Ryan Pau, Ars Technica, 2/3/2012

Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

The project is part of Mozilla’s broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

Mozilla developer Jeff Balogh described the new push notification system in a recent blog entry. The post sketched out a high-level overview of how the system might work and provided some sample JavaScript code.

“Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web,” he wrote.

The way that the system works is relatively simple. Mozilla or some other party would host a notification service that is capable of delivering messages to the browser. The service would have a unique URL endpoint for every active user.

The Web browser would provide a JavaScript API that websites can use to request permission from the user to send push notifications (such a prompt would be necessary to minimize spam). When the user grants permission, the browser hands the website the URL of the notification service endpoint associated with the user.

When a Web application sends a POST request with notification data to that endpoint, the notification service passes the message to the user. An instance of Firefox running on the user’s desktop would likely maintain some kind of persistent connection to the notification service so that it could receive notifications instantly.

In addition, the notification service would hypothetically be able to relay messages to mobile devices. It could use Google’s Cloud-to-Device messaging to send push notifications to mobile Firefox on the user’s Android handset. Or it could use the Apple Push Notification Service to send notifications to users of Firefox Home, Mozilla’s iOS application.

It’s important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla’s push notification system moves beyond that limitation.

The push system is still at a relatively early stage of planning and isn’t available to test yet. Balogh has defined the JavaScript APIs that the browser will use to enable the functionality and ask the user for permission to send notifications. He has also proposed the set of properties that will be associated with each individual notification that gets transmitted to the notification server.

Mozilla’s push system will be especially useful for websites that want to send notifications to their users’ smartphones without having to build a native mobile application. If the concept evolves into a standard, mobile browsers could someday potentially have the feature built in.

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Stuart Miles, PocketLint, 1/16/2012

A new technology that could save your phone from getting water damaged could be included the next wave of smartphones about to be made by Samsung and Apple.

Called HZO, the technology creates a nano-scale film barrier which has special water repelling properties once applied to the inside of electronic gadgets.

Done during the manufacturing process rather than by you once you’ve bought your phone, this isn’t a clumsy case or a sealant but a way of protecting gadgets from getting wet.

To help show off the capabilities of the technology, the company has already applied the tech to a number of different devices like the iPhone, as well as other phones from Samsung and Motorola. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas Pocket-lint witnessed what looked like an ordinary iPhone being repeatedly dunked into a fish tank full of water.

The company is hoping to sign big deals with all leading manufacturers. A spokesman for the company told Pocket-lint that it is in the process of signing up a major smartphone partner and a headphones maker in the very near future.

The plan for headphones is that they wouldn’t be damaged by sweat when running or water when swimming.

“We showed the Samsung Chairman the technology with a Samsung Galaxy S that we had coated with HZO and he couldn’t believe his eyes,” a representative of the company told us. “Samsung is really excited by the tech.”

The company has told us that they are also talking to Apple as well, hoping to be able to let Apple make the iPhone 5 waterproof.

“We expect HZO to be in next season’s phones,” HZO told Pocket-lint rather confidently.

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Angela Moscaritolo, PCMagazine, 1/11/2012

Online payment company PayPal processed nearly $4 billion worth of mobile payments in 2011, an exponential increase from the previous year.

To put this figure in perspective, the company processed $750 million worth of mobile transactions in 2010 and $141 million in 2009, David Marcus, vice president of PayPal Mobile, said at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The huge growth in mobile payment volume is the result of an overall increase in mobile commerce, combined with the availability of more useful mobile payment apps, Marcus told VentureBeat.

PayPal had originally kicked off 2011 predicting $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for the year, a company spokesman said. As the year went on, the company upped its projections three separate times, to $2 billion in February, $3 billion in June, and $3.5 billion in October.

“Over the course of [2011] we raised our initial prediction by a total of $2 billion, and still managed to surpass our goal by a wide margin with a total of $4 billion,” a PayPal spokesman said in an email.

PayPal has actually seen mobile payment volumes ratchet up each year since at least 2006, when it processed less than $1 million in mobile transactions. In 2007, it hit $7 million and by 2008, it reached $25 million.

