The latest rumor in telecom M&A arena has French conglomerate Bouygues in a hot bid for Vivendi’s SFR.   A tie-up like this will result in the largest mobile Telecom in France.  How does this concentration of market power measure up, and what will the regulator say? 

A little over two weeks ago, anon posted almost 13,000 IP addresses of vulnerable Asus routers to Pastebin. The list has been viewed over 44,400 times since posting, enough for a few malicious hackers to get their act together and start exploiting.  Another link is available containing over 10,000 lists of files stored on Asus-connected hard drives. The issue is that the vulnerabilities were first exposed more than 6 months ago and Asus had not done anything to patch it until last week. Asus is not the only culprit. Linksys vulnerabilities were exposed by the Internet Storm Center two weeks ago in 23 separate router models. The Moon, a worm targeting Linksys routers, has been happily self-replicating in the E-Series and Wireless-N product line. The exploit bypasses the admin authentication, but only works when the Remote Management Access feature is on. Linksys has published technical advice about how to prevent the routers from getting infected.

USA based AT & T has announced that it will scrap the costs for sending messages overseas for customers on its Mobile Share and Mobile Share Value plans, which provide unlimited text, picture and video messages.

I have been asked some questions following the news that Wallaby has released the first native payment app for Google Glass last week.  This, I thought, was something that could be really interesting but alas I ended up being disappointed.  My first major issue is that it isn't really a payment app - its a retail / financial app but in this instance Wallaby for Glass does not allow you to make a payment and Glass does not become the mechanism for making that payment.  Perhaps it is an interim step - it recommends which of your cards linked to the Wallaby app will give you the best return/offer/reward but the consumer still pays by card.  In the future perhaps it will be possible to pay with your phone or Glass but this is not what it shows in demos yet.

The way to look at generations of mobile wireless baseband technologies is by understanding the different dimension of spectrum the technology accesses.  Multiple standards can be built around a new generation of mobile baseband technology.  Looking at arbitrary groupings and arbitrary performance requirements is useful for spectrum alignment and adherance to the upper end of performance goals, but viewing the way the technology leverages spectrum leads to the simplest and clearest way to look at generations.

Last week saw an interesting strategic partnership being announced in the IoT space, as Cisco and AGT International  said that they had agreed to form a “Smart City Global Strategic Alliance” to drive future smart-city deployments and innovation.

Israel is currently home to one of the most active cybersecurity start-up markets in the world. The scene is certainly more energetic than anything coming out of Europe or Asia Pacific at the moment, and is rivalling US dynamism. The number of dedicated cybersecurity firms to come out of the region has been staggering: over 100 in 2013. Alongside more entrenched Israeli players such as Check Point and Cyber Ark, some notably successful start-up companies have emerged. Established players in the North American market are snapping up Israeli companies; Trusteer (acquired by IBM), ThetaRay (acquired by GE), Najavo Systems (acquired by Salesforce), NDS (acquired by Cisco), Versafe and Magnifire (both acquired by F5) have seen successful exits in the U.S. market.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had been promising for many years to make a decision on a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) mandate in the US before the end of 2013. It missed that deadline, but on February 3^rd 2014 it announced it will soon start work on “….a regulatory proposal that would require V2V devices in new vehicles in a future year…”.  Work on legislation will start following the publication in the next coming weeks of a research report summarizing findings of the V2V trial that took place in Ann Arbor in 2013 with close to 3000 vehicles involved.   The full text of the press release can be found here.