Jawbone Sues Fitbit

Jawbone has filed another lawsuit against Fitbit in less than two weeks, alleging its activity tracking products infringe several of Jawbone’s patents.

The new suit, filed Wednesday in San Francisco by Jawbone parent company AliphCom, seeks unspecified damages and an injunction to block the sale of Fitbit devices such as the Flex, Charge and Surge bands.

Late last month, Jawbone filed another lawsuit, accusing Fitbit of poaching its employees and stealing trade secrets. Fitbit has said it has no knowledge of any such information in its possession.

In its latest complaint, Jawbone says it will also ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate Fitbit, which could potentially lead to an import ban on Fitbit products.

Jawbone says it has hundreds of patents granted or pending, and claims that Fitbit infringes several of them. One patent describes a “general health and wellness management method and apparatus for a wellness application using data from a data-capable band.”

Another patent covers a “system for detecting, monitoring, and reporting an individual’s physiological or contextual status.”

Fitbit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest suit.

The timing is bad for Fitbit, which is preparing to go public on the U.S. stock markets. It also faces intense competition from a number of rivals, which also include Garmin and Apple with its Apple Watch.

Both Jawbone and Fitbit make wearable bands and associated software that tracks people’s movement, exercise, sleep and heart rate.

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Can MB Challenge Tesla?

On the heels of Tesla announcing a home and commercial battery product line, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its own brand of energy storage products for those with solar systems to store surplus power.

The Mercedes-Benz energy storage plants for private use are available for order now and are expected to ship in September.

The batteries were first developed for cars, but Mercedes-Benz said the energy storage units “meet the very highest safety and quality standards” for home use.

Up to eight battery modules with an energy capacity of 2.5 kWh can be combined into an energy storage plant with a capacity of 20 kWh.

“Households with their own photovoltaic systems can thus buffer surplus solar power virtually free of any losses,” the carmaker said in a statement.

What wasn’t announced by Mercedes-Benz was information about the size of or pricing for the new batteries.

In May, Tesla announced its Powerwall batteries for home use and its Powerpack batteries for commercial use. Today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his company would double the power output of the Powerwall batteries but keep their prices the same.

Tesla’s Powerwall batteries will go from having a two-kilowatt (kW) steady power output and 3.3kW peak output to a 5kW steady output and 7kW peak output, Musk said. The price of the batteries will remain the same: $3,000 for the 7kW/hour (KWh) daily cycle version and $3,500 for the 10kWh backup UPS version. Total installation cost will run around $4,000, according to Musk.

Up to nine Powerwall battery units can be daisy-chained together on a wall to provide up to 90kWh of power.

The average U.S. household uses about 20 kWh to 25 kWh of power every day, according to GTM Research.

Tesla Energy’s new commercial-grade battery is called the Powerpack, and will sell in 100kWh modules for $25,000 each. Musk said the Powerpack can scale infinitely, even powering factories and small cities.

Mercedes-Benz’s batteries, being produced by subsidiary Deutsche Accumotive, are its first industrial-scale lithium-ion units, and they’ve already been tested “on the grid,” the company said.

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Is Intel Supporting Open-Source?

Intel has suddenly made some interesting hardware less interesting to open sourcers by insisting that its i915 DRM kernel graphics driver for upcoming Skylake and Broxton hardware demands some binary-only firmware blobs.

According to Phoronix these first i915 DRM firmware blobs are for Skylake and Broxton for the GuC and DMC.
DMC is the Display Microcontroller used by Skylake (Gen9) within the display engine to save and restore its state when entering into low-power states and then resuming. It saves and restores display registers across low-power states separate of the kernel.

Intel said that the firmware blobs are required by the DRM driver rather than being an optional add-on.

The license of these firmware blobs also indicate that redistribution is only allowed in binary form without modification. Beyond that, “no reverse engineering, decompilation, or dis-assembly of this software is permitted.”

Basically this will kill off any desire for Open Source enthusiasts to touch Skylake, although we doubt Intel will be too worried – they are a very nice couple. In any event AMD apparently uses something similar to protect bits of its operation.

Still Intel is shipping these firmware files early so everyone knows they are there.

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MediaTek Debuts Contactless Heart Rate Monitor

While MediaTek might be known for its multi-core smartphone processors, the firm was very keen to show off its more adventurous side at Computex 2015.

With a booth almost entirely dedicated to the latest and greatest from its new Labs division, which aims to bring the latest innovations from developers to market, MediaTek offered something a little more unexpected compared to previous years.

Launched in autumn last year, MediaTek Labs is a worldwide initiative to help developers of any background or skill level to create and market wearable and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

With the firm’s LinkIt Development Platform, based on the MediaTek Aster (MT2502) chipset, sitting at its core, the Labs programme provides developers, makers and service providers with both software and hardware development kits, technical documentation and business support.

