ReadWriteMobile

The company is called CrowdStrike (not "CloudStrike"), and most folks attending the NSA session featuring the company Wednesday morning had never heard of it. That wasn't why they were there. The man behind CrowdStrike is George Kurtz, the former chief technology officer of McAfee, and the man widely credited with bringing that company into the realm of seriousness.

During the session introducing attendees to his new venture in a very big way, Kurtz demonstrated the threat of mobile remote access tools ("mobile RATs"), capable of polling smartphones to determine their users' location and scope their transactions. "It's the ultimate spy tool, and it travels around with us at all times... If you haven't figured out privacy's dead, this'll kill it for you."

There are more smartphones in the hands of consumers than ever. The natural consequence of smartphone penetration is that more users are downloading more apps. It comes down to simple economic theory: as volume increases the cost of acquiring loyal users goes down.

Mobile app marketing platform Fiksu revealed new stats today showing January saw the highest download rate of iOS apps ever. Users downloaded the top 200 free iOS apps 6.79 million times per day in January, a 12% increase from the previous high in December. That kind of volume comes with benefits to publishers who are now spending less to acquire users than any time since June 2011.

yo The man who helped put the issue of possible United Nations oversight of Internet governance back on the radar in the United States, stepped up his rhetoric Tuesday at a speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told the audience that a move back to the regulatory model of the International Telecommunications Union - the UN-sponsored body that Russia and other nations would like to see put in charge - would lead to a nightmare scenario of bureaucracy and multi-government regulation.

But learning a lesson from the SOPA/PIPA debate, this time Comm. McDowell added one more element to the mix: He argued ITU oversight could threaten the way the Internet actually works.

Brightcove does not want you to think of it as a video hosting company. From the beginning, that was never the plan. Yet, Brightcove rode its cloud video-hosting platform to an initial public offering last week,with the company valued at about $392 million. Brightcove considers itself a "cloud content services" company and wants to be the go-to resource for publishers storing and delivering media from the cloud.

Brightcove's next big project, dubbed App Cloud, is creating content containers for mobile HTML5 apps. The popular term for this is "wrappers" - taking apps written in Web languages and wrapping them with native functionality. Facebook and PhoneGap were the first to implement this practice but Brightcove thinks it can take it a step further, creating an entire platform for hybrid app development, as opposed to just a series of tools.

AT&T may be instituting a "pay to play" program for mobile app developers in the next year in which publishers would pay for the bandwidth consumers use on their mobile apps. The Wall Street Journal reported today that AT&T's head of network and technology John Donovan compared the service to "toll-free calling for the mobile-broadband world." The report was not specific on the details of the program.

We reached out to AT&T but the carrier does not have details of the proposed plan and declined to comment. That leaves a lot of questions to be answered. Will the program be mandatory? Will it be opt-in for publishers looking to push bandwidth-intensive apps? While the program could be a win for consumers, developers may not come out quite as lucky.

When we think of HTML5 as a mobile platform, devices are not what come to mind. The mobile Web, almost by definition, is an amorphous set of technologies, standards, designs, contents and ideas. The mobile Web is more of a Wild West these days then its desktop counterpart. Mozilla is attempting to give the mobile Web shape and definition and today announced a partnership that will bring the first HTML5-based mobile operating system to a device in 2012.

Mozilla announced a partnership at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today with Telefonica and Qualcomm to create the first mobile Web handset, dubbed open Web devices. The platform will be based on Mozilla's Boot to Gecko platform and will bring core device APIs to the HTML5-based devices. While many other would-be operating systems have tried to counter the dominance of Apple and Google, Mozilla and the open Web may have the best chance yet.

If you have ever been in a situation where one of your clients needed to get your signature on a document and you were on the road, you haven't had many good choices until now. For years, I have been a big proponent of J2's eFax service, which sets up a virtual fax machine in the cloud (of course, they didn't really use those words back then). Once you sign up for an account, your received faxes go to your email inbox where you can download the attachment and view them as PDFs. You can also send documents from your computer too.

The holy grail of mobile geo-location services is persistent, aware, real-time data delivered straight to your device. It is incredibly difficult to pull off. Especially if the idea is to, "give you vision beyond the Greek gods." Accuracy, battery life and location-aware push messaging are hard to build and even harder to implement on a scalable basis.

Portland-based startup Geoloqi thinks it can pull it off. The startup is aiming to give rich location data to enterprise and government customers through a release of a new SDK for Android and iOS an API. The idea is to turn complicated real-time location-aware data into a platform that developers can drop into any app.

Imagine playing a game of Scrabble on your iPhone against your mother. You and Ma are competitive and these games tend to turn into rabid battles for literary supremacy. Also, she's your mother so you want to talk about how things are with the family, your nephew and if Pa is taking that new job in Chicago. So, you press a button in the app and create a voice connection running over your data connection. No dialing, no minutes used. Just a data connection straight from the app.

Cloud communications company Twilio is making that possible. Today it is announcing a new native iOS software developer kit for its Twilio Client, allowing voice-over-IP calls from any app. The future of telephony is in data connections, not wireless minutes and Twilio is looking to make the mobile carriers' networks programmable for the next generation of app developers.

HTML5 Web apps are going to become a definitive section of the mobile ecosystem in 2012. The difference between the mobile Web and its native counterparts is that there is no one company seen as the de facto leader of the movement. Apple leads iOS, Google touts Android, Microsoft and Nokia push Windows Phone. The mobile Web? Lots of players, no clear leader.

One company is in the perfect position to take the reigns. What do you think about when you hear terms like "open," "cross-platform," and "standards?" Certainly not Apple. Facebook has the chops to lead the mobile Web but is closed system flies against the open Web community. When it comes to developers, resources, leadership and coding acumen, one company stands ahead of the mobile Web pack. If Mozilla wants it, the mobile Web is there for the taking.