Year: 2019

The European Commission’s digital commissioner has warned the mobile industry to expect it to act over security concerns attached to Chinese network equipment makers.

The Commission is considering a defacto ban on kit made by Chinese companies including Huawei in the face of security and espionage concerns, per Reuters.

Appearing on stage at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona today, Mariya Gabriel, European commissioner for digital economy and society, flagged network “cybersecurity” during her scheduled keynote, warning delegates it’s stating the obvious for her to say that “when 5G services become mission critical 5G networks need to be secure”.

Geopolitical concerns between the West and China are being accelerated and pushed to the fore as the era of 5G network upgrades approach, as well as by ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China over trade.

“I’m well away of the unrest among all of you key actors in the telecoms sectors caused by the ongoing discussions around the cybersecurity of 5G,” Gabriel continued, fleshing out the Commission’s current thinking. “Let me reassure you: The Commission takes your view very seriously. Because you need to run these systems everyday. Nobody is helped by premature decisions based on partial analysis of the facts.

“However it is also clear that Europe has to have a common approach to this challenge. And we need to bring it on the table soon. Otherwise there is a risk that fragmentation rises because of diverging decisions taken by Member States trying to protect themselves.”

“We all know that this fragmentation damages the digital single market. So therefore we are working on this important matter with priority. And to the Commission we will take steps soon,” she added.

The theme of this year’s show is “intelligent connectivity”; the notion that the incoming 5G networks will not only create links between people and (many, many more) things but understand the connections they’re making at a greater depth and resolution than has been possible before, leveraging the big data generated by many more connections to power automated decision-making in near real time, with low latency another touted 5G benefit (as well as many more connections per cell).

Futuristic scenarios being floated include connected cars neatly pulling to the sides of the road ahead of an ambulance rushing a patient to hospital — or indeed medical operations being aided and even directed remotely in real-time via 5G networks supporting high resolution real-time video streaming.

But for every touted benefit there are easy to envisage risks to network technology that’s being designed to connect everything all of the time — thereby creating a new and more powerful layer of critical infrastructure society will be relying upon.

Last fall the Australia government issued new security guidelines for 5G networks that essential block Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment to operators — justifying the move by saying that differences in the way 5G operates compared to previous network generations introduces new risks to national security.

New Zealand followed suit shortly after, saying kit from the Chinese companies posed a significant risk to national security.

While in the U.S. President Trump has made 5G network security a national security priority since 2017, and a bill was passed last fall banning Chinese companies from supplying certain components and services to government agencies.

The ban is due to take effect over two years but lawmakers have been pressuring to local carriers to drop 5G collaborations with companies such as Huawei.

In Europe the picture is so far more mixed. A UK government report last summer investigating Huawei’s broadband and mobile infrastructure raised further doubts, and last month Germany was reported to be mulling a 5G ban on the Chinese kit maker.

But more recently the two EU Member States have been reported to no longer be leaning towards a total ban — apparently believing any risk can be managed and mitigated by oversight and/or partial restrictions.

It remains to be seen how the Commission could step in to try to harmonize security actions taken by Member States around nascent 5G networks. But it appears prepared to set rules.

That said, Gabriel gave no hint of its thinking today, beyond repeating the Commission’s preferred position of less fragmentation, more harmonization to avoid collateral damage to its overarching Digital Single Market initiative — i.e. if Member States start fragmenting into a patchwork based on varying security concerns.

We’ve reached out to the Commission for further comment and will update this story with any additional context.

During the keynote she was careful to talk up the transformative potential of 5G connectivity while also saying innovation must work in lock-step with European “values”.

“Europe has to keep pace with other regions and early movers while making sure that its citizens and businesses benefit swiftly from the new infrastructures and the many applications that will be built on top of them,” she said.

“Digital is helping us and we need to reap its opportunities, mitigate its risks and make sure it is respectful of our values as much as driven by innovation. Innovation and values. Two key words. That is the vision we have delivered in terms of the defence for our citizens in Europe. Together we have decided to construct a Digital Single Market that reflects the values and principles upon which the European Union has been built.”

