London, England, – November 21, 2011 – Zonerider announced that it has been selected as a candidate for Red Herring’s 2011 Top 100 Global award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year’s most audacious and far reaching private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the companies demonstrating the most innovative technologies and business models originating from over 1000 companies from over 40 nations. These companies, representing past Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America awards, are judged on a range of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including but not limited to, technology innovation, financial performance, growth criterion, management’s execution standards, potential globalization of the strategy and market share improvement.

“Technology companies are becoming the bright spot in the economic outlook based on their increasing role within macro-economic environments.“ Stated Alex Vieux, Chairman of Red Herring. “2011 has confirmed the sector’s vibrant activity and its resilience to widespread economic problems. An unprecedented number of entrepreneurs are attempting to jump ahead of the competition and aspire to make a difference. Breakthroughs obsolete each other faster than ever before. Zonerider has performed exceptionally in its field and strongly deserves to be singled out as one of the Red Herring Global Finalists. At this stage, we are left with the daunting task to select the best qualified companies for the 2011 Top 100 Global Award.”

The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Global forum in Los Angeles, December 5-7, 2011. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on December 7 at the event.

This insightful market study includes a comprehensive survey of 259 service providers and Wi-Fi vendors.

The report reveals that global public Wi-Fi hotspot numbers are set to grow from 1.3 million in 2011, to 5.8 million by 2015 — a 350% increase. The number does not include ‘community hotspots’, where users share their own Wi-Fi access point with others, which add an additional 4.5 million worldwide.

China Mobile alone plans to deploy a million hotspots and Japan’s KDDI plans to grow its 10,000 Wi-FI hotspots to 100,000 within six months. The survey found that that this growth will be concentrated in three types of location: wide-area outdoor hotzones (e.g. parks); local-area outdoor hotzones (e.g. popular tourist attractions); and transport hubs (e.g. airports).

The findings also show that 58% of operators — including 47% of mobile operators — believe Wi-Fi hotspots are either very important or crucial to their customers’ experience; offload busy mobile broadband networks; and provide a value-added services platform.

Mobile data growth is a key factor in the rapid build-out of Wi-Fi hotspots. The report highlights that global mobile data traffic is expected to reach 16.84 million terabytes by 2014. Operators plan to manage the impact of this growth primarily through new pricing strategies and Wi-Fi-based offload.

Mobile Device Growth is Increasing Hotspot Demand

The survey found that smartphone connections to Wi-Fi hotspots will soon overtake laptops globally. Laptops now represent less than half (48%) of the connections to hotspots, smartphones account for 36% and tablets 10%.

In APAC and North America smartphones already outnumber laptop connections. While in Latin America, smartphones and laptop connections currently break even. Respondents don’t expect LTE mobile broadband deployments to have an impact on the growth of Wi-Fi hotspots.

The report highlights several barriers to adoption and use of public Wi-Fi hotspots. Cumbersome authentication procedures, costs of access, user discovery of available networks and security were listed. One UK operator recently reported that only 20% of its users access the free public hotspots available to them.

However, several challenges will be overcome by Next Generation Hotspots (NGH) which are currently being trialed internationally. These allow users to seamlessly roam between cellular and Wi-Fi networks using their mobile handset’s SIM card as authentication, reducing concerns about authentication, network discovery and security.

Operators are also reducing the cost of access by increasingly offering public Wi-Fi as part of broadband or cellular packages.

Chris Bruce, Chair of the WBA and CEO, BT Openzone said: “The findings show we are about to enter the golden age of public Wi-Fi with hotspot deployments set to soar. Fixed operators are extending broadband services beyond the home and office, and Wi-Fi is supporting busy mobile broadband networks. Next Generation Hotspot trials are making inroads in the remaining barriers and by cracking the code of a simple, secure user experience hotspot use will continue to soar.”

Mobile to be worth 1T by 2014

Largely because of the broad use of iPads and other mobile tablets, which are heavy users of video streaming, the guest room Wi-Fi networks that most hotels thought they had brought up to standard just a few years ago are now often groaning under user demands.

