A couple of charts I found worthy to share excerpted from Vision Mobile’s “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond” study which you should definitely read (it’s free – sponsored by Telefonica).

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.

Funny email just received from Chronopost, France’s express delivery service. Those days either they “loose” the iphone 4G sent by Orange (twitter is filled of depressed geeks) or they just burn the entire truck.

I’ve been using the iPad home since its US release and while I was really puzzled at first about what it’s good for now I guess I have a clearer view of why an iPad really is good for.
Let’s first start with Steve’s claims:

• The web : Really average experience imho, html5-optimized websites are rare while non-suported flas is overwhelming. All i all the experience is only partial and deceptive
• Productivity : pages/numbers/keynote are not really useful, this did not enable me to replace my laptop – FAIL
• Games : Excellent experience, games on the huge screen really rox. Also the bigger surface enabled new kind of cool games such as Harbor Master
• eBooks : apart from tech eBooks I hate reading on the device, readability is average and there is just too much distraction in the device soul to enable proper immersion in the narration. I still keep my beloved Sony PRS-505 (best form factor imho) – FAIL

Thus, Steve only gets an average mark on his predictions : 1,5 out of 4.

Now a few more have become clear from my experience of the device :

• Movies : using yxplayer makes it easy to upload DivX files without the hassle of re-encoding them to the itunes-supported format (and ending up in storing them twice on you laptop, once in divx, once in mp4 in the iTunes library)
• Educational games / Drawing : The platform is amazing for kids enabling lots of fun interaction. Red Fish is a splendid example of how this can be done.
• Rich Content : The wired application shows how interactive content can become and paves the way to more interactive books (would love to see school history books revamped to take advantage of the iPad)

As a conclusion, don’t buy an iPad if you don’t have kids – you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you do it’s probably going to be an excellent investment!

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.

Last year I spotted this TED presentation of MIT’s David Merrill presenting a concept of connected and interacive dominos he calls “siftables”.

A year later Venturebeat reveals that the concept has bacome a company, sifteo, that just raised 9MUSD of funding.

Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them—piling, grouping, sorting—to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provide a new platform on which to implement tangible games.

This kind of interactive connected devices really prefigure the next generation of interactive connected games which are finally letting the technology in “things” without the need of dematerializing everything into a (mini-)computer.