Verizon circuits.
The Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) approved a report on Domain Name System (DNS) best practices, which summarizes what industry has found to be the best solutions on how to protect the DNS from hacking, insider attacks, account takeovers and other attacks. The report also looks at protecting domain names from hijacking or misconfiguration and how to ensure the resiliency of DNS architecture as a critical infrastructure. The report, described at the CSRIC meeting at the FCC Wednesday, was not immediately available.
The “United States has regained its role as a global leader in and around mobile broadband,” the FCC said in its third annual International Broadband Data Report, released Tuesday after being adopted Aug. 13 (http://xrl.us/bnmshp). “More than 80% of smartphones sold globally run on U.S. operating systems, up from less than 25% three years ago,” the report said. The U.S. has become “a global test bed for wireless technology and services” due to early adoption of 4G LTE tech, it said. The report details how American providers ramped up their efforts over the last two years, and outlines the creation of what the FCC calls “the apps economy,” which it notes has created 500,000 jobs as part of its $20 billion industry. The FCC touted its own efforts to this end and said the 2011 USF/Intercarrier Compensation Transformation Order “transforms the existing high-cost universal service program in order to speed delivery of broadband to all Americans.” In the area of wired broadband adoption, the U.S. “continues to lag behind such countries as South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but exceeds adoption rates in Israel, Australia, and the EU average,” the report said. This third report, “for the first time, takes a close look at the broadband prices for both fixed and mobile service plans around the world” and finds “U.S. prices for standalone fixed broadband are in the mid-level range in our 38 country survey, but are higher in higher speed tiers,” the FCC said. The agency also released Tuesday a report done annually under Section 706 of the Telecom Act that found for another year that broadband’s not being deployed to all in the U.S. (CD Aug 22 p1).
Funding provided through the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program (RHCPP) can help rural healthcare providers with the recurring costs of broadband access and helps construct broadband networks where coverage is unavailable, said Arthur Spies, project coordinator for the Iowa Rural Health Telecommunications Program, in a letter to the FCC Monday. The FCC’s Wireline Bureau released a report last week that said the RHCPP, which funds 50 projects across 38 states, “provides fertile ground to help the Commission determine how best to reform the existing rural healthcare program, which provides ongoing support for telecommunications and Internet access services” (CD Aug 14 p11). The Iowa program, one of the 50 that receive RHCPP funds, is a consortium of hospitals in Iowa and South Dakota, along with the Iowa Hospital Association and the Iowa Communications Network (ICN), that connects participating hospitals through a dedicated broadband network using ICN infrastructure, Spies said. In describing the project and the program, Spies recommended the Wireline Bureau grandfather in urban hospitals that are part of RHCPP programs. “This will help support and sustain the consortia/network into the future,” Spies said in the letter. “We believe funding should continue as long as an urban site is a member of the consortium with rural health care providers” (http://xrl.us/bnmjdv).