Despite the huge growth in mobile payment volume seen by PayPal, those in the payments industry do not expect the new transaction method to reach ubiquity this year. A group of mobile payment executives in September said consumers will be quicker to embrace mobile payments than merchants, who have been slow to accept such transactions.

Some merchants have been early adopters, however. Starbucks, for example, in July unveiled a new mobile payment system available in all U.S. stores for BlackBerry and Apple iOS users.

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Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service, 1/10/2012

T-Mobile is offering a calling service for iPhone and iPad users, even though it doesn’t sell those devices.

The operator is expanding its free voice-over-IP service, called Bobsled, to iPhones, iPads, and Android phones. Users with the app can make calls to mobile or landline phones in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico without incurring charges. Users can make the calls over cellular data networks, which typically charge for the data usage, or over Wi-Fi, which could be free.

T-Mobile’s Bobsled for iPhone

The new services are an expansion of the Bobsled service that T-Mobile first launched early last year. Initially, it let people make calls only to Facebook friends from PCs. In October, it began letting people make calls from Facebook to mobile devices and make calls from PCs to U.S. mobile and landline phones.

T-Mobile is also separately launching a Bobsled Messaging app on Tuesday for Android phones, with plans to also offer it for iPhones and iPads later this year. That app lets users send group text and multimedia messages.

Key to both apps is that they are tied to a user’s mobile phone number. That means a user can download Bobsled Messaging on their Android tablet and tie the app to their mobile phone number, so that when they send a message, the recipient will see that the message is coming from the sender’s regular phone number.

Users will find some benefits to downloading the app on multiple devices. For example, a user can read conversations on their tablet that were started on the phone. They’ll also be able to access their contacts list from the app on both devices.

In the future, T-Mobile plans to start issuing phone numbers along with Bobsled. That means someone with a Wi-Fi-only iPad, for example, could attach a phone number to the tablet that friends would recognize when the user made calls and sent messages from Bobsled.

T-Mobile has a number of reasons for wanting to get into the VoIP business, said Brad Duea, senior vice president of marketing for T-Mobile. VoIP traffic is only expected to grow, he said. “It might cannibalize some revenue, but we think it’s a much greater opportunity. We don’t have a fixed-line business to protect. So we’re saying, ‘cut the cord, here’s how we can empower you,’” he said.

Some other mobile service providers that have landline businesses are often less keen to promote VoIP because it competes with traditional landline phone service.

For now, T-Mobile isn’t saying much about how it will make money from the service. It plans to bring some new business models to the market, including ad-supported services and contextual advertising, he said. The company will talk more about that in a couple of months, he said.

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Nancy Gohring, IDG News Servic, 1/9/2012

The operator also said it plans to launch an online store for HTML5 apps this year

AT&T is hoping to encourage developers to use HTML5 with the release of a new API platform. “It’s essentially a rich set of APIs and tools aimed at furthering the HTML5 appeal as an app development choice,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer at AT&T. “Why are we focusing on HTML5? We think it has the potential to address fragmentation.” He spoke Monday at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Developers must rewrite native applications to run on iPhones, Android phones, Windows Phones, and BlackBerry phones. HTML5 simplifies things for developers by letting them instead build apps that run in a browser accessible by any smartphone. HTML5 apps look and act similar to a native app. By 2016, 85 percent of smartphones will have browsers capable of running HTML5, Christopher said, citing a prediction made by Strategy Analytics.

A spokewoman told InfoWorld she was not sure whether the APIs could be used for apps expected to run on devices provisioned by any carrier — the norm in most companies given the mix of corporate-supplied and employee-owned devices — or just on devices running on the AT&T network.

The new API (application programming interface) catalog includes APIs for MMS, SMS, location, and mobile-health capabilities. In addition, it allows developers to let users make payments in the app that appear on their AT&T bill. It also includes technologies that sense what capabilities a smartphone has to optimize the app for the individual smartphone.

The APIs are hosted on cloud services, including Heroku and Microsoft’s Azure. Developers must pay a $99 registration fee to start using the APIs.

