Exploring New Frontiers Together

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How Important Is Open Source To Mobile Devices?

Open Source software has been around for a long time but really made its name in the public eye with Linux. For some, they think open source is Linux. Despite the name recognition Linux enjoys, it is still a relatively minor part of the overall computer industry, especially on the desktop side. The mobile industry though is shaping up to be quite different, and most of this has come about in just the last few years.

From the end user perspective, there wasn’t really an open source platform for devices. Sure, there was the Yopi device in the late 90’s that was based on Linux, and we can’t forget the famous Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC that had a Linux build floating around for a while. Those and other attempts to use open source to power a device for public consumption though just never took off. Until now that is. Google’s Android is, of course, open source and based on Linux. It is taking off in a big way, to the point that some people claim it will be the king of smartphones in just a few years, passing Windows Mobile, Blackberry and the iPhone.

Whether or not Android can pull that off is irrelevant. It has changed the smartphone landscape probably more than any open source project has changed any other market. HTC and Motorola have jumped in with Android devices in a big way, as have other handset makers.

That isn’t the only open source project though in the mobile device area. Funambol has profiled ten companies, without naming names, that have adopted open source for at least some of their mobile infrastructure. Obviously some are doing so just by selling an Android based device, but others are using cloud sync solutions. Funambol, in fact, is one of the providers of a server side sync solution for mobile devices. You can read the paper to get a feel for what these companies are doing, and why open source is as successful as it is for this area.

It makes you wonder why open source hasn’t taken off as well in other areas, namely the desktop. Linux is a serious contender with real market share on servers and embedded devices like firewalls and routers, but when it comes to the desktop, you’d be hard pressed to find someone running Linux on their PC in your neighborhood. You may find a few that have it installed in a virtual machine or in a multiboot situation, but probably not too many that use it exclusively, or even primarily. Even open source software such as Open Office hasn’t made too many inroads where it counts.

Criminals pick BlackBerries to avoid the police

Police often say organized crime is big business. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before gangsters adopted the device of choice among corporate workaholics: the BlackBerry.

It has become so popular among B.C. gang members that an internal RCMP “threat assessment” on organized crime produced this year devotes an entire section to the device.

“It’s something we’ve seen increasing over the last three to four years,” Staff Sgt. Bruce Imrie, head of the RCMP’s Vancouver Integrated Technological Crime Unit, said in an interview. And that poses a big challenge for law enforcement, because encryption and security features make the devices much harder to wiretap than land lines or cellphones.

“The BlackBerry (server) was created with corporate data security in mind,” states the RCMP report, obtained by The Vancouver Sun through the Access to Information Act. “Until recently, this system was only affordable by companies such as Telus, CIBC, and the like; they are now more affordable and it is easy for individuals to set-up a network.”

Imrie confirmed when police get a warrant for a criminal’s BlackBerry messages it can be difficult to intercept them.

“The use of BlackBerries may allow them to circumvent lawful access … (with) the encryption involved in the transmission,” said Imrie.

Even when police confiscate a criminal’s actual BlackBerry, he said, cracking its password to view the messages stored on it can be a challenge.

BlackBerries are most popular among a gang’s highest-ranking members, said Imrie.

“Your general street-level criminal doing organized shoplifting is not as likely to have a BlackBerry as your high-end drug trafficker,” he said. “(And) depending on the sophistication of the criminal organization, the use of the BlackBerry seems to increase.”

However, as BlackBerries become more affordable, that distinction is starting to blur, he said, with the devices becoming more prevalent among all types of criminals.

RCMP Insp. Gary Shinkaruk, head of biker gang investigations in B.C., said BlackBerries are “extremely common” among the criminals his unit investigates.

“For a lot of groups, it’s standard practice,” he said.

“Every message that is sent via a BlackBerry is broken up into 2Kb (kilobyte) packets of information, each of which is given a 256-bit key by the BlackBerry server,” said Totzke. “That means to release the contents of a 10Kb e-mail, a person would have to crack five separate keys, and each one would take about as long as it would for the sun to burn out – billion of years.”

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Flash coming, but not to the iPhone…. will it be missed?

Please click for the original article in the Washington Post here.

