Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Amazon seeks drone dudes and more in the UK; BT lands Indian broadcast contract; Orange invests in Android-based transaction system; BlackBerry sues Nokia.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

February 20, 2017

2 Min Read
Eurobites: Deutsche Telekom Extends Smart Home Platform

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Amazon seeks drone dudes and more in the UK; BT lands Indian broadcast contract; Orange invests in Android-based transaction system; BlackBerry sues Nokia.

  • Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) is extending and enhancing its white-label smart home offering, Qivicon. The service is now available to telcos and others in Slovakia and Norway, and includes devices from Centralite, which sells smart plugs, motion sensors and more, and Sengled, which offers "intelligent" lighting. The German giant clearly believes the smart home is where it's at: Only last week it announced that it had done a deal with Amazon which brought Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s Alexa voice-controlled assistant into the Qivicon fold. (See Deutsche Telekom Unveils White Label Smart Home Solution.)

    • Talking of Amazon, the online retail behemoth is creating 5,000 new jobs in the UK -- and not all of them crummily paid ones in warehouses. As the Daily Telegraph reports, more than 1,500 of the new positions will be based at its development centers in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London, where Amazon folk work on a range of innovations, including the aforesaid Alexa and its embryonic drone delivery service, Prime Air.

    • The UK's Intellectual Property Office has helped broker an agreement between the creative industries and search engines that, it hopes, will go some way to stopping consumers making use of file-sharing websites that break content copyright rules. All parties concerned have signed up to a voluntary code of practice on issue, which comes into force immediately.

    • Orange Digital Ventures has chipped in for the third round of fundraising by Famoco, a developer of Android-based transaction systems. Famoco, which claims to have more than 100,000 devices deployed in more than 30 countries, hopes to raise €11 million (US$11.6 million) from Orange (NYSE: FTE) and others to help it open new offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

    • BT Media & Broadcast, BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA)'s media services business, has been chosen by Indian broadcaster Viacom18 to distribute its flagship Colors channel to Sky TV subscribers in the UK in HD. BT will manage the uplink and downlink of the signal to and from the broadcast satellite.

    • Orange and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. have signed a partnership agreement to collaborate on 5G and "cloudification." Areas coming in for joint scrutiny will include Massive MIMO, network slicing and virtual reality.

    • Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) is being sued by BlackBerry for what it claims is the infringement of as many as 11 patents, according to a Bloomberg report. These two have history on the patents front, with Nokia winning a dispute over WLAN products back in 2012. (See Euronews: Nokia Goes After RIM.)

      — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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