Euronews: Telco Pain Continues in Spain

The near-term future for Spanish operators continues to look bleak, with telecom watchdog CMT delivering the news that revenues are generally continuing to fall, with mobile broadband the only sector bucking the downward trend, reports Reuters. In 2012 total revenue for the Spanish telecom sector fell 7.2 percent to €35.2 billion (US$45.9 billion). Spain is currently suffering from a catastrophic 27 percent unemployment rate, though among the nation's youth the rate is much higher.

Israel continues to parade its credentials as the tech innovation hub of the EMEA region, and Nokia Siemens Networks has put the spotlight on two companies that have come up trumps in its Israel Innovation Competition, which was seeking new developments that complement its Liquid Applications platform. Racana, which developed a platform for personalization of content and content recommendations for mobile users, won the Global Innovation Award, while C-B4, described as a predictive analytics software system, was declared winner of The Promising Startup Award. (See NSN Gets Its Cloud On.)

Still on a liquid theme, African wholesale carrier Liquid Telecom has chosen Ekinops SAS's long-haul DWDM technology for its new network that spans South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has teamed up with Imperial College London to explore the possibility of setting up an R&D hub to focus specifically on Big Data. If it goes ahead, the center would be located on Imperial's research and translation campus in west London. (See Huawei Expects Relentless Growth.)

OSN, a pay-TV operator based in Dubai, has launched an app which allows subscribers to watch content on its OSN Play service on the iPhone and iPod Touch via Wi-Fi, reports Arabian Business. A version for Android phones will be made available within a couple of weeks.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading