ReadWriteMobile

The Supreme Court thought it settled the issue in January, but the debate over warrantless GPS searches won't go away.  Now, one U.S. senator is concerned that the Department of Justice hasn't fully scaled back its searches and may be subpoenaing ISPs for the GPS data it can no longer get directly. 

The case pitting Google against Oracle over the use of Java in Android is turning into a spat of epic proportions. The opening arguments are in the books, with Google trying to portray Oracle as a spurned girlfriend trying to wrangle money out of a failed relationship. Oracle, meanwhile, painted Google as a callous ex-boyfriend who blithely takes what it wants, when it wants, with no regard for anyone else.

"Backend as a Service" (BaaS) companies provide easily integrated cloud-based backends for mobile app developers. Though not as well known as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the BaaS ecosystem has quickly evolved from a niche vertical into an important industry segment.

The industry segment took another step toward maturity this week with mobile development platform Appcelerator's announcement of its Titanium 2.0 SDK, with significant backend cloud services tied into it. Meanwhile, Boston-based mobile cloud provider Kinvey also released its platform to the public.

The two-year-long legal battle between Google and Oracle began its final confrontation today in San Francisco district court. At stake in the eight-week showdown? The future of the Java programming language and Android, the world's most popular smartphone operating system. That's not all.

One of the largest software companies in the world just made a series of moves that could make it one of the most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world. Hidden within SAP's Hana database platform announcement yesterday was the fact that the company signed three strategic partnerships with leading U.S. mobile development firms, signaling what could be a huge shift in the balance of power in the race for enterprise mobile dollars.

Not quite two months after the European Commission approved Google's pending acquisition of smartphone maker Motorola Mobility (MMI) on the grounds that it would be pro-competitive and would not impact the patent market much, the lawmaking body announced it is opening up two parallel investigations of MMI's conduct. One will study whether the company failed to honor its patent licensing term commitments to Europe's counterpart to the FCC, the ETSI. The other will look into whether Motorola made similar missteps in its dealings with the International Telecommunication Union - the United Nations agency that looks after the world's broadband markets, and which one U.S. FCC commissioner fears may eventually be appointed caretaker of the Internet.

The performance of mobile networks is one of the biggest issues facing cellular carriers, application developers and users. All four major carriers in the United States claim spectrum paucity and users are demanding the same type of performance on their mobile devices that they would find on through their desktop browsers. Something needs to give. While there is no silver bullet to curing network woes, there are ways to make the best of an increasingly tough situation.

Akamai represents one such solution. One of the original optimization platforms for the Web, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company has recognized mobile as a sector ripe for optimization. It is taking a layered approach working from both the application and infrastructure levels to ease the burden of the network and give consumers the performance they expect.

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."

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.

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.