Adobe Pushes for a Flash-ier Mobile Web The Web browsers on such smartphones as Apple’s iPhone, devices running Google’s Android software and the Palm Pre (all based on the same open-source code framework) do an outstanding job of presenting full-sized Web pages, with one exception — displaying most Flash interactive content. You can watch YouTube video clips in separate applications, but that’s about it.

This morning, Flash developer Adobe Systems Inc. announced plans to change that — the upcoming 10.1 version of the Flash player will ship not just for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but also for such mobile-phone platforms as Android, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, Palm’s webOS, and Nokia’s Symbian. This new release, unlike the Flash Lite software available on some phones today, shouldn’t be limited to running special, simplified Flash animations. San Jose-based Adobe has also set up an Open Screen Project initiative with phone software and hardware vendors, Flash developers and media companies “to enable the delivery of rich multiscreen experiences built on a consistent runtime environment for open web browsing and standalone applications.”

Apple, however, is not joining Adobe in this effort. It’s never supported Flash on the iPhone, objecting to the Flash player’s processing and memory requirements, and it counsels Web developers looking to create iPhone-friendly sites to provide interactive features through existing, open Web standards instead of Flash. Will the lack of Flash start to set back the iPhone? It hasn’t so far, and I’m not sure that Flash 10.1 will change that. On the desktop, the Flash plug-in can gum up a browser faster than any other piece of Web content (especially, it seems, on a Mac), is frequently targeted by malware writers and can also be a pain to keep up to date. I don’t need a mobile version if it will inherit those traits. Flash has also enabled some of the Web’s most annoying, if not outright abusive, content: the animated site introductions that fill your browser’s screen and play an unwanted soundtrack when you only wanted to see a restaurant’s menu or learn about the new apartment building going up down the street. (Note: Please don’t click the last link with your computer’s speakers turned up at work.) Are you anxious to bring Flash to the mobile Web, even if it means being subjected to some over-eager Web coder’s song-and-dance routine? Or would you rather do without it on the go, even if that means having to switch to a “real” computer to use some Web sites’ features?

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Mobile broadband is overtaking fixed line connections

More people are using cell phones and other portable devices for high-speed Web access than are signing up for fixed line subscriptions to the Net, according to U.N. figures published Tuesday. Mobile broadband subscriptions are expected to reach 600 million, leapfrogging the estimated 500 million fixed line subscriptions by the end of this year, the International Telecommunication Union said.

“There was a 50 percent increase in mobile broadband subscriptions just over the past year,” said Susan Teltscher of ITU’s statistical bureau. The agency expects growth to continue at this rate for several years, she said.

Most mobile broadband connections are still considerably slower than fixed line alternatives, and offer a more limited range of services at a higher price. Experts say that competitive advantage could soon tilt in mobile’s favour, too. Industry representatives at ITU’s Telecom World trade show in Geneva this week are touting two next-generation technologies as potential nails in the coffin for fixed-line broadband.

The first is LTE, or long-term evolution, which cell phone companies are considering as the replacement for 3G some years down the line. In the other corner is WiMax, a standard being pushed by the computer industry that works like Wi-Fi but over much greater distances.

The biggest winners from the emergence of mobile broadband are likely to be poor countries. Fixed-line phones are still scarce in the developing world, forcing those who want high-speed data services to resort to mobile technology. Voice-only mobile subscriptions already outstrip the number of regular phone connections in most poor countries: almost seven in 10 people around the world now have a cell phone subscription of some kind, the ITU report found.

Meanwhile, fixed line telephone subscriptions continue to decline and are expected to drop to about 1.1 billion – less than one for every five people on the planet – this year, the report said.

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Why consumers are not yet buying tablets.

Rafe Needleman from Cnet gave his views of the reasons why tablet computers where unsuccessful until now. And what problems will Apple be facing? For the original article please click here.

Rumors have it Apple is a month away from announcing a tablet computer. Another tablet, the Crunchpad, is also due for imminent release. These and other fine keyboardless computers get great play on gadget blogs, but in the real world, I believe this whole category is a nonstarter. Why we keep waiting for the killer tablet computer is beyond me. Few people really want one, especially at the prices that they will have to sell for.

