Route1 Picks Up $25 Million Dollar Deal

A Canadian company I’ve had my eye on for some time is Route1. I’ve used their product until very recently, and they’ve picked up a deal with the US Department Of Homeland Security as well as the Dutch Government, both of which are no small feats. Yesterday Route1 announced that they did it again. This time with the US Fish And Wildlife Service:

FWS requires removable, secure computing devices and services that will allow users to connect to their workstation desktops and applicable network resources from any internet-enabled, Windows-based computer. FWS’ objective is to acquire the ability to remotely access U.S. Government systems and information in a secure environment, and to enable and promote the ability to telework.

FWS has entered into a blanket purchase agreement with Route1 for delivery of up to 10,000 users, with the longer-term goal of adding users from other components of the United States Department of the Interior. The term of the blanket purchase agreement is five years from the date of the award, with the total value of the agreement valued at US$25 million.

This is good news for a company that has gone through some serious turmoil that resulted in a change in CEO as well as the board of directors and only very recently showed a profit. That can’t be good for the morale of their employees who are going to be critical to them executing on this deal. All you have to do is look at Yahoo as an example of what happens to a company that is under a fair amount of turmoil. Their key employees leave or are poached by other companies. That’s something that is hard to recover from. Seeing as Route1 is desperately close to hitting the big time, one has to hope that this hasn’t happened to them.

In any case we’ll see if this is the turning point for this company. Otherwise Route1 will be one of those companies that didn’t quite deliver on their potential.

Google Gets Sued Over Location Data Collection

Joining Apple in court over how their smart phones deal with location data collection is Google. Two women from Michigan are suing the Android folks over the way the smart phones deal with location data:

The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit, comes a week after Google acknowledged that phones running its Android software store some location data directly on phones for a short time from users who have chosen to use GPS services.

Google said that was done “to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices.” It also stressed that any location sharing is done with the user’s permission.

In the lawsuit, filed by Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski, the women said they did not approve.

The tracking capability puts “users at serous risk of privacy invasions, including stalking,” the women’s lawyer Steven Budaj wrote in the complaint.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind filed in the United States.

I’m really not sure about the merits about this lawsuit, but IANAL. Maybe they have something here. We’ll see as soon as next week as Apple and Google are being called on the carpet by the U.S. Senate to explain all of this location tracking stuff to a bunch of politicians who think that the Internet is a series of tubes. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Google and Apple smart phone OS users may have some software updates on or about the time of these hearings.

Review: Blackberry Traffic

I came across an app on Blackberry App World called Blackberry Traffic. The purpose of this app is to do two things. First, it’s a navigation app that helps you get from point A to point B. Second, you can send an email with your ETA to any (presumably) smart phone user that’s waiting for you. Sounds good on the surface, but how well does it work? Well it does work quite well. The navigation software can choose the most direct route as well as the one with the least amount of traffic. It also reports on the amount of traffic ahead of you. It also keeps your Blackberry screen active which is a nice touch. You can also store locations like home, work, or anywhere else to make it easy for you to pick locatons. Plus you can add new locations easily. The only downside is that you have to look at the Blackberry constantly as it doesn’t tell you when to make turns or anything else via voice commands. Hello? This is 2011. Every navigation app should do this as this is a major safety issue.

The price of this app? Free. You can’t beat that. Though the fact that it has no voice commands is something that really needs to be addressed. Check it out if you have Blackberry OS 4.6 higher and GPS capabilities along with Blackberry Maps pre-installed.

Sony Xperia Arc And Play Now Available On Rogers

For the second day in a row, my “best friends at Rogers” had some news for me. The Sony Xperia Play and Arc which I’ve previously written about are now available on Rogers. You can score one for $99 with the usual 3 year plan that is required to get the best price. Even though I’ve had seen these phones and touched them previously, I’m working to get my hands on them to do a proper review.

Rogers To Roll Out LTE In Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver

My “best friends at Rogers” pointed me towards this post which has some stunning news about their LTE deployment:

We’re excited to announce that Rogers will launch our Long Term Evolution (LTE) network this year in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. And it gets better – we also plan to deploy LTE in an additional 21 markets by the end of 2012. What this means is that Rogers customers will be among the first in the world to experience LTE.

However, that’s not the stunning news. Read this from the press release above:

Rogers customers will experience speeds that are between three and four times faster than HSPA+ with peak download rates of up to 150 Megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of up to 70 Mbps.

Holy crap that’s fast! Assuming users are not capped to death, which is entirely probable, this is a game changer. There’s no firm date for their rollout in these four cities, but that works in Rogers favor as they can take their time to roll this out properly as long as they roll out LTE this year.

Oh, if you live in some corner of Canada and you want some LTE action, check out this site to nominate your town for an LTE upgrade, not to mention score some tickets to the Toronto Indy Car race.

