Sinclair has filed a petition for review of the FCC’s incentive auction order, in documents filed Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Sinclair’s court challenge joins one filed last month by NAB (CED Sept 10 p5) and numerous petitions for reconsideration of the order filed this week at the FCC. The auction order was adopted “in excess” of FCC authority and violates the Spectrum Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, Sinclair said. The court should hold the order unlawful or enjoin it, Sinclair said. The commission declined to comment.

Qualcomm’s Connected Experiences subsidiary announced Vuforia, a mobile vision platform to enable developers to build augmented reality applications for next-generation digital eyewear. Calling the technology a “major advance in user experience,” Qualcomm said Vuforia lets interactive 3D content be “visually aligned with the underlying world.” Applications include hybrid virtual/augmented reality gaming, shopping and education across enterprise and industrial uses, Qualcomm said Thursday. The Vuforia SDK for Digital Eyewear will be available this fall as a beta for a select group of developers, Qualcomm said. Timing was meant to converge with recent innovations in digital eyewear devices, including the ODG R-7 and the Epson Moverio BT-200, it said. ODG’s R-7, announced Thursday and using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor, is “state-of-the-art” digital eyewear with an integrated one-piece design, a stereoscopic see-through display system and wireless connectivity, Qualcomm said. The R-7 is initially targeted at government and industrial applications, it said.

With the release of its iOS 8 platform, Apple unveiled a new privacy website Wednesday, saying the operating system won’t let the company comply with government national security requests (http://bit.ly/1uJqaWk). “On devices running iOS 8, your personal data ... is placed under the protection of your passcode,” the site said. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.” Apple took another jab at competitors: “We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We don’t ‘monetize’ the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.” Apple’s advertising network, iAd, is only “one very small part of our business,” Cook said, doesn’t use personal data “and you can always just opt out altogether.” Google’s revenue, by contrast, is primarily ad-based (http://bit.ly/1upkim4). Google didn’t comment. Apple has been facing heightened privacy questions since the high-profile hacking of numerous celebrities’ iCloud accounts.

The Telecommunications Industry Association praised the Senate Commerce Committee for its unanimous clearance of the E-Label Act (S-2583) Wednesday. “The bill will enhance the ability of ICT [information and communications technology] manufacturers to innovate and compete while increasing access to device information for consumers,” TIA President Grant Seiffert said in a statement Thursday (http://bit.ly/ZsgDbH). “The current FCC requirement for manufacturers to either etch or print mandatory regulatory markings on the exterior of devices unnecessarily increases costs, limits design options and ineffectively conveys important information to consumers.” The House passed companion legislation earlier this year.

The Internet Association released a video Wednesday featuring House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., with whom the group has disagreed on net neutrality. “We have a lot to showcase in that the Internet allows access to the market that’s frankly worldwide,” Upton said in the video, which also showed business leaders from a small business walking tour in Michigan (http://bit.ly/1uL6lxY). “These businesses may not be in business without the Internet. You don’t need to regulate the Internet -- it’s not a problem as long as it’s not regulated,” Upton says on the video.

Internet access via mobile devices soared 67 percent in the past 12 months, said a report released Thursday by StatCounter, a website analytics company (http://bit.ly/1udvccq). Overall, 64.6 percent of Internet access is from desktops, but mobile device access has grown from 17.1 percent to 28.5 percent in the past 12 months, StatCounter said. Tablet Web access has increased from 4.8 percent to 6.8 percent of traffic, the company said. “Mobile usage has already overtaken desktop in several countries including India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia,” said CEO Aodhan Cullen.

Home Depot’s investigation concluded that information for 56 million payment cards was exposed between April and September, the retailer said Thursday. That puts the breach ahead of the 40 million payment cards that were exposed during Target’s late 2013 breach, which also exposed roughly 70 million customer records that included names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and anxiety this has caused, and want to reassure them that they will not be liable for fraudulent charges,” said Home Depot CEO Frank Blake. Home Depot said it has also completed a point of sale encryption project to heighten security.

The market for power sources used in the Internet of Things will grow from $57 million in 2014 to $590 million in four years and to more than $2.4 billion by 2021, said a report from NanoMarkets (http://bit.ly/1wEkHDu). Products that have had niche success so far -- thin-film and printed batteries, energy harvesting modules, flexible photovoltaic panels and thermoelectric sources -- could generate “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue annually through IoT, it said. Mobile phones currently account for most of the $57.1 million thin-film and printed battery market, but smart cards, semiconductors/computing and wearables are each expected to grow into hundred-million-dollar battery markets by the end of the decade, NanoMarkets said. Other growth opportunities in IoT power include inductive power sources -- used almost exclusively in wireless chargers now -- which approach $5 million in current annual revenue but are forecast to pass $100 million revenue by 2018, jumping to $760 million by 2021, it said. The growth driver will be increased adoption of RFID tags, a segment forecast to hit a $100 million market by 2019 and $583 million by 2021, it said. While energy-harvesting power sources are a $7 million market through 2015, they're expected to spike to $41.5 million in 2016 on “rapid uptake” for sensors and networks, NanoMarkets said. Growth for energy-harvesting devices will pick up, increasing to $161 million by 2018 and $557 million by 2021, it said. Revenue for wearables power sources is forecast to accelerate from “next to nothing” today to $82 million in 2018 and $200 million by 2021, it said.

"Strides” made by Chinese smartphone makers has for Sony caused a “worsening” of the market in mid-priced handsets, spurring Sony to impose an impairment charge of 180 billion yen in its mobile communications business, CEO Kazuo Hirai said in a hastily called news conference Wednesday in Tokyo. The impairment charge means Sony now expects to record a 230-billion-yen net loss for the year ending March 31, vs. the 50-billion-yen loss predicted in its July forecast, the company said. Sony finished last fiscal year with a 128.4-billion-yen net loss. In its smartphone business, Sony now will forego higher unit sales and market share in exchange for profit, Hirai said, without giving specifics. The “overarching strategy” for mobile communications will be to “reduce risk and volatility, and to deliver more stable profits,” Hirai said. Again without giving specifics, Sony will change its smartphone strategy “in certain geographical areas, concentrating on its premium lineup, and reducing the number of models in its mid-range lineup,” Hirai said. A restructuring of Sony Mobile Communications will mean a 15 percent headcount reduction, but more details on that will be released later, he said. Though Sony on Wednesday didn’t offer a regional breakdown of where its smartphone business has hit potholes, the company as recently as mid-June said it would use the digital imaging technology and content “assets” unique to Sony as differentiation tools to build a bigger foothold in the U.S. smartphone business in the fiscal year that runs through March 31 (CED June 10 p4). That followed earlier vows by Hirai to “grow our presence” in the U.S. smartphone market, but to do so in a “prudent” way that won’t jeopardize profit (CED May 23 p1).

The reasons for not requiring DBS and IPTV systems to comply with separable security requirements no longer apply in the current market, said TiVo General Counsel Matt Zinn in a meeting with staff from the FCC chairman’s office, Media Bureau and AT&T/DirecTV deal review team Sept. 11, according to an ex parte filing posted in docket 97-80 Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1o3WCOw). CableCARD rules should remain in place until there’s a successor solution, Zinn told FCC staff.