ST-Ericsson has developed a Linux-based chip platform that could reduce the wholesale price of smartphones to less than €100.
ST-Ericsson said the first phones based on its U6715 platform will hit the market in the first half of 2010, making smartphones a mass market product.
Designed to run Linux-based operating systems, such as Android, the U6715 platform supports navigation, web browsing, video streaming, e-mail, Wi-Fi, a five-megapixel camera, a touch-screen, and more.
A multimedia engine integrated into the hardware architecture of the U6715 frees most of the platform’s microprocessor subsystem to run applications.
The U6715 includes an HSPA modem capable of delivering downlink speeds of up to 7.2Mbps and a 1000mA battery. This gives it music playtime of up to 40 hours, talk time of up to seven hours on a 3G network, and standby time of up to 25 days.

Marc Cetto, head of ST-Ericsson’s 3G and multimedia division, said the U6715 platform was designed to enable the smartphone to break out of its current high-end niche and become a true mass-market product in 2010.
Market leader Nokia said 52 million of the 329 million mobile phones sold last year were smartphones, up 12% on 2008.

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There are several different ways for today’s businesses to deploy IT systems.Software can be bought as packaged off-the-shelf products, built in house using standard components or accessed as a pay-per-use service.

There are very few organisations who build systems entirely from scratch and make no use of third-party products. This means the majority of IT departments must license some of the software parts of their IT estate.

However, the problem for most people is that IT is constantly changing, as are user requirements. Staff join and leave the company, systems are decommissioned and new ones are deployed. All this needs to be tracked, otherwise IT departments may find they are paying for software that is no longer used, or risk being fined for running under-licensed software, where the product has not been licensed correctly for the number of staff accessing it.

Today companies run a combination of server software, desktop software and software services. Software is licensed by user or by processor. Some are commercial, while others are open source, which means the licence fee is in effect free of charge. Some products are licensed on a monthly or annual usage basis.

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The 400-year-old British Library has completed a two-year trial using web archiving technology, preserving information on events such as Antony Gormley’s Trafalgar Square fourth Plinth Project, the credit crunch and the 2010 General Election for the future.

This relevant information is being archived for future generations and over the past 10 years the library has been storing this information on the internet. However, many websites are only live for a couple of months and therefore, this information is in danger of being lost as the sites are closed.

The program the library is using is Big Sheets, an IBM software. It searches web pages and extracts relevant data to analyse it for patterns. This needs to be done every 40 days.

There are approximately eight million UK websites and the library will need further permission to crawl through all of them.

In order to archive the information clearly, the software crawls through the websites and confirms the content that is supposed to be there is actually there and then it decides where the value is and processes the information in a way that is helpful to researchers.

CTO for emerging internet technology at IBM, David Boloker, said, “At some point in the future, people are going to want to look at the patterns shown through these websites. The software allows you to find all the relationships of the data, from the most simplistic keyword searches to looking at it more semantically – for example, not just whether the Conservatives are mentioned, but whether they are mentioned in a satirical way.” He also said, “We are on data overload, and the key question is how we get beyond the sea of information and actually find the important pieces.”

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