AT&T also said it plans to launch an online store for HTML5 apps this year. It will initially be accessible by Android and iPhone users but will expand to include other phones, said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president of devices for AT&T. “The two things that are the biggest challenges for HTML5 to reach its full potential are distribution and monetization,” he said. The API platform and the new app center are designed to address these challenges, he said.

The operator hopes to take a fresh approach to app stores with the store. Rather than simply listing apps by category, like most app stores do today, it will have a “magazine-like” format, he said. Developers can sign up to be part of the beta of the new app store at developer.att.com/appcenter.

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John Paul Titlo, ReadWriteWeb, 1/5/2012

In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.

The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT’s existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.

Assanka had evidently won the FT over with the work it had done previously for the company. After they refused to adhere to Apple’s revised subscription revenue share, the FT saw its native iOS app pulled from the App Store. Rather than give in to Apple’s terms, they simply focused on developing a Web-based mobile and tablet app written using HTML5 and related technologies. Ultimately, that Assanka-produced app saw more traffic than the publication’s original iOS application.

In addition to forgoing Apple’s revenue share, the HTML5-based app, which looks and feels a lot like a native tablet or smartphone application, has the advantage of being accessible from a range of devices and much easier to update. It also enables them to build out sites with the kind of responsive design techniques utilized by publications like the Boston Globe.

Mobile and tablet development is only going to increase in importance for publishers in the future. With this acquisition, FT can continue to enhance its existing mobile apps and use the development talent at Assanka to help build out future initiatives on various devices.

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Paul Krill, ComputerWorld, 1/3/2012

The Application Developers Alliance would enable collaboration and provide education, cloud access, and lobbying efforts

Mobile application developers are set to gain an industry association that would promote their interests, enabling collaboration and product testing while offering education, cloud hosting, and governmental lobbying on their behalf.

Led by Jon Potter, former executive director of the Digital Media Association, the Application Developers Alliance is set to get off the ground with promotions at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas next week and elsewhere. While Web developers also would be welcome, the alliance is initially geared to mobile development for platforms including Apple iOS, Google Android, and RIM BlackBerry. The alliance is looking to recruit thousands of developers. “We’re going to be at the meetups all around the country, we’re going to be at conferences, we’re going to be talking to folks, we’re going to be polling people,” said Potter.

“Our thought now is there’s an interesting space in the application developer community that isn’t really organized,” and could use service offerings, said Potter, who is developing the organization along with several associates. Key services included as part of the alliance include:

• a collaboration network, via an online database
• product-testing facilities offering access to multiple platforms and tools
• discounted and free tutorials on trends and technologies, as well as structured training and certification programs
• discounted hosting and cloud services via Rackspace

Lobbying for government policies to assist developers is expected to be part of the initiative. “There’s developer interest in privacy [policy],” as well as IP policies pertaining to patents and copyrights, Potter said. Mobile broadband policies also would be part of the alliance’s efforts. Expected backers of alliance, Potter said, include Google and RIM, although neither vendor could offer any feedback on the alliance last month. Apple and Microsoft are not participating, said Potter. The alliance will look to generate revenues via sponsors and, over time, membership fees.

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Tarmo Virki, Reuters, 12/27/2011

Vulnerability in a widely used wireless technology could allow hackers to gain remote control of phones And instruct them to send text messages or make calls, according to an expert on mobile phone security.

They could use the vulnerability in the GSM network technology, which is used by billions of people in about 80 percent of the global mobile market, to make calls or send texts to expensive, premium phone and messaging services in scams, said Karsten Nohl, head of Germany’s Security Research Labs.

Similar attacks against a small number of smartphones have been done before, but the new attack could expose any cellphone using GSM technology.

“We can do it to hundreds of thousands of phones in a short timeframe,” Nohl told Reuters in advance of a presentation at a hacking convention in Berlin on Tuesday.

The convention takes place just days after U.S. security think tank Strategic Forecasting Inc (Stratfor) said its website had been hacked and that some of the names of corporate subscribers had been made public. Activist hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility.

