And indeed there is something of a “next step” in evolution about Google Inc., which seems to be not only the world leader in online search, online advertising, and a rising force in productivity apps, but also a coming player in energy production, mobility, cooling technology that’s also cool, and TV.

Certainly Google’s vast reserves of pure profit resources are justified, as were its immediate predecessors’, Apple’s and Microsoft’s, as spoils justly gone to the victors of human evolution.

Yet Google’s hoard is about to get lighter, by $100,000, if Ms. Lauren Rosenberg of Park City, Utah, is granted her suit in that state’s U.S. District court.

Ms. Rosenberg did not elevate the human condition in any of the sectors where Google participates. She did not defeat Google’s awe inspiring engineering division on an even technological field. She did not even outsmart Google’s shrewd executives, who have steered the company through the world’s most dangerous financial waters.

No, Ms. Rosenberg’s achievement can be said to have been more elegant than any of Google’s to date. She went for a walk. And, unable to do it unaided, Ms. Rosenberg turned to her smartphone (a BlackBerry in this case) for help.

It was in relying on Google’s instructions for walking that Ms. Rosenberg’s genius really shone. She got hit by a car, and now she is suing Google for 100K. And why not? She survived her brush with a Darwin Award, and is here to claim her share of Google’s resources. Living proof of evolution in action.

And then there is Mr. Josh Michaels. Unlike Google, Mr. Michaels is getting paid by consumers. His innovation was not possible until the smart phone was invented, so you can say he is standing on the shoulders of giants like Google and Apple to collect his share of their rewards for moving civilization forward.

His contribution? Only the most-downloaded free application for the iPhone, that’s all. It’s called Ow My Balls, a cartoon game where the player guides an average-looking guy toward repeatedly getting hit in the crotch. I know what you’re thinking, evolution is complete, we have arrived. But it’s not over yet! Because Ow My Balls is not going to remain free.

Remember the simulated fart machines that shook the App Store and netted their developer VentureBeat $10,000 to $30,000 per day, spawning dozens of copycats? Evolution is survival of the fittest, and Mr. Michaels has every intention of thriving. “We just wanted to get it in the hands of more people,” he says of his temporary altruism.

Yes, it’s good to be human in the dawning era of the “smart” phone.

The post Are the new phones book smart or people smart? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

“Windows is too big and it’s too full featured for smartbooks and tablets,” Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at Nvidia said, speaking with reporters in Taipei on Monday. Smartbook is a term used to describe low-cost laptops containing processors designed by Arm instead of x86 chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices. “The good news is that we finally have an operating system to unite behind. Android is an operating system that has gained a tremendous amount of momentum all over the world,” Huang said. Strong words in an industry still ruled by Microsoft’s founding principles of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Android was designed to run cell phones, but Google’s master stroke was to modify arguably the best, and certainly the most broadly tested all-round operating system for any device, Linux. The result is a rapid adoption cycle in any device sector. So, while iPhone only works on one device, and Microsoft is still trying to get Windows right on the PC, Android is already there and running no matter what kind of hardware standard is set (usually by Apple).

As evidenced at last year’s Computex, where several hardware makers showed off netbooks running Android, and Acer shipped a version of its Aspire One netbook that came with Windows XP and Android installed.

“Android has become the fastest growing mobile operating system in the world and, in fact, it has surpassed the iPhone in terms of growth and in terms of users,” he said.

Today, Apple announced 2 million iPads sold. As always, Apple’s innovations in user interface and long battery life will be a tough act to follow. But Android is up to the challenge.

“Andy Rubin and his team [at Google] know exactly where the industry needs to go. Android started out as a phone but it’s not lost on them that the tablet is going to be very important and that the Android operating system has to evolve, and be enhanced in certain capabilities, in order to be a good tablet operating system,” Huang said, citing graphics performance as one area where Android needs to be improved to match the iPad.

Nvidia has designed the Tegra 2 chip for tablets: dual-core Arm processor, a graphics processor, and other components, all in one chip; they will go on sale before the end of this year.

“I think we’ll have to wait until this fall. The operating systems are coming together, the devices are coming together,” Huang said.

The post Nvidia supporting Google Android at Computex appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Apple the new alpha dog in tech Photo: Funny Hub

In only one month Microsoft lost a $25 billion lead over Apple in market capitalization, dropped behind by $3 billion, gave Apple the alpha dog status of tech, and all the leverage and power that comes with the sought after top spot.