Here’s a few of our favourite innovations showed off at Computex, based on either the LinkIt One platform, or the firm’s fresh Helio P10 smartphone family of SoCs.

Heart rate monitoring smartphone camera
This “contactless heartrate monitoring” technology is powered by the firm’s Visual Processing Application in its latest P10 smartphone SoC.

It makes use of a smartphone’s video camera to take a heart rate reading via the front-facing camera by stripping down the layers of the image taken by the camera in real-time to detect the pulse in a user’s temple.

We were rather dubious about how well this might work, so gave it a go. While it took a good few seconds to match up, you can see from the photo that it is almost as accurate as the portable ECG monitoring device we had clipped on our finger. Impressive stuff.

Wine brewer
Winning first prize in the ITRI Mobilehero competition in Taiwan last year, this nifty IoT wine brewing device was developed by a local start-up called Alchema.

It consists of five sensors thatmonitor the alcohol content and the brewing environment. The results we tasted were, shall we say, interesting, if a little on the sharp side.

Alchema looking to raise more funds on Kickstarter before the end of the year.

Another LinkIt-powered device MediaTek showed off at Computex was a wearable aimed for the elderly. Using Bluetooth and accelerometer sensors, the wristband tracker detects the users’ wrist motions and raises an alarm, alerting those that are linked to the watch via a smartphone app if their elderly family member, loved one or friend’s device has detected a sudden movement that could resemble a fall or accident.

Sitting at the more mature end of the LinkIt developer platform spectrum, but still less than a year old, is an electric-scooter rental company called Skuro Moto. We spoke to its chief executive Frank Chen, who is running the company at the tender age of 24 after developing the idea while at university.

Skuro works with electric-vehicle maker Ahamani EV Technology to provide a rental service at Yuan Ze University in Taiwan. The bikes reduce costs for riders by about 30 percent thanks to a monitoring system enabled by the LinkIt chip that lets riders see their power usage. They can also be started by a swipe of a student identity card, to save the trouble of lost keys.

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IBM Buys Blue Box

IBM HAS ACQUIRED Blue Box in an attempt to make its cloud offering even bluer. The Seattle-based company specialises in simple service-as-a-platform clouds based on OpenStack.

This, of course, fits in with IBM’s new direction of a Power PC, OpenStack cloud-based world, as demonstrated by its collaboration with MariaDB on TurboLAMP.

IBM’s move to the cloud is starting to pay off, seeing revenue of $7.7bn in the 12 months to March 2015 and growing more than 16 percent in the first quarter of this year.

The company plans to use the new acquisition to create rapid, integrating cloud-based applications and on-premise systems within the OpenStack managed cloud.

Blue Box also brings a remotely managed OpenStack to provide customers with a local cloud, better visibility control and tighter security.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meets their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort.

“The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy, making it easier for our clients to move data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

Blue Box will offer customers a more cohesive, consistent and simplified experience, while at the same time integrating with existing IBM packages like the Bluemix digital innovation platform. The firm also offers a single unified control panel for customer operations.

“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM. Blue Box is building a similarly respected brand in OpenStack,” said Blue Box founder and CTO Jesse Proudman.

“Together, we will deliver the technology and products businesses need to give their application developers an agile, responsive infrastructure across public and private clouds.

“This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they’ve seen thus far in the market.”

IBM has confirmed that it plans to help Blue Box customers to grow their technology portfolio, while taking advantage of the broader IBM product set.

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TSMC Moving To 16FF+ Soon

TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process has barely gotten off the ground, but the foundry is already talking about 16nm FinFET Plus, which is due to launch by the end of the year.

The improved 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) node is supposed to deliver more efficiency and performance, making TSMC’s node more competitive compared to Samsung’s 14nm node. That is the general idea, but TSMC’s first generation 16nm node has failed to impress in terms of design wins.

TSMC president CC Wei said the new 16FF+ node already has 20 tapeouts, ten of which achieved satisfactory yield performance. Wei said the company expects up to 50 tapeouts by the end of the year. TSMC expects 16FF+ to enter commercial production in the second half of the year.

16FF+ is not the only FinFET node coming from TSMC over the next year. The company plans to introduce 16FFC for compact devices sometime in the second half of 2016. In addition, 10nm FinFET is expected to enter risk production by the end of 2015, reports Digitimes.

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Can TSMC Beat Samsung?

TSMC has said that it is confident that it can beat Samsung Electronics in ramping up production on its 10nm lines.

Samsung disclosed during a recent technology forum in the US that the company plans to enter mass production of chips using its 10nm FinFET process by the end of 2016,.

But in a statement TSMC claimed it could the outfit said the way things are shaping up it could beat that time table. TSMC continued that in the 10nm FinFET race, Intel will be its major competitor.

We expect to hear a bit more about TSMC’s plans at its Taiwan Technology Symposium 2015 on May 28. At the upcoming event, the foundry is expected to talk about the progress and development of its FinFET manufacturing nodes.