Tablet computers–elegant slates that you operate with a touch screen–are attractive if you’re a sci-fi fan. There’s something functionally beautiful about a computer that’s all screen and nothing else, and where your interaction is directly through that screen, not an intermediary like a keyboard or mouse. And the concept works great on smartphones.

But what you can do with a screen-only computer gets really limited when you expand the device beyond pocket size. There are two big limitations. First, you need a keyboard for doing real work. At least most people do. Perhaps a generation of kids will grow up that are as speedy on a virtual keyboard as they are on a real one, but until then anyone who does more than write quick e-mails and Twitter messages on a computer will want to take a keyboard with them. And typing on the screen, even if you can do it, is an ergo disaster. Either you have to keep your hands up in the air (if the computer is mounted vertically in front of you) or you have to hunch over your screen to see it. Maybe it’s the national chiropractors association that’s pushing this form factor.

While a tablet may be great for browsing the Web and viewing media, it’s too big to replace a phone and too limited to carry around as a work computer. People will need their keyboarded Netbooks and notebooks for real work. Tablets, like other tweener devices, ultramobile PCs and Netbooks, are accessories to real computers. You can’t do enough on them to justify the price, although they’re sure nice to have if you have extra money for a gizmo that sits between your big computer and your phone, both in size and function.

So as an accessory, tablets are too expensive. If Apple releases a tablet in the rumored $700 to $800 price range, it will die. Not because people won’t love it and lust for it, but because they won’t be able to justify it.

Who’s Watching Online Video, and What They’re Watching

Online-video viewing has really reached critical mass, as more than 75% of all U.S. internet users watch online videos at least every now and then; almost 45% are watching every week and 12% view them daily.

Meanwhile, frequent online-video viewing extends across all demos. Although males 18-to-24 are the heaviest online-video viewers with 70% viewing at least weekly, one third of all 55-to-64-year-olds are also weekly viewers. But it’s not just about who is watching — it’s also what they’re watching. A study done for Metacafe found that the top 10 types of online video, according to consumers, range from user-generated videos, to news, weather, movie clips, etc.

What’s notable is that eight of the top 10 most-popular video genres are short form. It turns out the small screen and shorter length can be just as compelling. More than a third (37%) of short-form video viewers find that content equally or more entertaining than full-length shows on their TV set. And while 9% of online-video viewers say they watch more TV live on their TV set due to watching online video, 20% say they are watching less live TV on their set due to online video viewing.

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Twitter & Facebook traffic explodes thanks to mobile users

What is the effect mobile users have on social network sites. The Australian Herald Sun tells the following story. For the original article please click here.

The number of mobile phone users accessing the popular social networking websites Twitter and Facebook has exploded. Traffic on Twitter, which allows users to post short messages or “tweets” about their every move, has soared 1382 per cent worldwide in the past year. The number of Facebook users connecting with friends and posting updates about their status on mobiles has ballooned to more than 65 million people a month – and it’s growing, the Herald Sun reports. Such is the global love affair with social networking via the mobile internet, telecommunications experts and mobile phone companies believe the phenomena is changing the way we communicate on the run.

Facebook’s director of mobile, Henri Moissinac, said that since the website’s launch in 2004, Facebook membership had soared to more than 250 million. “Fifty per cent of them connect every day. That’s more than five billion minutes spent on Facebook every day,” Mr Moissinac said at a recent mobile phone conference in Stuttgart.

However, parents need to be aware that it is not safe.

Mobile Users the hardest to market, iPhone user’s especially

An online research from the Chitika Advertising network & research company shows that mobile Internet users are significantly less likely to click on an advertisement as traditional users. Although they used only the data from their own advertisement network and not is shown which countries where targeted, the results are nonetheless remarkable. Click here for the original article.

Based on a sample of 92 million impressions, the Chitika study shows that mobile users are approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as non-mobile users.