This is not news to consumers who continue to eagerly mob Apple’s hot new iPhone and iPad models; Microsoft’s consumer products business continues to struggle for every breath.  Their decline was underlined by the past weeks of market instability, bringing down the former heavyweight champ’s shares 15%, while Apple’s stock is down just over 6%.  ”What this really means is that Wall Street has more confidence in Apple’s growth prospects than it does in Microsoft’s growth prospects,” said Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent firm.

On Wednesday, we covered the shakeup in management structure that saw some of Microsoft’s most senior consumer products managers executed. Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) fell 4% to close at $25.01 on Wednesday, while Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) lost 0.45%, closing at $244.11.

“Apple is showing high growth, with the launch of its iPad and its new iPhone coming out, and while Windows is a great competitor versus the Mac, Microsoft just hasn’t come up with new areas of growth.” added Rosoff.

Microsoft’s consumer product division in fact looked into creating a tablet computer that would have competed directly with the iPad, which Apple introduced at the beginning of April, selling more than 1 million in the first 28 days of release. But it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who ended up pulling the plug on the Microsoft Courier project before the tablet ever made it to market.

“This just means those efforts didn’t work out,” said Roger Kay, president of analyst firm Endpoint Technologies. “It’s sort of like Japanese samurai ethic, which says you need to fall on your sword to maintain your honor.”

Balmer appears to have survived his consumer products purge, and is heroically staying on in the top spot, though the company is not. At Microsoft, even the samurai honor rolls downhill.

The post Apple the new alpha dog in tech appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

This year, Microsoft holds 6.8%.

In the first nine months of Microsoft’s 2010 fiscal year, Xbox and PC game revenue fell 5% during that period, while Windows Mobile and Zune revenue was off 4%.

As Windows Mobile gets tired, a hungry pack of Google’s Android based devices, powered by a growing army of developer driven apps, is taking increasing strides in the sector. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Mobile devices set to become the dominant computing platform in the coming years.

Ballmer’s strategy is classic Microsoft: punish and intimidate with a bold reorganization of the company’s struggling hardware unit.

Entertainment and Devices Division and hardware-related sales were down 5% year-over-year, to $6.5 billion. Off with the head of design and development senior VP J Allard, and president Robbie Bach, a 22-year Redmond veteran, is retiring at age 48.

“Robbie’s an amazing business person and a close personal friend, which makes his departure a point of sadness for me,” said Ballmer, in a statement. Bach’s reports—Interactive Entertainment Business senior VP Don Mattrick and Mobile Communications senior VP Andy Lees will now report directly to Ballmer.

The post Developers, developers, gurgle, blub, blub… Steve Balmer’s sad song says so much appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Shenzen plant workers manufacturing electronics devices. Photo: ECVV.com

Another Foxconn employee at the Shenzhen plant is dead after falling off a building this Tuesday morning.

With a total workforce in China numbering 800,000, Foxconn is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer; making devices for leading global electronics brands like Apple and the iPhone.  Shenzhen police confirmed the death, and it’s still under investigation as a possible suicide.  Nine people have died this year in a series of “incidents” among workers, with two failed suicide attempts.

The 300,000 workers at the Shenzhen plant are paid the minimum wage and regularly work heavy overtime.   The iPhone, as the most publicly visible product is under threat of boycott from labour activists in Hong Kong.  Betty Chan of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour said her group was in touch with activists in Europe over an international boycott campaign against the iPhone from next month.

Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Hon Hai, the Taiwanese parent company of Foxconn, held a press conference at the company’s Longhua plant on Wednesday, after a hurried arrival at Shenzhen to deal with the suicide crisis.   “We are definitely not a sweatshop,” Mr Gou said on Sunday. “At this stage we can only quietly do our job and not make any comments about this issue.  So we will do our best” to improve the situation. “A manufacturing team of 800,000 people is not easy to manage,” he added.

Foxconn has taken steps to set up new counselling and early warning systems, measures that have garnered support from psychiatrists “At least, here’s a company that’s doing something about it,” said Michael Phillips, director of the Suicide Research and Prevention Center at Shanghai Mental Health Center and a professor at Emory University School of Medicine. He also said the suicides appeared to have a “strong imitation factor.”

But labour activists called for more decisive action from the company. “The wages of these workers should be raised to decent levels so they won’t feel they need to rely on overtime,” said Geoffrey Crothall of China Labour Bulletin. “That would give them time to socialize, relax and work through whatever issues they have.”

