Mobitrends

Source : Nielsen

Mobile devices are small computers, that’s now granted. For years now some companies have foreseen that those devices will be target to security threats (F-Secure launched its first Mobile AV for Symbian in 2004 (and was well demoed with the Skull Virus – see pic to the side). Now quite a few players have joined the race with traditional security providers like AVG (through the purchase of DroidSecurity), McAffee (trhough the purchase of tenCube) and new independent players such as Lookout.

The threats have evolved also, we can now see that with the devices being sandboxed, the risk is not so much to get your phone infested with a virus replicating itself in every file than to have a malicious software access your personal data to replicate on your friend’s phones or pass unauthorized calls to premium phone numbers.

Main mobile threats :

• Malicious apps : unauthorized phone calls / text messages, access to private data. Unfortunately most devices and OSes aren’t AV friendly and won’t grant privileges to a software to exit its sandbox to analyze software for threats signatures. Thus AVs are only limited to application reputation to identify potential threats…
• Phishing : on a mobile device it’s even harder to distinct a forged copy of a website from it original self (now link preview, limited graphics…). Same goes with the emails where there is less info than in regular email clients to preview links
• SMS Spam : “someone sent you a voicemail, call and dial #123# to listen to it” : this kind of SMS Spam is tough to monitor and prevent
• Theft : stealing a mobile phone (or just loosing it) can be very easy  : many vendor have anti-theft / lock & wipe features to prevent that. Not to mention the backup that will prevent your files from being lost !

Lookout has recently announced it has passed the 1M user mark, but I’m pretty sure the market is still at its infancy. The OS manufacturers and Phone vendors were targets for very few attacks, but now that a few major Smartphones platforms have emerged such as Android and iOS, this creates a critical mass which makes it worth it for hackers to invest and start looking for breaches. And there’s no doubt they *will* find breaches (proof is hackers keep on jailbreaking every new iOS version as it gets released).

Palm just announced on his blog that jQuery Mobile has been released.
Aside from Windows Mobile and Maemo (!?!?) All the modern platforms are supported as you can see in the chart below. We’ve seen how web apps can look gorgeous on the iPhone Safari browser, now all the mobile browsers get a leveled dynamic experience of the mobile web. It’s hard to anticipate just now if this is going to be a game-changer or simply a nice to have feature, and while many have envisioned that web-apps would prevail to native apps this certainly hasn’t been the case till now.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing news and for sure web developers will have to upgrade their mobile site to take full advantage of this new dynamics.

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery
to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the
major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI
framework.
Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing
work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular
platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview
detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart
showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

RIM’s consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones, dubbed Blackberry Protect, has just been officially announced. Rumored for months, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

The application is currently in limited beta trial and no date for General Availability has been communicated

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.

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 !