The ancestor of Youtube

By Simon Poulter, head of media relations, Alcatel-Lucent (follow him on Twitter: @simonpoulter)

In 1996, while working in the consumer electronics industry, I had the pleasure of presenting to journalists the very first flat television set that a consumer could actually go out and buy (assuming, of course, that they had the 1996 equivalent of 16,000 euros to spare).

What made that set so remarkable wasn’t just the plasma technology that allowed it to be just 10cm thick (which, 17 years ago, was the thinnest TV ever), but that for the first time in the history of television it wouldn’t have to sit in the corner of the living room.

For 70 years, the location of the household TV set had been largely constrained by ergonomics. These large wooden boxes containing a heavy glass tube and associated electronics could only, really, go in the corner. The advent of the plasma set, however, meant that television could not only be freed from the living room corner, but freed from the living room altogether – and hung on any wall like a painting.

Today, LCD and LED TVs hang on walls everywhere. Commoditization has brought their price down to the extent that they now exist in multiple rooms in multiple houses. However, we can also access on-demand content on a multitude of screens and devices, at home and on the move, and are no longer bound by the programming schedules of broadcasters. Indeed, television ownership may even have peaked: two years ago the US TV ratings agency Nielsen reported a 3% decline in American households owning television sets, a small but significant drop and due in part to consumers using laptops, tablets and smartphones to consume television content.

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Engage, our company’s social and collaborative platform, celebrated its 3rd birthday on April 6. On this occasion, we’re publishing this article from Guy van Leemput with his kind authorization, which was originally posted in J. Boye blog.

Is your organisation ready for a social intranet? Studies show that social often fails: A recent report from Gartner found that 80% of all social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits. How to make sure that you are part of the 20% ?

I recently spoke with Marc Jadoul, Marketing Director at Alcatel-Lucent and advocate for the company’s social intranet called ‘Engage’, about the benefits of a social platform – and how to reap them.

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I.M. Ross, front, and G.C. Dacey jointly responsible for this development measuring the characteristics of a field effect transistor.

By Gee Rittenhouse, Bell Labs President.

Just a few weeks into my tenure as President of Bell Labs, it’s with sadness that I note the passing of one of my predecessors, Dr. Ian Munro Ross.  Ian, who was the Labs President from 1979 until 1991, died on March 10, at the age of 85.

Looking back on Ian’s background and accomplishments offers an interesting perspective on how Bell Labs evolved during his time here, and how his career evolved as well.

Ian joined Bell Labs in 1952 after receiving his PhD in electrical engineering from Cambridge University. He was invited by William Shockley, who – along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain – invented the transistor (for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize). He made enormous technical contributions, spending his first few years in Shockley’s lab where he worked alongside G.C. Dacey and others on improving transistors, playing a critical role in the early stages of development of the field-effect transistor.

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By Harish Viswanathan, CTO Advisor for M2M and Wireless in the Corporate CTO team, Alcatel-Lucent

Harish Viswanathan

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) got a lot of attention last week at Mobile World Congress 2013. At its most basic level, M2M to the communication between devices, machines, systems and people. Examples of M2M communication can be as simple as using a credit card for a self-service transaction and home automation, to more advanced applications such as smart metering, telehealth, the Connected Car, and Integrated Communications for highways and utilities.

Fueled by such factors as the ubiquity of wireless networks and simplified IP networks, M2M is rapidly moving out of a “niche” market into a promising opportunity, as evidenced by announcements from service providers such as Deutsche Telekom, Sprint and Verizon.

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By Khamis Abulgubein, Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Sprint Innovation Center

“LTE is fast. Uber-Fast; no it’s TURBO fast!” Many mobile operators around the world who are introducing LTE use this marketing messageto communicate the value of LTE to their subscribers.  But once LTE has become established in their network, how do they avoid the inevitable capacity crunch on their network as too many of their subscribers want too much data over these new networks?? Operators are looking for new business models and innovations that will help sustain their network financially as well as technically.  Innovations such as small cells can provide operators the ability to augment their network; since Tel-Aviv is rated #2 in the world for technology startups after Silicon Valley, it’s a prime location to look to for these innovations.

The Israel Mobile & Media Association (IMA) was founded by Eyal Reshef to create an ecosystem of technology startups in Tel-Aviv.  No operator in Israel has yet to deploy LTE but that hasn’t thwarted the ecosystem from thriving around the world.  Startups like WeFi have already begun proof of concept activities with carriers in the USA and the IMA is critical in establishing those relationships. Even though they do not yet have LTE in market, they are already anticipating the capacity crunch, which was the topic for this year’s 4G Israel conference.

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