Silicon Valley’s growing alter ego as Smartphone Valley has been boosted by Ericsson’s announcement today that it is opening a research centre in San Jose.

Its chief technology strategist, the 30-year company veteran Jan Uddenfeldt, will also move from Sweden to the Valley.

The initiative follows Nokia’s December decision to name its first non-Finn chief technology officer - Bob Iannucci - and base him in Palo Alto. The American headed its Nokia Research Center there, opened in 2006.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, Palm’s presence, a host of emerging telecoms start-ups and the move of PC applications to mobile phones has made it essential for industry leaders to take a stake in Valley innovation.

Ericsson, whose focus is network infrastructure, acquired the Valley’s Redback Networks and its IP routing technology in 2006 for $1.9bn and paid $1.4bn a year ago for Norway’s Tandberg Television, which has IPTV assets. It also acquired Santa Clara-based broadband equipment maker Entrisphere last year.

Bert Nordberg, Ericsson’s most senior North American executive as chairman of Redback and Entrisphere, moved to San Jose three months ago.

He told me the plan was to open a campus there for all of its acquired companies as well as core Ericsson staff. Its 1,000 employees in the Valley will move in this autumn and the centre has been designed for 1,500.

“We think it’s going to be manned by experts on mobile coming from other companies and within Ericsson, then some acquisitions and new hires,” he said.

“With the [fourth-generation Long Term Evolution] LTE technology coming and speeds of up to 100 megabits a second over the network, anything is possible. The PC-centric world is in North America and that’s why we believe a lot of the future will start here. We will have a base here in the Valley for building an LTE ecosystem.”

Vuze, the online video service that uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute its content, has come up with hard data suggesting “bandwidth throttling” is more widespread than previously thought.

Some internet service providers (ISPs) have not taken kindly to surges in P2P traffic on their network, with the file exchanges consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Although consumers can argue they have paid for unlimited bandwidth with their monthly subscriptions, companies such as Comcast have used techniques that disrupt P2P traffic and have become the subject of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission in the US.

Vuze made available a software plug-in to users in January that looks for “reset packets”, used to interrupt a network connection, and sends such information back to Vuze for collation.

Today it released its initial findings based on results from 8,000 users around the world.

Comcast tops the table, with one of its networks interrupting 24 per cent of connections. Ten other Comcast networks figure in the top 20. Canada’s Cogeco is fourth with a 19 per cent interruption rate and others with high rates include  Emirates Internet, Cablevision,  BellSouth, AOL and Tiscali UK.

For almost-interruption-free file downloads, the best bet seems to be Telecom Italia France with a 2.5 per cent rate.

Vuze’s conclusion: “We believe that there is sufficient data to suggest that network management practices that ‘throttle’ internet traffic are widespread.”

The company has written to Cablevision, Cogeco, BellSouth (now owned by AT&T) and AOL asking them to “clarify their broadband management practices in the interest of transparency for consumers.”

No one should be nodding off when the Federal Communications Commission holds a hearing at Stanford University next month into “broadband network management practices.”

Comcast can expect to hear some strong criticisms of its “practices” from technologists and Web activists in the heart of Silicon Valley with the FCC just announcing that a second “field hearing” is needed on the subject.

At the first, at Harvard University on the East coast last month, the cable operator and internet service provider paid people on the street to take up seats, meaning many members of the public who might have wanted to have a say on its practices were kept out of the packed hall.

Comcast said the seat-fillers were holding places for their own staff arriving later, but a Harvard administrator said they remained in their places. Some even fell asleep (pictured) during the hearing.

Comcast is the subject of complaints from online video companies such as Vuze and activists Public Knowledge and Free Press of the SavetheInternet.com coalition. They claim it is blocking peer-to-peer traffic and limiting the delivery of rival video-on-demand services on its network.

Comcast says it is managing its network and P2P traffic may be less timely.

Free Press has welcomed the new hearing: “The threat posed by would-be gatekeepers like Comcast is very real and getting worse,” said Josh Silver, executive director.

“Open internet policies are urgently needed.”

After the acclamation, for Apple opening up its iPhone to outside applications, comes the anxiety.

Developers were expressing concern today at what they saw as a poorly-worded email from Apple that could be read as suggesting many were being left out of the iPhone developer programme for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum on Thursday, I listened as Christopher Allen of iphonewebdev.com reeled off a long list of restrictions by Apple on what it will let developers create for the iPhone.

They included no applications that have executable code, which he said ruled out Java and Flash applications. The guidelines also required an application to terminate for an incoming phone call, making it an unsatisfactory experience for users of something like an instant-messaging client. He speculated on whether developers could include non-Apple media codecs such as DivX and he said it was unclear whether there would be access to the iPhone’s Bluetooth wireless capabilities.

On the positive side, there was Kleiner Perkins’ $100m fund for developers, a 70-30 revenue split between developers and Apple, the iPod touch providing an additional market and Apple’s habit of releasing quarterly upgrades to its firmware, compared to the mobile industry’s attitude of expecting users just to buy a new phone for fresh capabilities.

