NTIA “will continue to monitor the work” of the ICANN stakeholder community to complete an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition proposal that fully meets NTIA-established criteria, the agency said its Q4 report on the IANA transition process. The report, released Monday, covers IANA transition planning developments only through Sept. 30 and therefore doesn’t include the results of work at ICANN’s October meeting in Dublin or post-Dublin progress on transition planning. The IANA Transition Coordination Group has finalized almost all elements in its IANA transition proposal but can’t submit its final proposal to the ICANN board until the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) finalizes its own proposal on changes to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms that are critical to the IANA transition (see 1510290058). CCWG-Accountability reached a high-level consensus during the Dublin meeting on several controversial provisions in its proposal, but isn't expected to have a final proposal ready until late January (see 1510220053). NTIA said it continued emphasizing to ICANN stakeholders that the IANA transition plan “must support and enhance the multistakeholder model of Internet governance, i.e., it should be developed by the multistakeholder community and have broad community support. We will not accept a transition proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or intergovernmental organization solution.” Once NTIA receives a final IANA transition plan proposal, the agency will “work within the interagency process to provide a thorough review of the proposal across government agencies. NTIA is also organizing internally to undertake a rigorous review of the community proposal.”

Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas will meet with senior Chinese government officials in Beijing Nov. 12-13 to “advance implementation” of the U.S.-China bilateral agreement signed in September, a DHS spokeswoman said in a statement Monday. The bilateral agreement, announced during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the U.S., would prohibit both the U.S. and Chinese governments from doing or “knowingly” supporting IP theft, including of trade secrets (see 1509250059). Mayorkas will also discuss preparations for an initial ministerial-level U.S.-China dialogue set for Dec. 1-2 in Washington, DHS said.

Ericsson and Cisco are joining to accelerate their platforms and services needed to create the IoT and to develop a mobile enterprise experience through a secure technology architecture, the companies said in a news release Monday. The partnership will "drive growth, accelerate innovation, and speed digital transformation demanded by customers across industries," the release said, and has an incremental revenue opportunity of at least $1 billion for each company by 2018. The companies plan to jointly offer "end-to-end leadership" across 5G, cloud services, IP and the IoT, they said. The partnership will be supported by several agreements, including commitments to network transformation through joint development, collaboration in emerging markets, as well as licensing agreements for the companies' respective patent portfolios in which Ericsson will receive licensing fees from Cisco, the release said.

For the mobile device initiatives of chipmaker Pixelworks, Q3 “was an outstanding quarter of progress,” CEO Bruce Walicek said on an earnings call. Pixelworks introduced and sampled the second chip in its Iris family of mobile display processors, “and we gained volume production,” he said Friday. The processor is targeted at 5.5-inch smartphones, 10-inch tablets and other mobile devices at sizes in between that feature display resolutions up to full HD, he said. The chip “is receiving a great response and faster adoption as the concept of bringing TV quality processing to mobile gains momentum,” he said. As Pixelworks moves into “the next phase of market development” with the Iris initiative, “we are seeing opportunities and higher volume platforms as many mid-range mobile SoCs can leverage the performance and benefits and features of Iris, allowing them to compete against more expensive, higher end SoC platforms,” he said. “Regarding SoC partners, we are seeing significant pull as the benefits of Iris can help differentiate their platforms as well as enhanced capability and performance. As a key part of our strategy to drive Iris design wins, we are engaged in joint selling and reference designs with major mobile SoC providers. And our activity increased significantly during the quarter.” The strategy recently paid big dividends when Pixelworks “captured a significant milestone design win for a major U.S. mobile wireless carrier, and we expect to see Iris-enabled tablets in their channel in mid-2016,” Walicek said. Pixelworks sees over-the-top video streaming services as “a key driver of mobile video and the increasing importance of the display experience,” he said. Early in 2016, Pixelworks plans to roll out “a key piece of our strategy to leverage” the company’s core video processing technology, he said. Code-named True Cut, the initiative brings the company’s video processing algorithms “upstream to the server level to drive pull for Iris-based mobile devices and ultimately drive design wins for Iris,” he said. True Cut is “an end-to-end solution that enables products based on Iris to display a higher-quality streaming video experience,” he said. True Cut “not only provides a value proposition to products based on Iris, but to carriers and content distributors as well,” he said. Pixelworks has begun “initial trials” of True Cut with “a major China-based carrier,” and expects to mount “live demos of this capability” in Q1, he said.