Attacks on corporate landline phone systems are fairly common, often involving bogus premium-service phone lines that hackers set up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Fraudsters make calls to the numbers from hacked business phone systems or mobile phones, then collect their cash and move on before the activity is identified.

The phone users typically don’t identify the problem until after they receive their bills and telecommunications carriers often end up footing at least some of the costs.

Even though Nohl will not present details of attack at the conference, he said hackers will usually replicate the code needed for attacks within a few weeks.

T-MOBILE, SFR LEAD RANKING

Mobile networks of Germany’s T-Mobile and France’s SFR offer their clients best protection against online criminals wanting to intercept their calls or track their movements, shows a new ranking Nohl will demonstrate at his presentation.

The new ranking, at gsmmap.org, lets consumers to see how their operators are performing and lets anyone to participate in measurement of their carriers’ security.

Researchers reviewed 32 operators in 11 countries and rated their performance based on how easy it was for them to intercept the calls, impersonate someone’s device or track the device.

“None of the networks protects users very well,” Nohl said.

The sample is set to grow from 32 carriers dramatically next year as the tool enables anyone to participate in gathering of the data.

Nohl said mobile telecom operators could easily improve their clients’ security, in many cases by just updating their software.

“Mobile network is by far the weakest part of the mobile ecosystem, even when compared to a lot attacked Android or iOS devices,” he said.

Researchers reviewed operators in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Morocco, Slovakia, Switzerland and Thailand.

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Mat Smith, Engadget, 12/15/2011

Microsoft can’t release apps quick enough. Bolstering the cross-platform likes of SkyDrive, OneNote and Kinectimals, its Lync app is the latest addition to the app roster. The corporate communication app ties together instant messaging, audio conferencing and VoIP calls on both Windows Phone and Android devices, while the Symbian and iOS versions are still being vetted for approval. According to the official blog, the app will offer a similar experience across platforms, which makes sense for the enterprise-centric Lync — and an increasingly fractured business phone market.

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Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld, 12/14/2011

Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service debuted for iPhones this week, after it had been available to Windows users for several years and on Windows Phone 7 devices more recently. Microsoft understands that a lot of Windows users are carrying iPhones with them, so SkyDrive for iOSis a welcome addition, but the personal cloud market already offers plenty of choice.

If you have an iPhone and want cloud storage, chances are you already use Dropbox or Box.net—or Apple’s own iCloud—but Microsoft’s SkyDrive has one major advantage over them: it offers 25GB of free storage for your documents or media files. In comparison, Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage, while Apple and Box’s free accounts offer 5GB free storage.

To access your SkyDrive files, you will first have to sign in with your Windows Live/Hotmail credentials. The app has four main tabs that give you access to all your files and folders, recently edited files, a handy list of files you shared or have been shared with you, and a settings tab.

From the files or recent tabs, you can preview any Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents you have stored on SkyDrive, as well as photos, videos or music. A nice touch is the ability to stream songs you have stored on SkyDrive directly onto the iPhone, and given the 25GB storage capacity, you can fit quite a few of them there. Another good feature is the ability to check your OneNote notes (Microsoft released an iOS OneNote app this week, too) directly in the SkyDrive My Documents folder. Additionally you can organize your files in folders straight from within the app.

If you are a Dropbox power user though, don’t rush to say goodbye to the service just yet. In my hands-on tour of SkyDrive for iOS, I found the service is great way to access your files remotely, especially if you have a PC or a Hotmail account. But if you are looking for advanced functionality such as opening a file in an external app, SkyDrive is just not there yet.

For example, you can preview a Word document from within the app and you can share it via email for viewing only or editing on Microsoft’s online version of Word. However, there is no option to open the document into an iOS app, like you can with Dropbox, so you can edit it straight on the device. SkyDrive for iOS doesn’t let you upload anything other than photos or videos taken with your phone, so if you created a Word file in Pages, you can’t get it on your SkyDrive via the app.

However, these shortcomings of SkyDrive for iPhone could be just temporary, as new features can be implement via subsequent software updates. Microsoft also released OneNote and Kinectimals apps for iOS this week, but it seems the company is yet to give any attention to Android users, as Microsoft is busy with patent suits with Android manufacturers.

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