In nine months, the iPhone has grabbed 28 per cent of the US smartphone market and it is the vehicle for 71 per cent of all US mobile internet usage, he said.

Plenty of reasons then for high anxiety as well as anticipation about getting inside and exploiting this ground-breaking device.

One man clearly immune to Steve Jobs’ famed "reality distortion field" is Ad Scheepbouwer, straight-talking CEO of KPN, the Dutch telecoms company. He decided that his iPhone was "pretty useless" so he gave it to his 20-year-old daughter. She didn’t rate it either. "She’s given it to her boyfriend," Mr Scheepbouwer told the FT. "He’s very happy with it, but it’s been three days so we’ll see how it ends."

Given that the iPhone isn’t yet officially available in the Netherlands (or any other country besides the US, UK, France and Germany) that’s surprisingly candid. KPN would like to sell the phone on the Dutch market and Apple has so far chosen to sell the iPhone tied to just one mobile operator in each country. But it probably also reflects what some pundits have said all along: Europeans generally expect to pay less and get more from their phones. There is some evidence for that with the news last month that the iPhone missed its sales target in the UK, where 02 has responded with better value calling plans.

Bring on the iPhone 2.0?

The Demo technology conference underway in Desert Springs, California always throws up a few standout start-ups – along with lots of ‘me-toos.’ Among the standouts this time around were a couple of communications start-ups with practical and interesting products and services that have the potential to disrupt.

My favourite was Toktumi (pronounced talk-to-me), whose product (also called Toktumi) provides small and home office businesses with a full-functioned PC-based office phone system at really low cost. Toktumi – described by one of my colleagues here as ‘Skype for grown-ups” – is actually a hosted PBX (private branch exchange) service running on the company’s servers in San Francisco.

“There are 40m people working in small businesses with one to nine employees, half of who work out of their homes,” says Peter Sisson, CEO and founder. “This market segment has been ignored by by most providers .”

The basic Toktumi software is a free download and runs on virtually any PC turning it into a powerful yet simple to operate office system complete with call transfer, voicemail, conferencing and auto attendant in less than five minutes. The software requires no special hardware, but helpfully Toktumi also offers an adapter that enables users to plug any standard analogue desktop phone into a USB port completing the setup.

The free version of the service comes with a free phone number (likely to be an out-of-the-way rural area code so don’t expect a 415 or 212 number) voicemail and free calling and conferencing with other Toktumi customers worldwide. For $13-a-month and 2-cents a minute, users can upgrade to a premium version that allows outbound calls to regular phones worldwide and allows customers to select their phone number or port their current POTS (plain old telephone service) number over to Toktumi.

None of this functionality is really new, but the way Toktumi puts the PC at the centre of the office phone system is unique. There is also one really cool feature called ‘Search Dialing’ which enables users to place calls from a PC simply by typing in the name of the person, company or category of company you want to call. Toktumi then trawls through your PC contact book and then the web to find the number you are looking for and presents them on screen ready to click and dial.

The Toktumi service is currently available as an invitation-only beta form but Sisson hopes to make it generally available shortly. In the meantime, he notes, about half of those signing up for the beta are overseas.

The other comms company that caught my attention at Demo was Ribbit which describes itself as “Silicon Valley’s first phone company.” Ribbit’s Amphibian technology platform is designed to bridge the gap between a mobile phone and an internet-connected PC.

Among its features, Amphibian enables users to manage mobile voicemail as though it is email on your computer and on your mobile phone, convert voicemail into text to make voice messages shareable and searchable, and make mobile calls from any browser or web page - such as iGoogle, Facebook et al. The interface is smooth and polished and because Ribbit’s APIs (application program interfaces) are open, the technology is already attracting a host of cool third-party add-ons.

Ribbit’s claims to be Silicon Valley’s first phone company may be a bit of a stretch, but the start-up’s software could help a thousand internet phone companies bloom from virtual handset makers to vertical service providers.

Early examples include the chalkboard soft-phone, pictured left, developed by London design agency, Square Circle, and the Ribbit for Salesforce application that makes voice an object and provides speech-to-text transcriptions within a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Ribbit should be a godsend to developers. It’s a platform that acts as a “SmartSwitch”, handling all the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony and allowing developers to master just a few commands in Flash to introduce voice to any web page or web application.

It promises a complete matrix of connections, from mobile phones ringing up desktop widgets to an instant-messaging window calling a fixed-line phone.

Ribbit, which gets its official launch today, offers more possibilities and greater personalisation than the telephony buttons that services such as Skype and Jajah can add to web pages.

It says it can justify its Silicon Valley phone company tag with the processes, business model and innovations it is introducing.

Ribbit’s platform approach means it will offer services such as billing, customer support and quality-of-service assurance, just like a regular phone company, but it will leave it to a growing developer community to come up with applications for its technology.

