Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers’ locations, travels and Web-browsing habits, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

Verizon offers Precision Market Insights to businesses like malls, stadiums and billboard owners statistics about the activities and backgrounds of cellphone users in particular locations.

Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google and Facebook, reports the WSJ.

The companies say they don’t sell data about individuals but rather about groups of people. Privacy advocates say the law permits them to do so. In 2011, Verizon sent notice to customers saying they may use their data in this way.

Verizon’s data service is being used by the Phoenix Suns. The basketball team has used it to map where people attending its games live in order increase advertising in areas that haven’t met expectations, says Scott Horowitz, a team vice president.

Julia Angwin (twitter) recently led a team of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in analyzing the tracking software and discovered that nearly all of the most commonly visited websites gather information in real time about the behavior of online users. Visiting the top 50 internet websites resulted in more than 3,000 cookies embedded into a “clean” computer. Wikipedia had no cookies. Dictionary.com had the most, with over 250 attached to their computer on a single visit.

Chris Soghoian, a privacy specialist at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the ability to profit from customer data could give wireless carriers an incentive to track customers more precisely than connecting calls requires and to store even more of their Web browsing history.

That could broaden the range of data about individuals’ habits and movements that law enforcement could subpoena, Mr. Soghoian says. “It’s the collection that’s the scary part, not the business use.”

Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, one of the world’s biggest billboard companies, has agreed to conduct a trial of Verizon’s Precision service, reports the WSJ. The service could allow billboard owners to measure how likely someone driving by is to go to the store being advertised. “You’ve got an industry that was historically about eyeballs,” she says. “Now you know more about who those people are and what their behavior looks like.”

The multi-billion dollar data mining industry is taking target marketing into a New Frontier. Every time you swipe a rewards card at a store, that data goes somewhere to get analyzed. Marketplace’s Stacey Vanek-Smith takes a look and visits a data mining company.

Behavioral targeting captures data on websites, the pages they visit, the amount of time they view each page, the links they click on, the searches they make and the things that they interact with.

Cluster analysis takes a statistical approach. Words are tracked in relation to other words. Your consumer habits define your marketing cluster.

Carriers offer far more data mining potential.

Related Dailywireless articles include Mobile TV Shakedown, Behavioral Targeting: Kill/Capture, Behavioral Advertising Opt Out

Verizon Wireless has promised single-mode LTE devices in 2014, and 4G LTE-only smartphones may be included in the line-up by the end of the year.

Single mode phones would use voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and would not require CDMA for voice fall-back. Dual mode phones are compatible with more than one form of data transmission.

Verizon says that its LTE footprint now covers 95 percent of its existing 3G CDMA footprint, so coverage would be nearly the same and devices could be cheaper.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said on the carrier’s last earnings call that it would have devices without 3G CDMA chipsets next year. At CTIA, Verizon Executive Director of Network and Technology Jim Wales confirmed those devices may possibly include single-mode LTE smartphones by the end of the year.

Rival AT&T has also promised a limited launch for VoLTE phones later this year.

Verizon said it won’t be abandoning CDMA entirely, but the company would be incentivized to get rid of its legacy CDMA network so it can reuse the spectrum for other purposes.

A 3G phase-out would likely take years, however, as many customers are still currently on 3G phones. Wales said it will support 3G through the end of the decade and wants to ensure the best customer experience possible. That’s why the first batch of single-mode LTE devices will likely not be smartphones.

Today Verizon’s only LTE-only devices are in the machine-to-machine (M2M) business, tablets and one LTE router. But a Verizon LTE-only phone may not work in other countries.

Redline Communications, a leading provider of wireless backhaul, today unveiled a White Space system for the 470-698 Mhz band.

Redline’s RDL-3000 is a sub-700 MHz network technology, which operates in frequencies between 470 and 698 MHz and leverages the non-line-of-sight network attributes of the UHF spectrum.

Built on Redline’s recently announced Universal Wireless Transport platform, Redline says it can deliver data rates of up to 100 Mbps over the longest range of any currently available white space technologies. In a single FCC channel (6 MHz), it can operate at speeds of up to 27 Mbps and at distances up to 35 miles (approximately 60 km).

In addition to operating in white space frequencies it can also operate in any frequency up to 6 GHz, including key bands – 900 MHz, 1.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, 3.5 GHz, 4.4 GHz and 4.9 GHz and 5.8 GHz.

“Our product combines the greatest capacity with the longest range, and adds the reliability and security that Redline is known for, making our wireless network technology ideal for wide area applications in more remote areas – oilfields, mining operations, public infrastructure monitoring, and for bringing communications to remote communities,” said Bojan Subasic, vice president research and development at Redline Communications.

