Bivio Raises $16.5M for Gigabit Packet Handling

Bivio Networks, a start-up based in Pleasanton, California, raised $16.5 million capital in venture funding for its new line of multi-gigabit packet handling appliances. Bivio has developed an enterprise-class networking appliance that features a uniquely scalable architecture for advanced packet handling of network applications in the areas of security, VoIP, multimedia, wireless and IPv6.


Bivio's multi-gigabit architecture, which leverages off-the-shelf processors and programmable FPGAs, is specifically optimized for wire-speed execution of software-based network services. The design separates network processing (Layer 1-3) from application processing (Layers 4 and above) onto separate cards. An application processing card features parallel Motorola PowerPCs. The network processing card, which provides deep packet inspection and classification, scales to 4 Gbps in throughput. The 2U appliance can add either additional application processors or network interfaces as required. The system also scales by daisy chaining the backplane of multiple Bivio appliances.


Bivio is offering its platform on an OEM basis.


Investors in the new funding round include Goldman Sachs, InterWest Partners, Storm Ventures, and Venrock Associates. http://www.bivionetworks.com/

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Kasenna Previews its Latest IPTV Server

Kasenna is showcasing its latest IPTV application suite at this week's NAB 2005 show in Las Vegas. Kasenna's "LivingRoom" IPTV includes broadcast TV, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, network PVR, and a commercial music jukebox-all from the same application server. In addition, LivingRoom v1.2 supports easy integration of more advanced services such as Internet access, e-mail, chat, interactive gaming, and traffic watch using web services APIs.


LivingRoom clients are available in easily portable, thin client, browser-based configurations as well as with Macromedia Flash. LivingRoom v1.2 also includes a scalable back-office application server for content management, channel packaging, transaction processing, billing system integration, subscriber management/provisioning integration, services management, and other key functions.


The Kasenna demonstrations use set-top boxes from Amino and Thomson, and with encryption solutions from Widevine and SecureMedia. Key partners showcasing LivingRoom 1.2 at their booths include IBM, HP, and Optibase.
http://www.kasenna.com

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Altera and Gennum Develop 3 Gbps Video Interface for Coax

Altera and Gennum, a silicon company based in Burlington, Ontario, announced a serial video interface that supports a 3-Gbps signal over a coax. The solution uses Altera's Stratix GX FPGAs and Gennum's cable equalizer and driver products. This enables a multi-rate link that supports Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) protocols 259M-C (270 Mbps) and 292M (1.485 Gbps), and twice the SMPTE 292M data rate (2.970 Gbps).


"The movement in the broadcast industry toward 1080-line progressive video formats is creating demand for a 3 Gbps serial interface," said Alan Ferguson, director, video transport products at Gennum. "Copper is still the lowest cost method of transporting digital video, so the industry will be pleased to learn that 100 meters of coax is possible at 3 Gbps."


The companies will demonstrate the 3 Gbps link (two times the 292M SMPTE specification for high definition serial video) over 100 meter Belden 1694A cable at next week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference in Las Vegas.
http://www.altera.com/http://www.gennum.com/

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Liberty Alliance Addresses EU Privacy Concerns

The Liberty Alliance Project, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, released "Circles of Trust: The Implications of EU Data Protection and Privacy Law for Establishing a Legal Framework for Identity Federation".


The document is a guide for a federation of organisations implementing the Liberty specifications under the rigorous requirements of European privacy law.


The Circle of Trust is a concept central to the Liberty Alliance Project. A Circle of Trust is a federation of service providers and identity providers that have business relationships based on Liberty architecture and operational agreements, and with whom users can transact business in a secure and apparently seamless environment. As federated communities create interdependencies and, consequently, the need for trust between participants, the Circle of Trust is viewed by the Liberty Alliance as an essential component of establishing a system of federated identity based on Liberty specifications.