The company plans a revenue-share arrangement with developers, but it is also proving it can make money from its own reference applications – the Salesforce app is worth $29 per month per user.

The Mountain View-based company is VC-funded by Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures and has recruited 600 developers since the developer community was launched in August.

New applications are being launched every week. “The bulk have been enterprise applications, but we think it will open up for consumer ones, when we provide a [reference] application,” says Crick Waters, vice president of business development.

Coolest consumer app to date is the virtual iPhone, powered by Adobe’s AIR technology, which sits on your desktop and acts just like the real thing, minus the roaming charges.

Nokia is engaged in close combat with the internet’s leading companies as their incursions increase into its domain of the cellphone.

It gave a frosty reception on Monday to Google’s Android mobile phone software platform, which will rival the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system.

Then there was a strong riposte on Wednesday with the announcement that its internet portal Ovi will be included by Vodafone on its high-end handsets.

The deal with the world’s biggest mobile operator by revenue is a tangible win for the company compared to the vague promise of the Open Handset Alliance to Google.

Following on from a similar deal with Telefonica last month, it shows operators are willing to give a place to the handset maker’s internet services alongside their own content and services.

Smaller battles are also being won and lost.

Google acquired a company from under Nokia’s nose last month when it bought Jaiku, an Helsinki-based rival to the Twitter mobile microblogging service.

Jaiku was founded by ex-Nokia employees and the leading handset maker had adopted its technology, so it would have made a natural acquisition for a company looking for Web 2.0 smarts.

It already has Mosh, of course – a three-month-old service developed in-house that allows its members to upload and share content such as photos, videos, ringtones and games.

Mosh, short for mobilise and share, is proof that Nokia can think outside the box, or handset. It was thought up a year ago by Americans and Finns locked up in a hotel outside Helsinki for a month. “We were told to come up with something game-changing,” says George Linardos, Director of Experience, Forum Nokia.

So far, it has attracted more than 6m downloads of applications and content since its launch on August 9 and works on all Web-enabled devices.

The service will launch Seek next month, allowing users to request customised content such as a specific video or detailed map of an area for their phone.

With Mosh, Nokia beat another internet company, at least to the name. Legal letters were exchanged when Yahoo’s new social network Mash was under development with the title Mosh.

Nokia pointed out it got there first, and a mishmash over Mosh was avoided.

"You’ve Got Mail!" is the familiar AOL alert that presumably inspired the name GotVoice, a service that puts voicemails into a friendlier email-inbox format.

The Seattle-based company has introduced two new innovations in the past month to give it a leading position in a pack of services now available that convert voicemails to text, including those of SpinVox, SimulScribe, Callwave and Jott.

 “There’s been a lot of things you can’t do with voicemail – you can’t forward or prioritise it, for example,” Curt Blake, chief executive, told me.

His company was formed in 2003 by former Microsoft, RealNetworks and AT&T employees. The first version of its service made its début in March, allowing users to receive, play, manage and store all of their cell phone and home phone voice mail in their inbox or through a web page.

In the second quarter, the ability to consolidate all voice mail, including that received through an office switchboard, was added and an interface for smart phones was introduced.

In September, it introduced voice mails being transcribed to text and sent as a text message to a phone or as an email to an inbox. It also added avatars, from President Bush to a selection of animals, which lip-sync to voice mails as users play them.

GotVoice allows two numbers to be consolidated on its service for free and has a $9.95 a month premium package for three or more. It expects to “white-label” its product for carriers and cable companies that offer phone services.

Users may particularly enjoy the feature that allows them to record and send a voice mail themselves with added background noises, making it sound as if they are in the middle of a jungle trek, standing in a club or sunbathing on the beach.

So those who queued for days for an iPhone before its launch on June 29 have now been made to look double doofuses by Apple.

Not only did they wait needlessly when there were plentiful supplies, but a price cut just 10 weeks later means they paid $200 more than necessary.

For those that didn’t really want the phone, but the elements that made it the “best iPod ever” ( Steve Jobs’ description), it’s even worse. They could have saved $300 and got the new 8Gb iPod touch for $299.

The touch looks a winner with its touch-screen and wi-fi that brings internet browsing to a media player.

The new nano also sees Apple finally get it right with its most popular model – it can now play videos, sophisticated games, has more storage, a much better display, a full-metal jacket, better interface, cooler colours and 24-hour battery life for playing music.

The original iPod was renamed the “classic” today, but it is looking more like the “prehistoric” squeezed between the nano and the touch. The only thing in its favour seems to be storage – 160Gb for $349. Jobs emphasised you could store 40,000 songs on it, but who has 40,000 they need to carry around with them?

The only other disappointment in the presentation was the lack of any content announcements – the anticipated availability of the Beatles catalogue failed to materialise.

There were also no new video deals to accompany the nano’s empowerment, only a bitch from Jobs about his row with NBC, which is moving its content to Amazon.

Making an individual ringtone for his iPhone out of John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance”, he said: “That’s for when NBC calls.”