An overview of the week in deals in the Irish and global technology sector.
Sony completes Sony Ericsson acquisition
Sony said that now that the mobile company has been fully acquired, Sony aims to accelerate “convergence between Sony’s line-up of network-enabled consumer electronics products, including smartphones, tablets, TVs and PCs.”
In October, Sony announced it would buy out its stake in the Sony Ericsson joint venture from Ericsson as part of a US$1.47bn deal in order to include smartphones in its consumer electronics line-up.
It also gave Sony a broad intellectual property cross-licensing agreement covering all of Sony’s products and services, as well as ownership of five patent families.
Europe and US approve Google’s takeover of Motorola Mobility
The EU has joined the US in giving the all clear for Google to proceed with its US$12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
The US Department of Justice also approved Google’s purchase of patents from Nortel Networks.
As part of the acquisition announced last August, Google will gain access to some 17,000 patents, as well as a further 7,000 pending patents.
Google has said it intends to remain faithful to its open ecosystem mantra and will license the patents to other technology companies.
Lero signs research agreement with UTRC
Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, has signed a research agreement with United Technologies Research Centre (UTRC) Ireland to explore the area of access control to future ‘smart’ buildings.
The proposed collaboration will pool the expertise at UTRC, which is based in Cork, in the area of access control with Lero’s expertise in software engineering of secure systems. The aim of the collaboration is to investigate systematic and novel techniques for more effective physical access control.
Prof Bashar Nuseibeh, chief scientist of Lero, will lead its activities during the alliance.
Nuseibeh said the proposed research will look at the feasibility for applying adaptive software design techniques to provide more “flexible and robust access control to modern smart buildings” that would feature pervasive technologies, such as wireless sensor networks.
UL and NUIG in research alliance with Silicon Valley start-up
Silicon Valley start-up Compact Imaging has just signed a two-year research collaboration with University of Limerick (UL) and National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). The two universities will be working with Compact Imaging on the area of biophotonics and will also gain a stake in the tech start-up.
UL and NUIG will be sharing their respective expertise with Compact Imaging specifically around the field of optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is an imaging technique similar to ultrasound, but employs light rather than sound.
OCT was first commercialised more than a decade ago for use in ophthalmic and medical diagnostic imaging.
Dublin telecoms tech firm wins deal in Sudan
Dublin-based telecoms technology company i-conX Solutions has been chosen to deploy its routing optimisation technology by Sudanese telecoms company Canar.
Canar, which was already an existing customer of the i-conX Interconnect Billing solution since 2007, chose i-conX Routing Optimisation Core along with two additional modules for managing quality of service, and for real-time dashboard reporting on the network.
The new system provides Canar with an integrated billing and routing optimisation solution, based around a single core database architecture with fully harmonised reference data management.
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