Of the 92 million impressions cited in the study, approximately 1.3 million (1.5%) came from mobile browsing. While non-mobile held steady with a 0.83% clickthrough rate, mobile as a whole pulled a mere 0.48% – just over half of the average. While the recent growth in ’smartphones’ has sparked a renewed interest in mobile advertising, it appears given the numbers that mobile users are not receptive to advertising – a phenomenon that is not surprising, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions. Mobile vs. Non-Mobile Ad CTR Of the five major smartphone operating systems – Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Palm OS, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry – iPhone ranked the worst for clickthrough rate at a dismal 0.30%. iPhone also accounted for the bulk of mobile hits, at 66%. The group which clicked on ads the most is the “Other” group, comprised mainly of BlackBerry users and a small handful of other phone operating systems (including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC). Clickthrough Rate by OSMobile Internet Browsing The clickthrough rates are certainly lower than expected, given the industry’s general consensus that mobile users are more likely to click ads. However, it must be taken into consideration that this is a comparison of the same ads on different media.

The ads displayed on mobile devices are the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile, rather than comparing standard online advertising with mobile-oriented ads. While there are side issues to consider in the mobile advertising market – accidental clicks being more relevant than in non-mobile ad serving – it appears that mobile Internet users are disinterested in advertising at an extremely high rate, and iPhone users are leading the charge.

EC, Casio, Hitachi merging mobile phone businesses

An interesting press release in The  Star about the merge of mobile phone manufacturers in Japan.

For the original article, please click here.

Japanese electronics makers NEC Corp., Casio Computer Co. and Hitachi said Monday they will combine their mobile phone handset-manufacturing operations by April next year in a bid to boost their competitiveness at home and abroad. The three companies are relatively small players in the domestic market for handsets, which is saturated and dominated by Japanese manufacturers, although imports like the iPhone have scored some success in recent years. Under the move, NEC will join Casio and Hitachi’s mobile joint venture set up in 2004.

The new business, capitalized initially at 1 billion yen (US$11 million) will be 66 percent owned by NEC, 17.34 percent by Casio and 16.66 by Hitachi. By June 2010, that will be raised to 5 billion yen (US$55 million), with NEC owning a 70.74 percent stake, Casio 20 percent and Hitachi 9.26 percent. The three companies will share their technology and resources to lower development costs and boost their competitiveness and brands, they said. Japanese makers have largely failed in selling handsets overseas, partly because the mobile network technology in Japan is different from U.S. and European systems. Mobile phones here also tend to be loaded with quirky features that aren’t likely to be popular abroad.

The future of Windows Mobile; Is there any?

This month, yet another big handset maker (Sony Ericsson) decided not to continue further with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile as the standard operating system for their handsets. Clearly, the once dominant operating system for smart phones as fallen behind on the competition. Paul Korzeniowski from the site Bmighty.com gives an excellent analysis of the situation. For the original article click here.

A collective yawn was heard when Microsoft announced the upcoming delivery of the latest version of its Windows Mobile operating system. Call it a hunch, but I don’t expect to see long lines of potential users or reporters interviewing excited customers when the new devices powered by Windows Mobile 6.5 hit store shelves next month. Microsoft has clearly fallen behind competitors, so businesses may want to pause before buying more Windows handsets.

Microsoft stated that the latest release features a new operating system V. 6.5, which includes a redesigned Internet Explorer Mobile browser, a new engine, and built-in Adobe Flash Lite support.

Drab And Ho-Hum

In sum, the new release seems pretty drab compared to recent announcements from competitors such as Apple and Google. Microsoft is clearly lagging the market leaders in “Buzz” factor. The company is finally ready to open up its Windows Marketplace, a centralized online store where people can download applications directly to their phones, but it too looks like a cheap imitation of Apple’s iTunes-based App Store.

The timing of the ho-hum feature set is troubling because Microsoft needs a boost in the highly competitive handset market. With about 15% to 20% market share, Microsoft had represented a serious threat to Nokia’s market dominance. But recently, Redmond has been losing steam and market share. The company claimed that it would increase unit shipments from 11 million in fiscal 2007 to 20 million in fiscal 2008. However, the vendor fell 10% short of that goal and is in danger of falling behind RIM and even Apple whose new product launches are generating considerable buzz. And coming up along the rail is Google’s Android OS, which is off to a good start in the handset space.