Mobitrends

Seems like the mobile security industry is shaking :

• In May, McAfee bought mobile security provider Trust Digital for an undisclosed price
• Last week, Lookout announced it has gotten more than a million registered users in the past six months for its smartphone security app which includes anti-virus, anti-spy/mal-ware, lock and wipe and backup and restore for android, windows mobile and blackberry

Lookout recently secured a second round of funding increasing total funding to a wooping $16.5 million and has only 20 employees – sounds lean enough and ready to last.

Shopping from a mobile phone has always been a very theoretical exerience. Sounds like a good idea but nobody ever really managed to make a clean 360 experience from window licking to actually paying for goods.  Mobile phone may be used to give more info on a product but at the end the purchase was always done in-store or on the PC. Apple’s app-store made it real and mainstream for apps and now today they just released a mobile app version of their app-store. You can download it right here.

Since your Apple account already integrates your billing infos, the whole process is as seamless as it is on the app store or on the web, probably the first really compelling e-shopping experience on mobile to date !

While the app stores have been marketed as a safe place by Apple since the very beginning, turns out they can become quite easily the haven of the new-age app piracy. The WSJ runs an article on the subject (thanks @gr for the link) where they give as an example a fake banking application sold 1,50USD on the Google app store.

Of course Apple has a very strict human-based approval process that should limit those malwares/spywares, but while the other app stores only react to notification, bottom line is the mobile app world is getting unsafe, and those articles definitely are raising awareness on this fact.

Even with all the human brain curation of the app store, it appears it’s far from perfect as explains the WSJ article “Consumers should be aware that iPhone security is far from perfect and that a piece of software downloaded from the App Store may still be harmful,” wrote software engineer Nicolas Seriot in a research paper detailing iPhone security holes that he presented at a computer security conference in February.

It’s probably time to secure that environment where apps and andvanced browser lead to the same threats that we’ve been taught to manage on the PC world, just as some visionaries such as F-Secure have foreseen for a couple of years already.

From Sharp’s press release :

Sharp Corporation has developed a 3D camera module for mobile devices capable of capturing high-definition (720p*2) 3D video images, an industry first. Sharp will start shipping samples in July. Mass production of these modules will begin within 2010.

3D images are composed of two views taken using two cameras that simultaneously capture separate images for the right and left eyes. Consequently, a 3D camera requires peripheral circuitry to apply image processing to the two images, for example, to adjust color or to correct positioning between the images from the two cameras. Manufacturers have thus been pursuing designs that reduce the size and weight of 3D cameras and seeking ways to shorten their development period.

Those modules are hitting pre-prod this summer and mass production by the end of the year, hopefully we’ll see the first camera early 2011 that will get full 3D HD capability! Can’t wait to get a 3D setup at home to enjoy the full experience.

I installed yesterday pCalc on my iPad and was quite amazed by the way the developer invented a really innovative business model of freemium … for a simple calculator.

As any freemium model, the basic calculator is free and high-quality and the developer identified a few typologies of users that need special functions such as HEX/Binary handling, RPN with multi-lines… and all those features can be purchased in-app in a super smooth way.

It’s jus brilliant to see that something as simple as a calculator can be a field of innovation like this.

That’s the breaking news of the day. While they managed to stage their comeback at CES last year, Palm piled up bad choices preventing them to actually get healthy again, one being to get stuck with Sprint wich a CDMA-only version of their phones for over 1 year. they only now managed to release a GSM version of their Palm Pre and Pixi and are struggling with distribution, for instance in France you can buy int through SFR but only online (no retail presence) and the only place you can touch one is the lobby at SFR HQ (picture on the left).

HP invented the iPaq, the first really amazing windows-mobile based PDA in the early 2000 which were instrumental in the decline of Palm and triggered a couple of big reorganizations such as the split between Palm One and Palm Source (hard/soft) and eventually lead to the abandon of PalmOS.

But HP did not understand the move from the PDA to the Smartphone and every experience they did in that area ended up as a catastrophy.

HP buying Palm at such a high valuation  means they want to get back in the Smartphoen business and want to get rid of Windows Mobile as their reference platform (which has obviously been a burden over the last couple of years). I still feel the valuation is very high since they’re buying an OS that was built in about 1 year, some experience in the field of capacitive sensors and a pile of patents.

Here’s the official press release.

I’ve been quite involved with Streamezzo since its creation. First, we were at the same incubator at Telecom Paris, then Kamayo which I co-founded based his work on STZ’s engine and got eventually acquired by STZ, and I had the chance to keep close bounds with the company.

Innovacom invested last year in Streamezzo and reboosted the company so well that it just got acquired by AMDOCS. While I don’t know the details of the deals, one can only guess that such a quick turn-around means a good deal for Innovacom and for the founders (who are known to be treated respectfully by Innovacom).

The technology will certainly become a part of AMDOCS’ CES portfolio offering to Telcos worldwide. As usual when it comes to operators technology, 100% of user-base support is compulsory and Streamezzo has been the only one to reach that level yet.

Congrats again on the deal !

While the smartphone market is structuring around the big OSes that are iPhone, Android, RIM and Windows Mobile, one can wonder where the next powerful ideas will be coming from in terms of killer mobile applications. After the hype with casual games and the usual set of tools (better to-do list, better email client, better… , remotes…), and as the app stores are now super-filled, inventing and promoting relevant mobile application is far from being a breeze.

Yet, mobile apps is probably the most growing field in the computer world today. With all those feature-phones being converted into smartphones, this is the most growing space in the industry yet.

Below are a few themes worth thinking about that have yet to be addressed correctly:

• Convergence : Obviously our life is split between devices, and there even apple fails at offering a perfectly convergent experience (i.e. my iPhone doesn’t sync with 2 iTunes on 2 MACs even while they both are authorized on the same account). Ubiquitous data, ubiquitous usage… 1Password is an excellent example of how a great simple desktop app gets a mobile extension generating lots of value, same for Evernote.
• Productivity : there’s still plenty of space left in this area, all the vendors doing complicated stuf such as office doc editor which are totally not suited to mobile usage.
• Lifelog / LifeTracker : while there are tens of ways of sharing stuff from your mobile, I don’t feel satisfied with any as they all feel limited regarding the verbosity of the infos i want to share or the pertinence of the info I would like to see stored.
• Presence : Presence information is currently poorly used either in the core network or in the way events are being treated. Google Voice did an amazing first step (and they are way ahead rest of the world with this) yet there is still a long way to go before presence information is treated seamlessly and adds value to our live
• Books : Publishing is being reinvented through tactile interfaces, from interactive publishing to cross-media, there is loads to do there.
• Banking : I often wonder what Mint would be like on a cell-phone. Apart from the security issues, finances is a standard theme usually badly addressed. Update: As Jerome pointed out in the comments, the mobile payment is also something hot, but the ecosystem is a huge pain/mess to organize to see this happening.

There are probably lots of other themes that could be added for this list, so I’m open for contributions / ideas of use cases that need to be polished/enhanced / developed !

Finally got to try out in-flight Internet on a Delta Seattle-Atlanta plane. Totally seamless experience, the connection seems quite stable and even VPN get through properly! The only thing I’m missing is power plugs (although for some odd reason there is a usb-power plug under my seat). It’s amazing to see the cloud getting a bit more ubiquitous.