While mobile operators are increasingly relying on Wi-Fi to augment their cellular networks, it’s still a lesser tool in their toolbox. But in the coming year, Wi-Fi is going to play a more vital role for carriers turning operators from providers of cellular voice and data to purveyors of connectivity.

That’s the prediction of Bob Friday, the CTO of wireless for Cisco, who is helping push this vision along. Cisco is a major driver behind Hotspot 2.0, an initiative that will use 802.11u, WPA2-Enterprise and EAP-based authentication to create easy Wi-Fi roaming for devices looking to move from cellular networks onto Wi-Fi networks or between Wi-Fi networks. Essentially, it will bring the ease of cellular roaming to Wi-Fi, something Stacey has written about before.

“The vision is to bring cellular-like authentication to Wi-Fi. Hotspot is trying to be the SIM card for Wi-Fi. We’re trying to bring connectivity to the general public,” Friday said.

This kind of roaming, Friday said, will make Wi-Fi a much more versatile tool for wireless operators because it will greatly simplify the way people jump onto Wi-Fi networks. He said by automating the authentication process, tying user identity to a SIM card and making it seamless for users, their devices can easily shift over to Wi-Fi networks without having to enter in credentials. And that will help transfer the data traffic burden on to Wi-Fi while giving users a better experience indoors and at crowded venues.

But it could also allow carriers to charge their users for access to Wi-Fi. That’s something we’ve talked of before, and it remains a potential byproduct of easier Wi-Fi roaming. Carriers, as they do with cellular roaming, could charge users when they jump on to other networks and track their usage using their SIM card. Friday said it’s possible that users would pay to roam on international Wi-Fi networks, but he wasn’t sure that would be the case domestically, if carriers signed agreements between each other. But it could be another source of revenue for carriers interested in bolstering their bottom line.

In the larger picture, Wi-Fi will become a much more valuable weapon in their arsenal and along with femto cells and small cells, will make them focus on delivering broader connectivity, regardless of the technology. Through their own Wi-Fi networks and roaming agreements with other Wi-Fi network providers and owners of hotspots, the operators can better construct a comprehensive system that keeps their users connected. Users will not only be able to jump on to Wi-Fi networks seamlessly but they’ll also be able to move between Wi-Fi networks.

The Wi-Fi Alliance and Wireless Broadband Alliance in June announced plans to collaborate on developing Hotspot 2.0 to ease Wi-Fi roaming. Trials are being conducted this year with further testing and a rollout expected to take place in the first half of next year, Friday said.

It’s unclear if all the operators will sign on, which would undercut the usefulness of Hotspot 2.0. Japan’s KDDI is already pursuing its own proprietary solution with a network that utilizes seamless switching between the cell sites and 100,000 Wi-Fi hotspots with a WiMAX overlay. Other companies are also putting together their own tools to help with Wi-Fi roaming. But Friday believes operators will be motivated to wait for Hotspot 2.0 to achieve a more comprehensive roaming system.

“It’s in the interest of the operators (to support Hotspot 2.0). It’s the same drive for cellular authentication that will drive them to Wi-Fi authentication,” Friday said.

This is going be key especially with the explosion of Wi-Fi hotspot use. In-Stat recently estimated that by  2015, wireless hotspots will account for nearly 120 billion connect sessions. And by 2013, there will be one million hotspot locations available. With so many hotspots available, having a comprehensive program to ensure easy roaming will facilitate the kind of sharing that has helped cellular operators. And it will mean more utility for users, who will have fewer restrictions in moving between Wi-Fi networks.

And just like KDDI is already proving, carriers will increasingly operate more heterogeneous networks that utilize a handful of technologies to connect users. It makes sense for the carriers to stay on top of exploding data traffic and it gives users a better experience and potentially more lower prices. The only questions are will the operators wait around for Hotspot 2.0 or pursue their own solution now? And will they charge for all this additional Wi-Fi service?

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Android users have about 250,000 apps to choose from but most have little use for any of them outside the top 50. That’s according to new data from Nielsen’s Smartphone Analytics, a new initiative that analyzes data from on-device meters.

The interesting news is that the top 10 Android apps account for 43 percent of the time spent on all mobile apps by Android users. And when you look at the top 50 apps, 61 percent of the time spent is on these apps. That means that if you’re an app maker on Android, you’re facing long odds at being used if you’re even in the bottom half of the top 100. And if you’re lost among the rest of the 249,550 apps, good luck getting any usage.

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Google has plenty of things going for it, but patience has never really been high on the list — not surprising, really, for a company that employs scooters to get around the halls of its offices. The search giant has taken a similar approach to the web, offering up a number of services to help speed things up around the old tubes. Page Speed Service is the latest simply named initiative on that front, which has apparently offered up speed improvements of 25 to 60 percent in its early testing phases. How does this magical quickening work? Google grabs content from your servers, rewrites pages with performance best practices, and sends them out through its own servers. The service has raised a few eyebrows, but Google insists that Page Speed Service is all about improving performance, not collecting information for future advertising opportunities.

Google wants to speed up your site, while resisting the urge to sell you stuff originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last week, Facebook formally announced “Hackamonth,” an internal initiative that allows some engineers to leave their team to work on a side project of their choosing. The goal is to prevent burnout among the staff and should result in some cool new products.

In fact, it already has. Over the past year, Facebook tested out Hackamonth with 35 engineers who were encouraged to submit project ideas requiring about a month’s worth of work. Each participating engineer then voted to join the project they found the most interesting. The three most popular projects became the first pilot Hackamonths.

The results were impressive: Facebook’s new Deals feature was actually born out of one of the three pilot Hackamonth projects, Facebook spokesman Slater Tow told me this week. Deals started as a Hackamonth pilot led by Facebook engineer Brian Sa and was initially dubbed “Paid Deals.”

Starting this week, Hackamonths are now available to any Facebook engineer who has worked on the same project for more than a year. At the end of a Hackamonth, engineers can choose to either go back to the old project or stay on the new one. According to the company, Facebook hopes to have around 10 percent of its engineers working on a Hackamonth at any given time.

The Hackamonth idea is an extension of Facebook’s longtime tradition of engineering “hackathons,” overnight events complete with beer, food, and DJs. During hackathons, employees must follow just one rule: They can’t work on anything related to their day jobs.

“For engineers, hackathons are opportunities to dive into any other project they’ve had their eye on. It’s a chance to shake things up for a night,” Tow said. “Hackamonth is a way to perpetuate this hackathon mentality into a full month.”

The parallels to other institutionalized burnout prevention tactics, such as Google’s 20 percent time program, are clear. What’s interesting about Facebook’s Hackamonth is that retention initiatives aren’t usually associated with venture-backed companies; the potential for a cash-out from a sale or IPO is usually enough to keep employees around. At nearly seven years after its first round of venture capital investment, Facebook is at an interesting spot that stretches the definition of startup (for reference, Google held its IPO five years after its first venture funding round). The Hackamonth initiative further solidifies Facebook’s status as a more mature company — albeit in a state of protracted adolescence.

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Google is the only major holdout in the “Do Not Track” flag initiative that Microsoft, Apple and Firefox are incorporating into their browsers. Google says the flag is too unclear — but it could also hurt its bottom line.

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Facebook unleashed a new commenting system this week that promises to help online publications clean up their commenting cesspools while simultaneously extending Facebook’s tentacles further into the web outside its walls. Unfortunately for those with visions of a non-Facebook dominated web, this initiative has the potential to dramatically expand the ginormous social network’s already imperial reach.

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