Her speech also focused on AI, with the commissioner highlighting various EC initiatives to invest in and support private sector investment in artificial intelligence — saying it’s targeting €20BN in “AI-directed investment” across the private and public sector by 2020, with the goal for the next decade being “to reach the same amount as an annual average” — and calling on the private sector to “contribute to ensure that Europe reaches the level of investment needed for it to become a world stage leader also in AI”.

But again she stressed the need for technology developments to be thoughtfully managed so they reflect the underlying society rather than negatively disrupting it. The goal should be what she dubbed “human-centric AI”.

“When we talk about AI and new technologies development for us Europeans it is not only about investing. It is mainly about shaping AI in a way that reflects our European values and principles. An ethical approach to AI is key to enable competitiveness — it will generate user trust and help facilitate its uptake,” she said.

“Trust is the key word. There is no other way. It is only by ensuring trustworthiness that Europe will position itself as a leader in cutting edge, secure and ethical AI. And that European citizens will enjoy AI’s benefits.”

OnePlus promised us a 5G handset this year. At Mobile World Congress this week, the company kind of, sort of delivered. Unlike the sea of other 5G devices unveiled at the show, however, the company’s offering is still very much in the prototype phase — like, behind protective glass with all of the interesting bits obscured, since it isn’t officially official.

The product appeared at Qualcomm’s booth this week, since OnePlus’ presence at the show has been mostly limited to closed door events. For the chipmaker, it was an opportunity to show yet again how ubiquitous its tech has become in the vast sea of Android devices.

“At Qualcomm Technologies’ booth, OnePlus simulated a futuristic setting of 5G cloud gaming where players would only need a smartphone and a gamepad,” Qualcomm explains. “Through the powerful capabilities of cloud processing as well as the throughput and responsiveness of 5G, players can play large sized games online that are generally only playable after downloading onto the PC first. Utilizing Snapdragon elite gaming features and optimizations, players were able to experience high definition and low latency cloud gaming like never before.”

Based on past release schedule, we can likely expect OnePlus to officially debut its next handset in the summer. Past release cycles have also seen a point upgrade later in the year as well, though the company has been shifting things around a bit, as it continues to grow and figure out where it best fits in the broader handset market.

This particular device, likely the OnePlus 7, is due out in Q2, though, sadly, its 5G variant won’t be released in the States in 2018.

The addition of 5G in 2019, meanwhile, finds OnePlus taking a more cutting edge approach to its release cycle, rather than holding back in order to lower the price tag on technology.

The FIDO Alliance and Google today announced that Android (from version 7.0 up) with the latest version of the Google Play Services, is now FIDO2 certified. At first glance, that sounds rather boring, but it will enable developers to write apps that use a phone’s fingerprint scanner or a FIDO security key to authenticate users without making them type in a password. Since I’m not aware of too many people who like to type in complicated passwords that their IT department makes them change every few months, that’s a big deal.

Developers will be able to enable password-less logins in their web and native apps. Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox already fully support this feature, as does Apple’s Safari (but only in preview). In addition to the convenience, FIDO2 also promises to offer phishing-resistant security, given that this technology won’t let you authenticate on a malicious site.

“Google has long worked with the FIDO Alliance and W3C to standardize FIDO2 protocols, which give any application the ability to move beyond password authentication while offering protection against phishing attacks,” Google product manager Christiaan Brand. “Today’s announcement of FIDO2 certification for Android helps move this initiative forward, giving our partners and developers a standardized way to access secure keystores across devices, both in market already as well as forthcoming models, in order to build convenient biometric controls for users.”

It’s worth noting that Android already supported password-less authentication for native apps, but now it’ll also support these for browser logins. Once you’ve set up this new authentication mechanism (and once web apps support it), your phone will store all of the cryptographic data on the device and none of the raw fingerprint data, for example, will be transferred to anybody else.

The FIDO Alliance says this new mechanism will soon enable a billion users on modern Android devices to experience password-less logins. Developers will have to implement support in their web and native applications, though, but that’s relatively easy.

Telecom company Sprint has shared some of its plans when it comes to 5G service in the U.S. The company announced at MWC in Barcelona that mobile customers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City can expect 5G service as soon as May 2019.