“The iPad is the fastest-selling device in consumer electronics history, and because of it the demand placed on any public place Wi-Fi system has gone up exponentially in the last year and a half,” said David W. Garrison, the chief executive of iBAHN, a provider of systems for the hotel and meetings industries.

This means more hotel customers are unhappy with their Internet connections. Hotel owners, meanwhile, who are digging out from a two-year slump caused by the recession, will probably have to invest more money to provide more bandwidth.

For travelers, it may mean still another fee, since hotels will be paying their own Internet bills. Some hotel Internet service providers are proposing a solution that offers tiered Wi-Fi service. The lowest level, suitable for basic Internet requirements like checking e-mail, would be free, but other levels would be priced depending on bandwidth requirements. According to iBAHN, iPads consume four times more Wi-Fi data per month than the average smartphone.

The iPad represents the “final nail in the coffin” for the idea that all Internet is free, Mr. Garrison said.

Amy Cravens, a market analyst with the mobile Internet group of In-Stat, a technology research and consulting company, agreed that tablets “have had a huge influence on bandwidth consumption.”

Ms. Cravens said hotels had been slow to respond to the idea of a tiered fee system. “They’ve been talking about that for a few years, but I haven’t really seen it put much into play,” she said.

Mr. Garrison estimated that 10 to 15 percent of hotels in the United States now offered at least some kind of Wi-Fi service with fees for higher use.

The growth in bandwidth demand is obvious. As we were speaking on Monday, Ms. Cravens received a note from AT&T saying that connection times for its hotel Internet service had more than doubled from the second quarter of this year to the third quarter.

Studies conducted for iBAHN indicate that while free Internet service remains a big factor in choosing a hotel, nearly two-thirds of business travelers say they have encountered slow Internet downloading in the last 12 months. Over two-thirds said they would “not return to a hotel where they had a poor technology experience,” iBAHN said.

“The bits used for video streaming and downloading increased thirtyfold on our network in one year,” Mr. Garrison said.

Hotels, he said, now must choose “either to not increase the amount of bandwidth, so everybody will get much slower service to the point where you’ll think you’re on a dial-up connection,” or upgrade and essentially put in a metered fee-based system.

“It’s about managing that bandwidth,” Mr. Garrison added. “We’re not saying that free Internet as you know it today is dead. We’re saying that a hotel owner will have to decide what free should be. I could have a free option, for a limited level of service, but charge for higher levels of demand.”

The research firm the Gartner Group predicts that the number of iPads sold will reach 100 million by the end of 2012.

“People are now carrying multiple devices. We see instances in hotels where people are using their laptop and their iPad at the same time, and maybe even have their smartphone on,” Mr. Garrison said. “As a business traveler, you’re trying to get work done and you need a guaranteed adequate connection. So don’t give me free Wi-Fi if it’s not going to work.”

I, too, am about to join the mob and buy my first iPad. As I mentioned here, on a recent stay at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Denver, the Internet connection (at $12.95 a night, no less) was as sluggish as a dial-up. Even if it had been free, it would have remained almost useless to me.

Will you opt to pay an added fee in a hotel room for the extra bandwidth you may require? I hate to say it, but I probably will, if I have a guarantee that it will perform adequately.

I asked the same question of Ms. Cravens, an iPad user herself. Would she pay extra for the bandwidth she needs on the road?

“Absolutely,” she replied.

Telecoms operators need to spend $840bn (£533bn) on urgent upgrades in order to avert a “bottleneck”, it said.

Ntin Bhas, an analyst at Juniper, said: “As many operators are either deploying 3G or augmenting their network to 4G, they need to simultaneously manage the upgrade of their backhaul networks with the upgrade of their radio networks.”

Around 60pc of the bumper investment is expected to go on microwave technology, although fibre is on track to overtake copper as the most commonly used network infrastructure. It is expected to drive an estimated $233bn of spending on networks in China and the Far East alone, according to the research.

Smartphones are expected to account for around 28pc of the global handset market in 2011, but will accelerate rapidly to more than half of all handsets by 2015 as more manufacturers release models priced less than £100.