TSMC chairman Morris Chang remarked earlier in 2015 that TSMC expects to gain a majority of market share in the FinFET segment in 2016.

Intel is also expected to release its first chips made using 10nm process technology as early as in the middle of 2016.

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IRS Reducing Size Of Cybersecurity Staff

The Internal Revenue Service, which confirmed rumors of a breach of 100,000 taxpayer accounts, has been consistently reducing the size of its internal cybersecurity staff as it increases its security spending. This may seem paradoxical, but one observer suggested it could signal a shift to outsourcing.

In 2011, the IRS employed 410 people in its cybersecurity organization, but by 2014 the headcount had fallen by 11% to 363 people, according to annual reports about IRS information technology spending by the U.S. Treasury Department Inspector General.

Despite this staff reduction, the IRS has increased spending in its cybersecurity organization. In 2012, the IRS earmarked $129 million for cybersecurity, which rose to $141.5 million last year, an increase of approximately 9.7%.

This increase in spending, coupled with the reduction in headcount, is an indicator of outsourcing, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. Paller sees risks in that strategy.

“Each organization moves at a different pace toward a point at which they have outsourced so much that the insiders do little more than manage contracts, and lose their technical expertise and ability to manage technical contractors effectively,” said Paller.

An IRS spokesman was not able to immediately answer questions about the IRS’s cybersecurity spending.

This breach is drawing congressional scrutiny. On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who heads the Senate Finance Committee, called the breach “unacceptable.”

The IRS’s total IT budget in 2014 was $2.5 billion, an increase from the prior year’s $2.3 billion, with 7,339 employees last year, little change from 7,303 reported in 2013.

The agency’s IT budget has fared better than the agency overall. Congress has been cutting spending at the agency. IRS funding has been reduced by $1.2 billion over the last five years, from $12.1 billion in 2010 to $10.9 billion this year. An IRS official told lawmakers earlier this year that the budget cuts have delayed critical IT investments of more than $200 million, which includes replacing aging IT systems.

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FCC To Tighten Rules On Robocalls

The top U.S. telecommunications regulator wants to make it more difficult for telemarketers and other businesses to robocall and text messages consumers under changes to autodialing rules being proposed.

The Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on June 18 on the proposal, which would give legal cover to telephone companies to offer consumers technologies that would block robocalls, regardless of where they originate.

“The FCC wants to make it clear: Telephone companies can – and in fact should – offer consumers robocall-blocking tools,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a blog post.

The wireless carriers have worried that blocking automated calls could be construed as violations of the law that requires them to ensure that all calls placed over their networks reach their intended recipients.

The proposal would also reassert that consumers have to agree to receive automated calls and texts and clarify that they can revoke their consent in any “reasonable” way, including a simple request for calls to stop, without the need to file convoluted paperwork.

Robocalls and robotexts are by far the most common cause of consumer complaints at the FCC, topping 215,000 in the last year alone. Consumer advocates and the majority of U.S. states attorneys general had pressed the FCC to clarify the robocall rules.

Numerous business associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have also pushed for clarifications, facing a growing number of lawsuits prompted by violations such as calling cellphone users whose numbers used to belong to someone else.

The FCC’s proposal would reassert that companies should try to avoid numbers reassigned to consumers who have not agreed to receive their calls. If they do not know that a number has been reassigned, they are allowed one call to find out.

The business community had also complained that some lawsuits unfairly target them for using dialing technologies that could be modified to become autodialers. FCC officials said any technology with the capacity to dial random or sequential numbers qualifies as an autodialer, even if it would require modification.

U.S. law prohibits telemarketing calls to both landline and cellphones of consumers who have not given written consent.

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Broadcom Aquired?

It is starting to look Broadcom will get bought out by its rival Avago as deep throats within both outfits think a deal is close.

Avago is in advanced buyout talks to acquire Broadcom, which manufacturers chips for both the smartphone and broadband industries. The two companies are more or less the same size, but at the moment Broadcom is the weaker partner

It has been the subject of previous speculation regarding acquisitions. The company is among the largest maker of chips for mobile systems such as smartphones, tablets and wearables, Internet of things (IoT) devices and automotive technology products.

Such capabilities could give Avago greater traction in fast-growing markets like IoT and mobile devices.

Broadcom announced last year that it was closing its baseband cellular chip business after being unable to gain inroads against such competitors as Qualcomm. The company had $8.4 billion in revenue last year.

It seems everyone wants a lot more consolidation in the chip industry. Intel reportedly resumed buyout talks to acquire Altera earlier this month, with the parties eyeing a potential price that could reach $13 billion. Micron was tipped as a potential buyer of rival SanDisk.

An April report cited a note from Bernstein analyst Mark Newman. According to this report, Newman pointed to SanDisk’s current valuation as making it a prime takeover target for rival NAND chip maker Micron, as well as other players in the market.

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