The paper discusses such issues as: how EU privacy law treats identity and the use of identifiers; how the law applies to different entities in the federated identity ecosystem; and what rules apply to the transfer of personal data beyond the boundaries of the EU.
http://www.projectliberty.org/

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Club iT and Alcatel Supply Gaming-on-Demand in Cyprus

Club iT Corporation, a subsidiary of SOFTBANK Broadmedia Corp., partnered with Alcatel to supply an on-demand gaming solution for CYTA, the incumbent telecommunications organisation in Cyprus.


Club iT's G-cluster solution is fully integrated with Alcatel's Open Media Platform (OMP) IPTV middleware suite. Customers are able to play the latest console and PC games on their set-top boxes (STBs). The games are hosted and executed in one of 6 miVision server centers. G-cluster servers stream the video and sound output to the STB. User input (jump, move left, fire, etc) is sent from the STB to the appropriate server centre. Players can use remote controls, keyboards, or USB game pads connected to the STB as input devices.


Alcatel serves as the reseller and system integrator for the DSL-enabled service.
http://www.alcatel.com
http://www.g-cluster.com

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Distributel Licenses DCL's Messaging and Conferencing Technology

Distributel, a Canadian provider of competitive telecommunications services, has licensed both Data Connection's MailNGen platform for voicemail, email, fax and unified messaging and also Data Connection's MeetingServer platform for integrated audio/video/web conferencing. This gives Distributel a single source for two key services, both of which are becoming increasingly important differentiators in the hugely competitive telecommunications market.


MailNGen offers email, voicemail and fax, all through a single inbox. This allows Distributel to offer a full unified messaging service to customers, but also to offer different levels of service to different user groups. The system runs entirely on commodity hardware and using a server farm architecture that provides 99.999% availability and low-cost scalability.


MeetingServer provides a set of data and video conferencing features through an entirely web-based GUI, avoiding large downloads that are prone to failures. It is tightly integrated with the audio bridge that Distributel is using, allowing conference users to manage both the audio conference and the web conference through the same interface.


Using the Data Connection technology, Distributel is able to offer bilingual French and English versions of the GUIs and phone interfaces, as well as support both TDM and VoIP traffic. http://www.dataconnection.com

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Eagle Broadband Appoints CEO

Eagle Broadband, a supplier of broadband solutions including IPTV, promoted David Micek to the posts of president and CEO, succeeding Dave Weisman. In addition, Jim Reinhartsen, who is currently a member of the company's board of directors, will succeed Dave Weisman as chairman of the board. Weisman will continue to serve as a member of the board of directors.


Micek has previously served as the company's COO. Most recently, Micek was president at Internet search company AltaVista where he led a restructuring and sale of the company's enterprise software business. Before AltaVista, he was president and CEO of wireless networking company Zeus Wireless. Micek was also president and CEO of broadband video applications company iKnowledge. Prior to iKnowledge, he was vice president and general manager at Texas Instruments.


The company is headquartered in Houston, Texas. http://www.eaglebroadband.com

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Conax Provides Encryption for IPTV

Conax, a subsidiary of the broadcast operation of Norway's Telenor, introduced a product that enables operators and content providers to encrypt streamed IP television content, distribute the stream via open networks, and selectively determine the receivers who will be able to decrypt and utilize the content. Conax offers a complete video DRM enforcement solution for IPTV, addressing both the point-to-point on-demand and the multicast push content modes.
http://www.conax.com

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Streaming Media Consortium Announces Downloading Spec

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) made publicly available the final version of its next generation specification, ISMA 2.0. The specification incorporates advanced codec technology for audio and video applications, Internet protocols for streaming and file formats for storage.


ISMA 2.0 defines a standards-based approach to developing products for the streaming multimedia market. For video, ISMA 2.0 has adopted MPEG-4 part 10, also known as ITU H.264 or AVC. AVC guarantees greater quality at various bit rates and over multiple connection types. Also adopted in ISMA 2.0 is the High Efficiency AAC audio codec, or HE AAC, which offers multi-channel support and the best quality available for very low bit rates.