If you don’t live in one of those cities, maybe you live in Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix or Washington D.C. Sprint also promises 5G coverage in those cities soon after the initial launch, at some point before the end of June 2019.

Overall, Sprint expects to cover 1,000 square miles in nine cities by the end of the first half of 2019. It’s going to take years to roll out 5G coverage across the U.S.

When it comes to devices, Sprint will sell smartphones that are compatible with its 5G network. The first one will be the LG V50 ThinQ 5G. The company will also sell the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G at some point this summer.

Sprint is also partnering with Google so that Google Fi customers can take advantage of Sprint’s 5G network if they have a compatible device.

And that’s about all there’s to know. It’s still unclear whether 5G plans are going to cost more.

Disclosure: Sprint competitor Verizon owns TechCrunch

SME lending was a hot topic in Southeast Asia last year, and companies continue to attract investor dollars in 2019. The latest to pull in capital of its own is Singapore-based Validus Capital, which today announced a SG$20.5 million (US$15.2 million) Series B that’ll go towards regional expansion.

Founded in 2015, Validus is focused on growth capital among SMEs with an average loan of SG$70,000 (US$52,000) in Singapore. Its P2P lending platform pairs SMEs with individual and institutional lenders and it has paid out SG$180 million (US$134 million) in loans since acquiring its license in December 2017. Validus works with an insurance firm to underwrite its loans.

The company goes after “brick and mortar SMEs, such as guard supply or service companies that do not have collateral… or companies in the construction sector where cashflow becomes a problem as they grow,” Validus co-founder and executive chairman Vikas Nahata told TechCrunch.

That approach is in contrast to others, which go over micro-loan type enterprises, such as small businesses or sole merchants using e-commerce platforms.

Nahata said Validus uses a cluster model, which includes partnerships with procurement platforms, to tap SMEs at the point that they need capital, for example, when they have landed a big contract or major order.

This new round of funding is led by Dutch development bank FMO — which is making its first direct investment in Asia through this deal — with participation from Taiwan’s Cathay Financial Holdings, Vietnam’s VinaCapital Ventures, AddVentures from Siam Cement Group in Thailand and Singapore-based VCs Openspace Ventures and (returning backer) Vertex, which is backed by sovereign fund Temasek. The company previously raised a $3 million Series A in 2017.

Nahata, who operates the business alongside fellow co-founder and CEO Ajit Raikar, said the goal is to expand to Indonesia by Q2 and Vietnam later this year. Already, the company has a team of nearly 20 in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, that’s likely to double as the business kicks off once it is awarded the requisite license it is waiting on.

The capital will also go towards developing technology. That includes the Valdius credit risk algorithm, as well as APIs to help work more closely with third-party services, particularly around aggregating data.

Nahata said that, typically, Validus asks for as much data and signs of growth that applicants can provide. So that’s information such as invoices, contracts and cash flow signals. It’ll also map how companies work with large corporates as an endorsement.

In Southeast Asia, however, and particularly outside of Singapore, the reality is that credit is not a digital-only business. A retail presence, including partners with banks, offline touch points sales, are wholly necessary for growth. While he said that word of mouth is a major driver — while a 90 percent return rate is impressive — Nahata said a mixture of on- and offline is crucial.

“The last mile requires touch points but our objective is that origination should be tech-orientated,” he said.

Other SME lenders in Southeast Asia include Funding Societies, Aspire Capital, First Circle and Finaxar.

Like every year, Facebook is using MWC Barcelona to focus on its infrastructure projects. While you may mostly think of Facebook as a social network, the company started launching infrastructure projects for connecting bringing more people online (and onto its network) many years ago.

These projects include things like the (now-cancelled) solar-powered Aquila drone and plenty of open-source software and hardware initiatives for carriers. Indeed, there’s so many project’s that range from physical devices and networks to software that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. That wide range is by design, though.

“The one thing that has been consistent since the very beginning is that there’s no silver bullet,” Facebook director of engineering Yael Maguire told me during an interview at MWC. “We try to contribute to different parts of the ecosystem. The ecosystem could be in dense urban markets where we’re doing things like Terragraph, or rural markets where we are doing Express Wi-Fi.”