Intel announced an IoT reference platform architecture along with related hardware and software products Tuesday. The Intel IoT Platform includes two reference architectures and a product portfolio that includes new Intel Quark processors for IoT, analytics capabilities and free and “simple” operating systems with a cloud suite from Wind River, Intel said. The strategy is to make it easier for its customers “to scale from things to cloud” using the Quark processors and Wind River OS, Intel said. The platform architecture is focused on enabling the Intel ecosystem to “develop, secure and integrate smart things,” Intel said. The platform provides a “blueprint” for bringing innovations to market faster by “reducing complexity and defining how smart devices will securely connect and share trusted data to the cloud,” Intel said. The first company to announce IoT technology based on the new Intel IoT Platform is SAP, which will develop IoT enterprise end-to-end products based on the Intel platform along with its SAP HANA cloud platform, Intel said. Yanzi is using Intel’s Quark SoC to develop a solution that can optimize energy use based on space utilization and predictive maintenance in smart buildings, Intel said. A Honeywell connected worker wearable for mission-critical workers is designed to anticipate unsafe conditions and prevent “man-down” scenarios or unsafe conditions, Intel said.

Pandora finalized its buy of live events technology company Ticketfly, Pandora said in a news release Monday. The transaction was valued at about $450 million (see 1510070013).

Akamai Technologies said it bought Secure Web Gateway provider Bloxx in an all-cash transaction. Bloxx’s technology will “complement Akamai's cloud security strategy for protecting businesses against Internet vulnerabilities,” Akamai said in a Monday news release. It said the deal will allow Akamai to “extend its portfolio of cloud-based security services to focus on the enterprise” and “go beyond traditional blacklisting by providing real-time risk assessment and enabling customers to specify the actions Akamai will take based on the detected threat level.”

With the holiday selling season fast approaching, retailers are “thinking through every element” of their e-commerce plans to “significantly boost sales during the busiest shopping time of the year,” Jason Miller, Akamai chief strategist-commerce, said Friday in a blog post. The quality of the “user experience” is one of the "biggest drivers" of online sales, so retailers should place “increased emphasis” to bolster several key “customer touchpoints” during the holiday rush “to ensure positive brand interactions that convert browsing into sales,” Miller said. For example, Akamai research has found that more than half of consumers expect a Web page to load in three seconds, or less, he said. “So if your page does not, shoppers will most likely use the back button and visit your competitors,” he said. “Getting content close to users and caching content to avoid round trips to origin servers will increase performance.” Said Miller: “The importance of exceptional user experience across all channels cannot be undervalued. The reason many consumers decide to research and shop online as opposed to going to a store is convenience and simplicity. If customers find that a site is not easy, they'll find another resource.” Retailers that make the e-commerce effort to “consistently delight their customers” will be well “on their way to driving impressive results this holiday season,” Miller said.

ICANN’s Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Transition Coordination Group (ICG) said Thursday that it has completed almost all elements of its final proposal for the IANA transition plan but is still awaiting a final proposal from the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability). Major portions of the ICG’s plan derived from a proposal submitted by the Cross Community Working Group to Develop an IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal on Naming Related Functions are dependent on CCWG-Accountability’s set of proposed changes to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms. CCWG-Accountability reached a high-level consensus on several additional items in its proposal during ICANN’s meeting in Dublin last week, but the working group’s proposal won’t be ready to submit to the ICANN board until late January (see 1510220053). ICG said in a news release that it will need to “secure confirmation” from CCWG-Accountability that its accountability proposal will meet NTIA requirements before ICG will send its own proposal on to the ICANN board. Portions of the ICG’s plan derived from proposals by the Consolidated Regional Internet Registries IANA Stewardship Proposal team and the Internet Engineering Task Force’s IANAPLAN working group “are complete, ready for implementation, and have no dependencies on the work of [CCWG-Accountability] or other remaining processes,” ICG said.

A coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Thursday, asking him to “disclose information on the impact that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] has had inside the U.S.,” a TechFreedom news release said. The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Cyber Privacy Project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, R Street, Restore the Fourth, the Sunlight Foundation and the World Privacy Forum, and several others. In it, the groups ask Clapper to “disclose an estimate of the number of communications involving U.S. residents that are subject to surveillance, the number of times the FBI has used U.S. person identifiers to query Section 702 data, and the policies governing how agencies notify individuals that they intend to use information derived from Section 702 surveillance.” Since the FISA Amendments law is set to expire at the end of 2017, “this information is key to evaluating the decisions Congress will finally have to make about reforming over-broad surveillance,” TechFreedom Policy Counsel Tom Struble said.