Microsoft has a live stream today at 10AM Pacific Time. The new Xbox One will launch in markets around the world later this year. The Xbox Wire blog has more features on the new system.

Engadget had a liveblog. A new Kinect motion-sensing camera that goes alongside the new Xbox One game console is expected to ship with every new console at launch. One of the most impressive features is the ability to wake the console with just a voice command. Simply say “Xbox on”. Skype is also coming to Xbox and Kinect.

In terms of specs, the console has an 8-core CPU, USB 3.0, WiFi direct, Blu-ray, 500GB HDD, HDMI input and output, and 802.11n wireless — no mention of the GPU, reports Engadget. Microsoft touts the Xbox One as delivering 8 times the graphic performance of the 360. If you go by raw transistor count, that performance jump would be closer to tenfold, and the 512 MB of memory has been boosted to 8 GB.

Smart Glass is the tablet and smartphone app. With this new generation, your smart device “will behave like it’s born to work with the Xbox One”.

Music, movies, games and saves are all stored in the cloud. Kinect ties it all together. It’ll detect when you pick up your controller, even let you lift the controller to lift a shield in-game.

The Xbox One will replace the venerable Xbox 360. As of September 30, 2012, 70 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.

The Xbox 360 was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005. The original Xbox was released in North America on November 15, 2001, marking Microsoft’s entry into the console gaming industry and selling over one million consoles in the first three weeks.

Microsoft is powering its machine with an x86-based CPU rather than continue with IBM’s PowerPC technology. Sony has also opted to switch from its proprietary Cell processor tech to the x86 architecture.

Sony held its a press conference in February when it revealed details about its upcoming PlayStation 4 – but it has still to show off the console itself. Nintendo launched its next-generation console, the Wii U, last. Both Microsoft and Sony plan follow-up “keynote” announcements at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles on 10 June.

Today, Leap Motion released a video showing what its 3D gesture-control system will be like on a Windows computer. The company has struck partnerships with Asus and Hewlett-Packard, says C/Net. Leap Motion’s $79 gesture control device will ship in July.

With Leap and Windows, the company said in a blog post, “You’ll be able to browse the Web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that’s possible with multitouch inputs — without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements.”

Leap Motion promised to release video of the system running on a Mac soon. It enables developers to use finger tracking in their application. Kinect doesn’t have that BUT it has a lot of other features like skeletal tracking etc.

Both devices use computer vision with various sensors combined with artificial intelligence like machine learning for the object recognition. The Kinect for Windows recognizes skeletons with joints in a distance of 80 – 400 cm or 40 – 300 cm (Near Mode) which means the Kinect is perfect for the mid range distance but not for close PC interaction. The Leap Motion on the other hand is more for the close range and detects hands, fingers and pen-like objects very precisely.

Charlie Ergen, chairman of Dish Network, has made a $2 billion bid for radio frequencies from LightSquared , reports Bloomberg.

Ergen has offered to buy the spectrum even though the Federal Communications Commission has yet to approve its use, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the deal hasn’t been shown to the bankruptcy judge. Reston, Virginia-based LightSquared filed for bankruptcy last year after regulators blocked approval to build its network on concern it would interfere with global-positioning system signals.

LightSquared would apparently use the proceeds to pay off secured debt. The company has until May 31 to accept the offer, which was made May 15, according to Bloomberg.

Dish received permission from the FCC to set up a 2.1 GHz wireless service that could compete with the largest U.S. mobile providers after paying about $3 billion for airwaves from bankrupt satellite companies DBSD North America (ICO) and TerreStar Networks.

Earlier this month FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said he expects LightSquared to eventually win approval to use its airwaves, after a possible swaps of frequencies for cleaner airwaves and tighter enforcement of signal parameters in GPS devices, Genachowski said.

A Dish move putting a $2 billion pricetag on LightSquared’s troubled frequencies could convince Clearwire shareholders that its less-constrained spectrum is worth more than what’s been offered and clinch a rejection of Sprint’s bid says the Denver Business Journal.

Today, however, Sprint Nextel increased its bid for full control of its wireless-network partner Clearwire, seeking to persuade shareholders to reject a competing proposal from Dish. Sprint offered $3.40 a share, up 14 percent from a previous bid of $2.97 a share, the company said today in a statement. Sprint made its original bid for Clearwire after agreeing to a deal with SoftBank in October.

Meanwhile, today Sprint announced the first tri-band Sprint 4G LTE-capable mobile broadband devices, the MiFi 500 LTE by Novatel Wireless, international-capable NETGEAR Zing Mobile Hotspot, and the plug-in NETGEAR 341U USB Modem. All three devices will be able to access LTE in the 800MHz, 1900MHz, and 2.5GHz bands. Pricing and exact availability dates for the three devices will be provided at a later date.

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