First News Briefs: HPE and 5G Lab Germany, Samsung and Amazon, YouGov BrandIndex, TrendForce

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a collaboration with the 5G Lab Germany, a consortium of researchers focused on delivering key technologies to enable 5G wireless networks. Through this collaboration, HPE and the 5G Lab will research the impacts of 5G wireless networks combined with HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems on the telecommunications and mobile industries. Additionally, Edgeline systems will be deployed at the network edge to enable the next generation of applications to take advantage of 5G network performance.

The HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems feature integration of the PXIe instrumentation standard in partnership with National Instruments. 5G capabilities, coupled with Edgeline systems, provide an integrated communication and compute platform to empower 5G applications, HPE said.

“Without addressing 5G network needs, the advances in automation for mobile applications would not be possible for the telecommunications industry,”  Gerhardt Fettweis, Vodafone chair professor at the  Technische Universiät of Dresden, commented. “HPE and 5G Lab Germany are working to deliver the necessary network upgrades for the next generation of mobility, enabling the pathway towards the Tactile Internet.”

Samsung has teamed up with Amazon to make its Bixby assistant even smarter. Galaxy S8 customers will now be able to use Bixby and their phone’s camera to conduct a visual search for Amazon products.

With the new capability, users will be able to open the camera on their S8, go into Bixby mode, point the camera at a product or barcode, and tap the shopping cart underneath the image. The tap will activate Amazon’s visual search technology to hunt down results from Amazon’s catalogue of products. Customers will then have the option to view product reviews, browse related products, or purchase an item with one click.

Amazon’s visual search feature was originally launched in the Amazon app in 2009. The partnership with Samsung marks the first time customers will have access to the feature outside the Amazon app through a third party.

Speaking of Samsung and the S8, YouGov BrandIndex noted this week that Samsung’s brand reputation hasn’t yet fully recovered from the Note 7 disaster.

On a scale of -100 to +100, the firm said Samsung’s “Buzz score” hovered around +21 to +23 before the Note 7 incident. As a result of the debacle in the fall, that figure plunged to -27 and had only climbed back to a score of +15 by Christmas, YouGov BrandIndex noted. While the launch of the S8 last month helped – bringing its score to +19 – YouGov BrandIndex said Samsung is currently three to six points short of where it was before the Note 7 crisis.

And on one last tangentially related note, TrendForce predicted the infrared sensor module market will hit $145 million this year as more companies (like Samsung and rival Apple) adopt 3D sensing technology for facial recognition applications.