The Internet Streaming Media Alliance said that, when used together, AVC and HE AAC offer endless possibilities across the digital spectrum, from IPTV to mobile devices. In addition to new codec technology, ISMA 2.0 integrates proven formats for both content delivery over IP -- utilizing RTP/RTSP -- and multimedia file storage, endorsing the industry standard MP4 file format.


ISMA member companies participated in extensive interoperability testing, known within the alliance as plug-fests, to ensure their products comply with the new specification. The alliance promotes a formal certification program, the ISMA Conformance Program, and will issue a call for participants for the next test cycle to validate compliance with ISMA 2.0.


The ISMA 2.0 specification is available for download online. http://www.isma.tv

• Members of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance include Act, Inc., America Online, Analog Devices, Apple Computer, California State University at Fresno, Case Western Reserve University, Cisco Systems, Coding Technologies, ContentGuard, DMDsecure, Dolby Laboratories, Envivio, France Telecom, Fraunhofer Institute, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Inka Entworks, Philips Electronics, Standby Program, Sun Microsystems, Telecom Italia, University of Washington, VBrick Systems, Widevine Technologies, and WIS Technologies.

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Skype Offers Inbound PSTN Calls, Voicemail

Skype announced the public beta launch of two commercial services: inbound calls to a Skype users from the PSTN and voicemail. Separately, Skype announced an agreement with TDC Song to provide call termination services and numbering allocations for Skype premium offerings. TDC Song joins previously announced carriers, including B3G Telecom, Cable and Wireless, COLT, HGC, iBasis, Level3 and Teleglobe, in providing global termination and premium services.


SkypeIn provides customers with a regular telephone number so that they can receive inbound calls to their Skype client from ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones. The Skype software client receives the call from any location where the user has broadband access. Users may purchase up to three numbers from their home country in Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States during the beta period. Three month SkypeIn subscriptions are available for €10 ($13) and 12 month subscriptions for €30 ($39).


Skype Voicemail enables customers to receive a voicemail message up to 10 minutes long from any user or traditional phone. Skype Voicemail customers may record their own personalized voicemail greeting, playback their messages, even while offline, and send incoming calls to voicemail if they away, offline or simply busy on another call.


Skype Voicemail subscriptions are available for €5 ($7) for 3 months or €15 ($19) for 12 months, and a free subscription is included with all SkypeIn orders.


Skype also updated several key metrics:

• Total downloads to date have exceeded 100 million. The company now has more than 35 million registered users.



• More than 150,000 new users are signing up per day.



• Skype has now enabled more than 7 billion minutes of talk time



• More than 1.2 million people are now using SkypeOut, which allows global calling to public telephone numbers for local rates

http://www.skype.com

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Skype Offers Inbound PSTN Calls, Voicemail

Skype announced the public beta launch of two commercial services: inbound calls to a Skype users from the PSTN and voicemail.


SkypeIn provides customers with a regular telephone number so that they can receive inbound calls to their Skype client from ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones. The Skype software client receives the call from any location where the user has broadband access. Users may purchase up to three numbers from their home country in Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States during the beta period. Three month SkypeIn subscriptions are available for €10 ($13) and 12 month subscriptions for €30 ($39).


Skype Voicemail enables customers to receive a voicemail message up to 10 minutes long from any user or traditional phone. Skype Voicemail customers may record their own personalized voicemail greeting, playback their messages, even while offline, and send incoming calls to voicemail if they away, offline or simply busy on another call.


Skype Voicemail subscriptions are available for €5 ($7) for 3 months or €15 ($19) for 12 months, and a free subscription is included with all SkypeIn orders.


Skype also updated several key metrics:

• Total downloads to date have exceeded 100 million. The company now has more than 35 million registered users.



• More than 150,000 new users are signing up per day.



• Skype has now enabled more than 7 billion minutes of talk time



• More than 1.2 million people are now using SkypeOut, which allows global calling to public telephone numbers for local rates

http://www.skype.com

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