News in Brief: Motorola, NTT, Sprint, Telenor, Rinspeed, Finjan, Vodafone NZ, Facebook

Motorola expects the performance of its troubled mobile phone business to start improving in the second quarter, joint CEO Greg Brown told the Financial Times .

NTT Communications will formally open its new Hong Kong data center on March 24.  The five-story center, initially built out at 138,000 square feet, has been in service for a year.

Chinese and Indian nationals are abandoning US hi-tech jobs to return home, a report due Tuesday is expected to reveal. An estimated 100,000 are forecast to leave the US in the next five years, compared with 50,000 over the last 20 years.

Embattled US operator Sprint is predicting wireless revenue will decline by 11% in 2009 if the company continues to lose customers at the current rate. Sprint lost 1.3 million customers in Q4.

Telenor has rejected a demand from the music industry body IFPI to block access to the Swedish P2P website, The Pirate Bay. There was no legal basis for ISPs to control or assess content downloaded by users, Telenor said.

Swiss design firm Rinspeed will be showing a prototype of a new vehicle, iChange, at the Geneva motor show which opens on Thursday.

An Australian computer scientist has created a working version of the famous shoe phone from 60s TV series Get Smart using a disassembled Motorola V620.

Cybercrime in Japan grew by 15.5% last year, and will grow even faster in 2009, says a new report from Japanese security vendor Finjan.

Vodafone NZ has contracted Nokia Siemens Networks to expand its 3G coverage to 97% of the population using its "green" flexi base stations.

Frost & Sullivan is expecting the global IPTV market to grow at a CAGR of less than 15%,  revising its forecast downward from 29%.

Facebook has been targeted by five separate phishing attacks in the past seven days, the BBC said.

Singapore has the lowest telecom prices in the world as a proportion of income - with Hong Kong fifth and Taiwan seventh - according to the ITU's latest ICT development index. No other Asian market made the top 20 in a list of 154.

The ITU report found that most developed countries pay between 0-3% of their gross national income (GNI) on telecom services. By contrast, developing countries typically pay around 25%, and those in the bottom 25 pay up to 72%.

The cost of mobile services is lowest in Hong Kong, followed by Denmark and Singapore. By contrast, fixed services are cheapest in Iran, followed by Hong Kong and the UAE.

Intel and TSMC have partnered to co-develop system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for handsets and MIDs.

Under the agreement, Intel will port its Atom CPU cores to TSMC's technology platform, including processes, libraries and design flows. The companies will also collaborate on the development of IP infrastructure.

 

It is the first time that the chip giant has outsourced the manufacturing of its own microprocessors. TSMC operates the world's largest contract chip plants.

Optus joins the ranks of several smaller telcos in Australia offering naked DSL (that is, without a voice landline service). Recent results from Telstra show significant declines in local, national and international voice revenues and minutes, along with a consistent decline in PSTN services in operation over the past three years.

The first naked DSL plan in Australia was launched in November 2007 by iiNet, Australia's third-largest Internet service provider.