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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Dan Elliot, MobileTechToday, 12/14/2011

In what is being called the “guinea pig” for a new generation of GPS satellites, called Block III, a prototype is beginning the testing process at a Lockheed Martin facility. The Block III satellites are expected to allow military and civilian users to determine their position within three feet, compared with 10 feet with current technology.

A $5.5 billion upgrade to the Global Positioning System moved a step closer to launch this week when a prototype arrived at a Lockheed Martin complex in Colorado to begin months of tests.

It’s the guinea pig for a new generation of GPS satellites, called Block III, that’s expected to make military and civilian receivers more accurate, powerful and reliable.

They’re also part of an international effort to allow civilian receivers to use signals from U.S., European, Russian and perhaps other satellite navigation systems.

GPS has become ubiquitous in American civilian and military life, with hundreds of thousands of receivers in cars and weapons systems. Financial systems use GPS receivers to get precise time stamps for transactions, relying on the atomic clocks onboard the satellites.

The Air Force Space Command oversees the U.S. GPS satellites and ground control systems from its headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.

The Block III satellites are expected to allow military and civilian users to determine their position within 3 feet, compared with 10 feet with current technology, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Higher-powered signals from Block III satellites are expected to be harder for enemies to jam and easier for receivers to tune in, especially in urban canyons or under thick tree canopies.

The U.S. and other countries have agreed to make a new, common frequency available to civilians. That means civilian receivers could calculate their position from a number of different satellite navigation systems.

The Block III prototype arrived Monday at an $80 million test facility at Lockheed Martin’s Waterton Canyon complex south of Denver. Workers will do final assembly work on the prototype in a cavernous clean room and then run it through a gantlet of tests.

The prototype won’t be launched into space.

The first flight model is expected to arrive at Waterton Canyon next year and be launched in May 2014.

Flying versions of the satellite will go through final assembly in the same room where the prototype is assembled and tested. They’ll also be subjected to extreme temperatures that mimic conditions in space.

Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Md., has a $1.5 billion Air Force contract to build and test the GPS III prototype and build the first two satellites for launch. The contract includes an option for 10 more.

The company expects the Air Force to authorize construction to begin on the third and fourth flight satellites later this month.

The Pentagon expects to buy and launch a total of 32 Block III satellites. The Air Force says it will cost about $5.5 billion to design, build and launch all the satellites and upgrade the ground control systems.

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Bill Ray, The Register, 11/16/2011

Inside Secure demonstrates NFC in every phone

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Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 10/31/2011

Mobile development firm appMobi is launching a new HTML5-powered browser for iOS on Monday which will bring additional capabilities typically found only in native apps to the mobile Web. The MobiUs Web App Browser, as it’s being called, works both as a standalone browser alternative or in conjunction with Apple’s mobile Safari, similar to the way browser extensions work on the desktop Web.

Although HTML5 can already tap into some of a smartphone’s sensors, like the GPS and accelerometer, for example, appMobi’s MobiUs Web App Browser will go beyond HTML5′s current capabilities to provide access the smartphone’s camera, the ability to scan QR codes and barcodes, support for augmented reality, accelerated graphics, the ability to lock the rotation of the device and more.

The browser integrates two full sets of APIs from both appMobi and from PhoneGap (1.0) to give the Web apps a native look-and-feel, plus the ability to access all the hardware features of the smartphone. Like native apps, the mobile Web apps can work online or off, deliver push notifications and offer in-app purchasing capabilities. AppMobi’s DirectCanvas game acceleration technology is included as well, for optimized HTML5 gaming.

Users won’t have to switch from using Safari as their primary Web browser in order to take advantage of the new functionality, says appMobi. Instead, when a user encounters a webpage that requires the capabilities provided by MobiUs, the Web app in question will prompt you to install the MobiUs iOS app from iTunes. The experience is similar to how online users are prompted to install the Flash plugin to watch online videos. Except in this case, the additional software is not a browser plugin – it’s an app.

After the initial installation, any future Web apps requiring MobiUs’ technology will be able to seamlessly switch over from Safari to MobiUs as need be, without any user intervention. Mobile Web app developers will be able to configure various settings affecting the user experience during the transition, including the customization of the splash screen. And when MobiUs launches, it will be in full-screen mode.

AppMobi knows that, eventually, HTML5 will be able to do what its MobiUs browser is doing today, but those APIs won’t be added to the standard for years. Other solutions, like the HTML5 capabilities chipmaker Qualcomm is working on bringing to mobile, operate lower in the stack than what appMobi offers, and will be provided to OEMs to be sold on new handsets. That’s another way to solve the problem, but on a slower cycle than what appMobi is now doing.

The company had a few developers testing the technology pre-launch, but unfortunately, we couldn’t go hands-on.  It remains to be seen how truly seamless the experience is for the end user or how “native-like” the apps really feel. However, the launch is interesting in terms of its potential to bring that long sought after “write once, run anywhere” ability to Web developers. Now they can write for the desktop, Facebook, iOS and soon, Android, using HTML5, without having to sacrifice so much functionality when porting the codebase to mobile.

The MobiUs app is available here. The Android version will arrive early next year.

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Sean Gallagher, ArsTechnica, 10/18/2011

A group of researchers at Virginia Tech have developed software for the Android OS that can enforce policies on mobile devices based on what room they’re in. It can even make sure that sensitive data doesn’t walk out the door with them by wiping it from a phone’s memory. The technology, which has gotten the attention of Google’s federal government group and several defense systems integrators, could eventually be used to protect patient data on doctors’ tablets and sensitive military and intelligence information. Virginia Tech researchers even suggest it could be used to prevent students from texting during classes.