The post Electronics manufacturing’s encroaching dark side casts shadow on iPhone splendor appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Elecom Biometric Flash Drive

Security. The guy in the red shirt who always beams down with the Enterprise landing party, but never beams up again.

And seriously, who cares?

Ever since Captain Kirk whipped it out and flipped it on, in every episode of the same original 60s Star Trek series, the mobile phone has been a symbol of freedom.

No programs, no IT department, just free love forever… And no security! There was no need for it, no data on a phone, no passwords, no access to the corporate network. In those bygone days, not fussing with security may have been the best part of having a mobile phone.

Has anyone ever found security attractive? It doesn’t make the developer rich or famous. It doesn’t make the user more elegant and beautiful (I’m looking at you, cow-eyed Apple consumer, you know that free love is still blind), or more productive (if you’re not fortunate enough to buy a smart phone to just accessorize).  If Ensign Ricky is not coming back with the landing party, well — who cares! We all lived innocent in a Garden where love was free and forever, where every feeling and opportunity could be shared instantly, gratified as soon as our bodies caught up to our signals, sending each other photos and sexts, not even aware of our nakedness. There was only one restriction. Thou Shalt Not Eat of the Tree in the Center of the Garden, the Tree of Intelligence.  Every garden has a serpent, and when that shiny Apple was held up for the first time, who among us stood up and said “Guys wait! What about security?”

Now your innocence is jail broke, your phone is a little computer… as complex, vulnerable, and leveraged into every part of your life as your Old World desktop — in many ways more so! And it’s getting worse with every generation. These are early days of course; no one knows the full extent of the problem, but one thing is abundantly clear already: innocence and freedom are the price of Intelligence.

A large part of security’s unapproachable aura is the economic dynamic that is inverse (some would say, perverse) to the way we normally think of profit in a market economy. Whereas most of us try to buy and sell a feature that is going to make us glad, security’s dubious temptations promise to make us sad. Most party people don’t get that and don’t want to think about it much, but it’s actually painless.

1. You have something others want.
2. Someone steals it from you.
3. You are sad, and want to be compensated.
4. You pay the insurance company a stiff premium to compensate the rest of your stuff, but
5. Nothing else gets stolen, you just continue to pay a lot and get nothing for it, so you’re sad again, what up yo!

Security comes in here, because your insurance company will drastically reduce your premiums if you invest in an accredited security program. That’s how everyone gets paid for something nobody wants.   The take home is that, if you don’t know how the security works, you are increasing your risk from both ends: you may not have either your insurance right, or your (data) stuff safe.    Having fun so far? Don’t worry, it gets much more depressing. For example, did you think that leaving it to the experts is safe? Not if those “experts” are the big organizations that inspire a false sense of safety for most ordinary users. One of the biggest known losses of data from the last decade could be the UK government’s mishandling of 25 million nationals’ bank account information, national insurance numbers, birth dates, and anything else a criminal would need to steal someone’s identity. It resulted in the resignation of the department head of the agency that lost the data — that’s your consolation if you lost your identity, all your life savings, etc. — and to this day nobody knows where the data ended up.

If the PC industry is any indication of what is coming to the smart phone market, government agencies, fortune 500 corporations, and local banks offer no refuge for the very substance of your modern existence, your personal data. Despite all the hi-tech differentiators that define your modern, smartphone-bearing life, you are no less alone and unprotected in a predatory wilderness than your paleo ancestors; your digital identity is still just many financial calories to any tech-savvy carnivore who happens to see it exposed.

Scared? Good. There is no more explicit example of burying your head in the sand, nor potentially tragic, than ignoring mobile security. Over time, you will be carrying more and more of your life in your phone holster, and more and more people will be after it. Your only defense is your knowledge.   So where do you begin? We decided to speak with Jacob Greenblatt, Chief Strategist at Discretix. From a background of delivering general security solutions from mobile phones to portable storage devices, the Discretix mobile security product suite is currently protecting millions of handsets, flash memory cards, drives, and smartphones around the world.

Discretix Cryptocell security platform

The Discretix suite is broad, attacking the potentially vast mobile security challenge from multiple fronts. Embedded engines perform heavy lifting, time-tested encryption and key-exchange protocols. Newer approaches concentrate fire on some of the more ephemeral features and opportunities specific to mobile: software images and versioning, booting protocols, disk integrity, and ensuring that flash memory devices for both storage and user authentication are safe from hackers and thieves.