The hotspot market continues to surge forward with phenomenal growth in footprint and usage. Over the past several years, growth in the hotspot market has largely been driven by wireless and broadband providers embracing Wi-Fi as both a competitive differentiator, and an enhancement to core services. New In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) research, Wi-Fi Hotspots: The Mobile Operator’s 3G Offload Alternative, forecasts that this trend will continue as usage will increase to nearly 120 billion connects in 2015.

“The hotspot market is in a continuous state of flux. Now over a decade old, the market is still undergoing significant changes in usage and business models,” says Amy Cravens, Senior Analyst. “Wi-Fi hotspots have become a service used to attract customers to other product offerings, rather than a standalone offering. Whether the product is broadband, mobile service, or a cup of coffee, Wi-Fi is being layered on top of core offerings as a competitive differentiator.”

London, UK, – 23 Dec 2010 – Zonerider announced today it has been selected as Finalist for Red Herring’s top 100 Global award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures worldwide.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of 1200 companies from across the world – the Finalists from its Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America Awards. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an important instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

“2010 was very difficult but extremely rewarding,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “Despite lingering effects of the global economic situation, there are many great companies producing truly innovative and amazing technologies, to the extent that we had a hard time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Zonerider shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Winners of the Top 100 Global Award.

Finalists for the award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in spaces such as mobile, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.

The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Global forum in Los Angeles, January 24-26, 2011. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on January 26 at the event.

Cambridge-based company Zonerider has come up with the technology to make this possible, which will result in a rapid increase in the number of WiFi hotspots.

The software it has created can be downloaded free and allows anyone to turn their internet connection into a private wireless hotspot. The hotspot owners can then earn by letting other people use their connection.

Entrepreneur Levi Russell, who founded Zonerider, believes his company is sitting on something big:
READ MORE

Cambridge, UK – The hunt is on to find the next generation of technology tycoons as ‘Discovering Start-Ups 2010’ – a brand new competition and support programme – launches across the East of England today.

Cambridge Wireless has joined forces with the East of England Development Agency (EEDA) to offer local technology start-up businesses the opportunity to win cash prizes in a competition to find the best new wireless technologies. The competition runs across five categories of wireless technology:

• Green radio – wireless technologies that address environmental concerns• Hot applications and services – for software developers/service providers • Health and wellness – using wireless technology solutions to solve health-related issues• Technology design – for those with a new take on technology, and; • Emerging disruptive ideas – for the best ideas that might come out of research and development (R&D).

Closing for entries on 29 October, the competition will be judged by leading industry figures and winners will be announced at the Cambridge Wireless Founders’ Awards dinner on Thursday 9 December at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Alongside the competition, Cambridge Wireless will provide a series of ‘masterclasses’ to help technology-focused start-ups – wireless or otherwise – to address common issues when starting and growing their business. The launch event, ‘Show us the money’ will be hosted on Tuesday 13 July 2010 at the Møller Centre, Cambridge, and will provide top tips on securing critical early-stage investment. The event starts at 12:00pm.

About Zonerider
Zonerider has unique patent pending technology that turns ordinary wireless networks into secure revenue producing and intelligent hotspots, our vision is for a connected world where anyone anywhere can contribute their broadband capacity and participate in a global wifi community and earn income from this. Broadband becomes democratized and is proliferated through an open market mechanism of commercial and social driving forces.

We do this with a clever Windows program called The Zonerider Gateway and will work behind any wifi or even wired hardware, servicing the smallest to the largest and complex enterprise networks.

We believe the best way to spread broadband is to allow ordinary people to become broadband stakeholders taking a ground-up approach, and with the power of everyone sharing this vision, broadband will spread through enterprising projects and initiatives in developing countries and become more accessible and mobile in western societies.

About MobiTechFest Europe
MobiTechFest™ is a part of the Investorfest™ series of events produced by Investorfest Media, the leading VC funding accelerator in the mobile space. Through our highly focused training and hands on support, qualified companies are put in front of specially chosen investors at our annual conference series. To date, over 75% of presenting companies have gone on to receive funding, with over $250 million being raised since 2006. For more information, please visit www.investorfest.com