At MWC, the company announced a number of new partnerships and projects that expand on its existing projects.

Maybe the most interesting of these projects is called Internet para Todos (IpT) Peru. What Facebook is trying to show here is that it’s possible to create an economically viable provider of rural mobile infrastructure. Facebook is building this together with Telefonica, IDB Invest and CAF (Development Bank of Latin America). It’s an open access network that will be open to all carriers. “It is very economically challenging to think about connecting small communities in rural parts of Peru, let alone other parts of the world,” Maguire said. “The idea is that we can create common infrastructure that is open access, let others innovate on business models and create competition etc. The hope is that a business case can close for IpT.” Over time, Facebook hopes to bring this model to other places, too — assuming it works, which Maguire admits is not a given since this is very much an experiment at this point. If the model works, though, then the hope is that commercial vendors will see that there’s money to be made by connecting these small rural communities.

As the company also announced today, Facebook is investing in a new 750km open-access fiber project in Nigeria, for example, which will provide fiber access to more than one million people. Facebook is co-investing in this project with a number of local state authorities. The company previously worked on a similar project in Uganda and as Maguire noted, it learned quite a bit from this experience, including how to make laying fiber through large bodies of water more economically viable. But it’s not just the logistics, it’s also working with the local bureaucracy — which Maguire says is harder than the technical challenges. “There’s not a lot of new technology that we are inventing for this right now,” he said and also acknowledged that these are relatively small projects. But as the company learns, it plans to scale up these efforts and launch more projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The company is also announcing new partners for its Express Wi-Fi service, including Cell C in South Africa, Vodafone in Ghana and Globe in the Philippines. That’s on top of other partnerships in India, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia. The idea of Express Wi-Fi is to work with internet providers and mobile operators to help them build their Wi-Fi businesses and to give local entrepreneurs the tools to provide internet access to their neighbors.

As far as open source projects go, Facebook also today announced the launch of Magma, a new open-source platform that makes mobile network deployments easier for carriers. The launch partner for Magma is Telefonica, which is using it in Latin America, and BRCK, which is using it to pilot a new LTE network in Kenya.

Terragraph, one of the company’s most successful open source infrastructure projects that helps bring high-speed connectivity to urban and suburban communities, is now seeing new trials in Athens, Greece and Curitiba, Brazil and it’s already in production usage in Canon, Ohio and Penang, Malaysia, as well as Alameda, California.

Those are still small-scale projects, though, even if the local impact is huge. What’s maybe more important, though, is that it’s seeing increased support from hardware vendors, which now include MikroTik and Cambium Networks, in addition to Nokia and Radwin, which previously came on board.

One thing Maguire also noted is that Facebook remains as committed to these infrastructure projects as it has ever been. “We are trying to make sure we are learning and reflecting on everything that is happening and it’s important that we understand the role we play in all of this, but it’s super important and tied to the mission of what we do,” he said.

Today MWC Barcelona the SD Association unveiled microSD Express that will allow future mobile devices to consume and create content at even faster speeds. This new microSD card platform boosts incredible transfer speeds while consuming less energy used by previous formats.

The new format will be available in the flavors of microSDHC Express, microSDXC Express and microSDUC Express.

Like SD Express, microSD Express taps the PCIe interface to hit a maximum data transfer rate of 985 megabytes per second (MB/s). This is possible through the PCIe 3.1 and NVMe v1.3 specifications that live on a second row of pins. The SD Association expects the faster cards to consume less energy than traditional memory cards while still being backwards compatible.

The fast data speeds could lead mobile device makers to rethink how they equip devices. Read and write speeds have long been a limiting factor for expandable memory, but with this new format, that’s backwards compatible, the data transfer happens nearly as quick as built-in memory. With 5G data and cameras pumping out huge files, expandable memory could make a comeback.

Another name to add to the ever-lengthening list of 5G phones hitting Barcelona this week. ZTE just announced the Axon 10 Pro 5G, which is due out in the first half of 2019 — in China and Europe, at least. The States are a different question altogether, of course. ZTE hasn’t been quite the same political flashpoint as Huawei in recent years, but the company’s been subject to its own scrutiny from U.S. authorities.