Smartphones from the iPhone and Android families deploy the application via the CPU, as well as USB, flash or USB drives, sandisk, se, Motorola… Discretix provides the security infrastructure, encryption engine, real core security competencies required to encrypt a disk, wipe the data, or reset a device.

According to the company, any smartphone’s potential downfall is it’s chief strength: the ability to download what you want, when you want it, and have it run on your phone. Everyone knows that’s how the bad guys get in to get your stuff.   But other dangers are not as immediately obvious. If that phone is, for example, a Blackberry packing a full list of customers’ email addresses and private information, and it is simply misplaced, then it requires a security solution that will wipe the device remotely, kill the device, or retrieve it.   A remote wipe has a number of different mechanisms. The basic idea is very simple, the phone would receive a certain repeated message continuously. If that message was not received for a defined period, the phone is required to execute a protocol. So I report my phone lost, for example, immediately the repeating message stops, and the phone responds by wiping its disk and shutting down. In the case of an unconnected device like a flashcard, as soon as that device connects to any phone, the protocol should wipe the device immediately.

But here a subtlety lurks, someone could cloak the message to wipe out someone else’s device; the mechanism embedded in the chipsets would need to be able to differentiate faultlessly between a self-device that is operational, and a foreign device that should not be connecting to this phone, not unlike a mammalian immune system.   Further dimensions open when you provide a security infrastructure that offers the software vendor hooks to take advantage of your offerings, thereby providing a more robust performance, and a more uniform standard.

Discretix multi-scheme content protection

According to Discretix, the target is not only moving, but the problem is getting bigger at least as fast as the mobile market itself. Smart phones are by no means satisfied with mere phone status, or even settling for just being smart. At the recent MWC, Discretix saw chipsets that were able to run HD movies on a large screen from a mobile phone, new form factors like book readers and numerous iPad-like species of tablet computers. The handsets are also becoming more actively involved in delivering content projection.

“Traditionally content has been concentrated on large devices like televisions and movie theatres. That content is migrated in a mobile form, in different formats and combinations; as that content migrates to the mobile device, the mobile security solutions required to protect that content are likely to increase. We expect the mobile security market (MSM) to display continued fast growth, what was a desktop device last year is now a mobile connected device today, like netbooks, tablets, ebook readers, are more connected devices. Are all running open oses; many allow you to download apps and are used for delivering some type of content to the end user and such requires more solutions.” Jacob Greenblatt told Mobile in a telephone interview.

Mobile Security industry is about to go through a major overhaul.

“According to our initial estimates we see the MSM at a 100-150 million global today, we expect the market to more than quadruple and approach 800 million by 2013. Internal company forecasts are seeing an increased number of mobile content subscribers. Approximately 500-600 million subscribers will be accessing mobile content via the internet by 2013.

Companies like ours have watched the market develop and we’ve seen an uncharacteristically large increase in content to mobile devices. I’m not talking about games, Tetris or things like that, 40% of subs by 2013 will be using a smartphone in one form or another.” added Greenblatt.

Discretix expects mobile business security to be catalyzed by a few high profile incidents that will escalate and catapult industry awareness and priority. The immediate response will include mandatory encryption, and other security standards subject to regulatory compliance.  A mobile phone/internet device can increase enterprise productivity, but the downside and risk must be taken into consideration. In dollar figures, RIM’s recent acquisition of Certicom weighed in at $100 million, so this downside is not trivial.

The current iPhone 4G (generation 4) is displaying the industry’s classic “borrow from the future” approach to security, rushing the most desirable features out to market first, and leaving security woefully inadequate for the current release. Discretix views the current state as sufficient for what the iPhone is currently used for, but nevertheless a soft target until Apple invests the needed resources to tighten up to enterprise standards.

Who is making the most secure smartphones today?

Discretix seems most impressed with a few offerings like the NSA-grade made by General Dynamics. Nokia has always traditionally invested heavily in security, probably the vendor that’s invested the most is RIM. They’ve always had encryption since day one, their solutions are behind a firewall, there enterprise is great. They are able to target that NSA market as well since their Certicom acquisition.

Special feature by Lance Hanlen with contributions by Fabrizio Pilato

The post Mobile Security – The Gathering Storm appeared first on Mobile Magazine.