Looking back at 2011, we could call it subtitle it as The Year Of Android Malware. It started with DroidDream and reports have been issued all year that have shown exponential growth in Android malware. It is not getting any better. If Juniper's research can be believed, it is getting much worse.
Juniper says there has been a 472% rise in Android malware samples since July 2011. Juniper says that almost all of the Android malware contains code for root access that will force the device to communicate with a command-and-control server and download additional instructions. 55% of Android malware acts as spyware and the rise of "SMS Trojans" has become a significant problem.
Netflix today announced a new user interface for all Android tablets, including both the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook. The interface displays twice as many movies to place in the user queue and is generally a better looking app than it was before. Yet, does the new UI solve some of Netflix's problems with search and discovery on tablet devices?
Research firm Gartner has come out with its third quarter global mobile sales numbers and overall, the industry grew 5.6% from the same period last year. About 440.5 million cellphones were sold, with 115 million of those being of the smart variety, a 42% growth rate from Q3 2010 but only 7% growth from Q2 2011. The feature phone market is being buoyed by emerging markets while most of the smartphone growth was in Russia and China. Many other markets have stalled in smartphone growth.
Gartner says the slowdown of smartphone growth in markets such as the United States and Western Europe was due to consumers waiting for flagship devices to be released, such as the newest iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Rezound. Nokia is still No. 1 in the world in overall sales while another study shows that the best selling single devices in the U.S. are Apple's variety of iPhones.
According to a new study from Forrester Research, 5% of U.S. adults now scan 2D bar codes - including QR codes - with their smartphones, up from 1% in 2010. Compared to consumer adoption, the development of 2D bar code reading software has grown much faster, while business adoption of the codes as a strategy has grown much slower.
"Too few eBusiness professionals use best practices to offer consumers good experiences once they've scanned a bar code," writes author Julie Ask. The study's conclusion is that consumer habits are driven by ubiquity and ease of access; just like with traditional 1D bar codes, consumers will get used to them the more prevalent they are. That means it's up to businesses to use QR codes wisely while not being afraid to keep up with consumers' interest in new technologies.
Should you be concerned about mobile malware? There are reports of new bugs and exploitations every month and there is a general rising wariness among mobile consumers that their phones could be the target of spammers and malicious hackers. Make no mistake, the bad guys want access to your phone. It it really a problem if you exercise common sense?
Security in almost all of its forms comes down to common sense. If you practice common sense, you can thwart almost all of the would-be attempts to gain access to your personal life, be it your home, apartment, PC or smartphone. Security company McAfee came out with five common sense precautions for mobile users to keep their users safe. We have a few of our own. Check them out below.
MasterCard, the longtime credit card and payments processor, wants to reposition itself as a technology company. Throughout the latter half of 2011, it has been pushing hard on the technosphere to make sure that journalists and bloggers know the company is doing some cool stuff around payments research and the cutting edge of technology, like NFC, audio signals and QR codes that can lead to purchases through smartphones.
It now comes as no surprise that MasterCard has announced a partnership with Intel on a multi-year strategic partnership that is intended to enhance the security and payment experience for digital commerce. These are two titans in the tech and financial industries and shows one of the first steps of these two industries merging in the future.
Location-based social networks were one of the top five trends of 2010. Nowadays, location is baked into pretty much everything that developers do. Mobile and social apps are location-enhanced, not location-based. You still can, however, "check in" somewhere using geosocial networks Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. Location-based services like Yelp utilizes the geographic position of your mobile device to figure out what's nearby.
Wondering who's actively using geosocial and location-based services? Take a look at this handy infographic after the jump.
Whenever people think of near field communications, they think of mobile payments. Your phone becomes your wallet and spending money becomes as easy as tap, tap, tapping all day. Well, the era of your tap-able digital wallet is not here yet. It may never come. But that does not mean there are not some very interesting uses of NFC coming down the pipeline.
For instance, there was a Coca-Cola vending machine at ad:tech this week that was tied to Google Wallet. Tap, tap, tap away and take a Diet Coke Break. At Nokia World there as a gate that could be opened with a tap from your phone. A developer is working on NFC solutions to help his father who has Alzheimer's. NFC could be great as a monetary transfer solution, but there is so much more.
AnchorFree, the company that makes the popular Hotspot Shield application that secures mobile browsing activity, is bringing the app to iOS. Hotspot shield gained some acclaim this year during the revolutions of the Arab Spring by allowing users to create a private connection to the Internet. Users were able to skirt detection by officials that may have been monitoring mobile Internet activity.
Hotspot Shield works by creating a mobile virtual private network (VPN) that encrypts a Web session, turning HTTP into HTTPS. Hotspot Shield will also serve as a bandwidth compression service on iOS, cutting down on the amount of data that users consume. Create a VPN through an app anywhere with your iOS device? There is sure to be a market for that.
With less than a week to go before Amazon starts shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the company today announced the inclusion of several more Android apps. The list of new additions includes Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and many other hugely popular apps.
Quite a few of the applications Amazon announced today are games. Apps from Zynga, EA, Rovio and a number of other mobile game makers are going to be included on the Kindle Fire, which substantially expands the catalog of games available on the device.