Apple Says It Isn’t Tracking You…. Yeah Right

After an extended, but not surprising silence, Apple finally had something to say about the tracking circus that has been circulating around the Internet:

The data, downloaded from Apple, help the phone figure out its location without having to listen for faint signals from GPS satellites. That means navigation applications can present the phone’s location faster and more accurately, Apple said.

Apple said the data are stored for up to a year because of a software error. The company said there’s no need to store data for more than seven days, and a software update in the next few weeks will limit the amount of data in that file.

The iPhone will also stop backing up the file to the user’s computer, a practice that raised some concerns. Computers are much more vulnerable to remote hacking attempts than are phones.

A third planned fix is to stop downloading the data to phones that have all “Location Services” turned off, Apple said, and to encrypt the file on those where it’s on.

“Users are confused, partly because creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date,” Apple said in its statement.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t exactly buy the fact that this was an error. Seeing as there’s a patent floating around that implies that they have plans for that data. But we’ll see.

In a way, Apple has become Big Brother. It is ironic if you remember their commercial from the 1984 Superbowl that they used to introduce the original Macintosh which featured a woman in red shorts smashing a hammer into image of Big Brother on a giant TV screen. Now Steve Jobs is Big Brother and his iPhone users the drones in the audience. While I have said previously that you do agree to this when you use an iPhone, I don’t think that you agree to something where this sort of data is unencrypted so that who knows what happens to it.

This is really a #fail for Apple to quote Jack Layton.

Lawsuit Filed Over iPhone Tracking Circus…. And It Gets Worse For El Jobso

You knew this was coming the second the news about the fact that the iPhone and iPad tracks your movement and stores it in an unencrypted file. A federal lawsuit has been filed over this whole affair:

The suit against Apple, which was filed Monday in Florida, is seeking class-action status and accuses Apple of using the GPS feature on iOS-based devices or cell-tower triangulation to pinpoint user location and then stores that data in an unencrypted format, all without the consent or knowledge of the user.

“All iPhones log, record and store users’ locations based on latitude and longitude alongside a timestamp. The iPhones store this information in a file called “consolidated.db” or something similar. Apple intentionally began recording this information with the release of its iOS 4 operating system in June 2010. Apple uses a cell-tower triangulation to obtain user location. Recording Your Moves. Alternatively, Apple may use global positioning system (GPS) data to obtain user location,” the suit alleges.

Lovely. It likely doesn’t help that a patent filed by Apple makes it really hard for them to claim that this was a mistake. Oh yeah. If that’s not enough, South Korea, Italy, Germany and other countries are all looking into this mess. This is not what Apple wants to hear and it could be a bigger threat to them than “antennagate.” Expect this to be playing out soon and expect some lawyers to be scoring some serious cash. Not to mention that it could seriously put a crimp in Apple’s record profits.

Have A PS3? Your PSN Account May Have Been Hacked

For the last few days, the Playstation network has been down. Now this news appeared on the Playstation blog:

We are currently working to send a similar message to the one below via email to all of our registered account holders regarding a compromise of personal information as a result of an illegal intrusion on our systems. These malicious actions have also had an impact on your ability to enjoy the services provided by PlayStation Network and Qriocity including online gaming and online access to music, movies, sports and TV shows. We have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.

Oh joy. PSN accounts hacked and personal info exposed. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. If you have a PSN account, I’d read their blog post as it has info you really need to know.

In the meantime, I suspect that Xbox sales are about to go up.

RIM Faces Limits In The UAE

Sucks to be RIM. The Globe And Mail is reporting that effective May 1st, Blackberry users in the UAE are facing significant restrictions:

Under the new policies, Du and its rival Etisalat — both majority owned by the government — are required to limit access to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to companies with 20 user accounts or more. That system provides the most secure communication on the handheld devices and is used by many international companies and government agencies.

Other users would need to rely on a less-secure system known as the BlackBerry Internet Service that experts say could be easier for authorities to monitor. Unlike the more secure BES system, which routes encrypted data through company servers abroad, the BIS system runs over the regular Internet.

So Blackberries aren’t banned, but the fact that they’ve restricted how they can be used. In my mind, this is the thin edge of the wedge. Expect more to come in the near future in the form of snooping on BIS traffic. From there, who knows? But I guarantee it won’t end here.

Samsung Sues Apple…. And It Begins Again

All I have to say is that I am not the least bit shocked that Samsung has decided to sue Apple to defend itself against Apple’s patent lawsuit against them:

“Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property,” the statement said.

Charming. And so begins the pattern of tit-for-tat lawsuits that tends to happen in the patent lawsuit space. Oh well. Check back in about 3 to 5 years and maybe this will be sorted out. Not that you’ll care by that point.