Also like Huawei, ZTE’s got the marked benefit of building its own 5G networking equipment, which puts the Chinese smartphone maker ahead of much of the competition in terms of testing. At present, it’s working with carriers ready its phone for the imminent arrival of the next gen wireless tech.

In fact, the company used the kickoff of MWC today to showcase some of its own 5G tech, including a live presentation executed alongside Qualcomm. From this morning’s release,

The demonstration over 5G NR radio utilizes a real-world end-to-end 5G NR network built with ZTE’s commercial core network and radio base station equipment, as well as a ZTE 5G smartphone powered by the world’s first commercial 5G mobile platform—the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855Mobile Platform paired with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem, as well as Qualcomm Technologies’ RF transceiver and RF front-end solutions.

The forthcoming device also sports three rear-facing cameras, a U-shaped hole punch bezel and what appears to be an in-display fingerprint reader. ZTE also launched the Blade V10 today. That handset features a 32-megapixel front-facing camera, because you can never have high enough resolution selfies.

Even after years of using systems like the Google Assistant or Siri, talking to inanimate objects can still feel weird. In cars, the early voice recognition systems were typically close to unusable, with a user experience that was often eclipsed by the worst of customer service phone trees. Nowadays, though, AI has made for a far better experience and now BMW now wants to take this one step further for its drivers by combining data from its voice recognition systems with better AI tools, gesture control and even gaze recognition.

This new system, dubbed BMW Natural Interaction, will launched in the 2021 BMW iNEXT electric SUV.

The company promises that this technology will allow for more intuitive interactions with the car’s systems. If you’re in a conversation, for example, you may want to use a gesture and gaze control to turn down the volume, open the sunroof or adjust air vents. But if you are driving down the autobahn at 220kmh, you may want to use your voice instead.

“People shouldn’t have to think about which operating strategy to use to get what they want,” said Christoph Grote, Senior Vice President,
BMW Group Electronics. “They should always be able to decide freely– and the car should still understand them. BMW Natural Interaction is also an important step for the future of autonomous vehicles, when interior concepts will no longer be geared solely towards the driver’s position and occupants will have more freedom.”

In many ways, this new system builds upon the work that the company introduced with the BMW OS 7.0 and the launch of the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant in 2018. Gesture control, too, has been available in BMW cars since 2015. Combining all of these into a single system is a logical next step.

For this new system, the gaze recognition camera is now built directly into the dashboard and the overall system then uses machine learning models to evaluate what the driver is trying to do.

Some of the niftier features that BMW Natural Interaction enables are actually about what’s happening outside of the car. BMW says that you will be able to point at something outside, for example, and ask for opening hours and customer ratings. The company also promises that you’ll be able to point at a restaurant to make a reservation (though hopefully you thought about that before you drove all the way there).

The canned demo the company showed at MWC Barcelona was impressive, of course. It remains to be seen what the experience will look like in reality, though. Since a production launch isn’t imminent, it’ll be a while before we’ll be able to actually give it a try.

The version of Nubia’s “wearable smartphone” that was on display last year at IFA was an unwieldy thing. This year’s model of the Alpha, however, is certainly a step in the right direction.

It’s still bulky, so far as smartwatches go, but at very least, you could probably walk down the street in the thing, without stopping traffic.

Details are pretty scant at the moment. The Shenzhen-based smartphone maker promised more information at a press event later tonight (Barcelona time), so we’ll be dropping them in here as they arrive.

Meantime, this does feel like a logical next step for this technology, beyond the simple sandwich clamshells we’ve been at the show so far. The human body is a funny, weirdly shaped thing, so why not just wrap it up in OLEDs and be done with it?

TCL clearly had similar ideas when it was working through early concepts of its own demos, which included a phone that wraps around the wrist. Of course, that form factor is not doubt significantly more difficult to pull off than the inclosed version here. And unlike TCL’s mockups. This thing is likely actually coming to market some point soon — in China, at least.

Between this, a mini 5G phone and the recent dual screen handset, Nubia will be an interesting company to watch in the coming years.