While there are existing applications that manage the security of mobile devices, and technology to locate a phone by GPS is readily available, GPS signals can’t be used accurately inside a building to create policy zones as small as a conference room. So Virginia Tech researchers have been looking at other ways to use smartphones’ built-in hardware to sense where the device is. Their prototype system, which is about to be released as an open-source project, uses Bluetooth and near field communications (NFC) wireless signals to authenticate the location of the device.

Developed with funding from the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation, the software is a modified version of the Android operating system that adds a policy engine on top of Android’s security model. Jules White, assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, told Ars Technica in an interview that the prototype system, which was deployed on Google Nexus S phones, uses NFC to pass the phone a location-based key, and Bluetooth for the phone to communicate a confirmation of its location to a management server. ”We could theoretically do that all with just Bluetooth,” White said. “But NFC adds that extra guarantee that you’re actually in the room.” Because of Bluetooth’s longer range, the signal could leak out of the space being identified, potentially weakening the system’s security.

The software uses the location-based authentication along with a policy engine to enable or disable Android features and applications. The policy engine can allow users to access sensitive information on the phone that is restricted to the physical space they’re in, creating a “data jail,” White said. Since it also can control inter-process communications on the phone, it can control where data is stored to by applications, forcing data to be written to memory instead of to SIM cards or other storage. “If you walk out of the room, or you haven’t hit the NFC key for a certain amount of time,” White explained, “it can clear the data out of memory.”

Because the wireless technology used for the system is all built into the Nexus S phone, a phone can even act as the base station to verify other devices’ locations. White said that this could allow for the creation of a temporary “bubble” of data sharing at any location within a building. The Virginia Tech team is also investigating other ways to create location awareness for mobile devices, including signals that could be picked up by audio (such as a special pattern of “white noise”) or by the phone’s camera. “But using the camera would require a person to orient the phone in a certain way,” White said, so that approach may not be practical.

The core of the software used in the project is open-source, and efforts are being made now by White and his research team (Masters candidates Paul N. Miranda and Danny Guymon, and PhD candidate Hamilton Turner) to post the code to a GIT site. “Right now it’s just a research project,” White said, but he adds that there are hopes of commercialization of the technology—either through a partner or a Virginia Tech startup.

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Jordon Crook, TechCrunch, 10/5/2011

After years of having a GPS-equipped phone, the idea of not having GPS is a little crazy. Even with smartphone adoption rates dramatically increasing, there are still plenty of folks out there with maps and awesome memories. But come 2018, all of our directionally gifted friends will have GPS on their phones like it or not.

The FCC has ruled that all telephone service providers — including VOiP services — must offer only GPS-capable handsets by 2018 to better aid in pin-pointing the location of 911 calls.

According to Courthouse News Service, it’s still unclear what the sunset deadline is for use of phones not equipped with GPS. 911 calls from phones without GPS require the carrier to triangulate the caller’s location from cell towers, which is less efficient than the phone’s GPS simply relaying location data back to emergency services.

Either way, the FCC estimates that with or without the new rules, 85 percent of cell phone owners will have GPS-equipped devices by 2018. Hopefully the leftover 15 percent gets with the program before anything that requires a call to 911 goes down.

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Michelle Haag, CrackBerry, 9/20/2011

If you’re a BlackBerry developer you may be interested in knowing that Research In Motion officially launched the Wi-Fi geolocation service a little over a week ago. Using Wi-Fi Access Point data that has been collected anonymously from your BlackBerry, this technology can provide location based sharing apps (such as foursquare or Twitter) a quick and accurate location fix.

Wi-Fi geolocation is faster and more convenient than GPS-based and Cell-site based location as well as uses less bandwidth, though the accuracy falls somewhere between that of GPS and Cell-site. APIs are available for devices running BlackBerry 6 OS and and higher, though service provisioning may take up to 3 more weeks.

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Lance Whitney, CNETNews, 8/16/2011

A new flavor of Android malware is disguising itself as a Google+ app in an attempt to capture instant messages, GPS, location, call logs, and other sensitive data.

Uncovered by the team at Trend Micro, the new malware known as ANDROIDOS_NICKISPY.C can also automatically answer and record phone calls. To capture data, the app loads at boot-up and runs certain services that can monitor messages, phone calls, and the user’s location, thereby stealing e-mail and other content.

Detailing its findings in a blog Friday, Trend Micro said it discovered that the malicious app tries to trick people by installing itself under the name Google++.

But instead of providing access to Google’s new social network, the app sends its stolen user data to a remote site where presumably cybercriminals can grab it. Unlike some malware in the past that masqueraded as legitimate apps through Google’s Android Market, this particular one must be downloaded by an unsuspecting user from a malicious Web site and then manually installed.

And even if installed, the app can be uninstalled from an Android device by selecting Settings > Application > Manage applications, choosing Google++ and then clicking Uninstall, according to Trend Micro.

Trend Micro gives the app a low-risk rating, but it’s still something that Android owners should be sure to avoid.

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Matthew Rogers, LifeHackers, 6/14/2011

The Google Search mobile landing page got a change overnight that deeply integrates Google Places, making it easier to find nearby restaurants, coffee shops, and bars directly from the front page. Other Places directories, like ATMs, fast food, and gas stations, can be searched locally with just one more tap of the finger.

Tapping any of the directory sections leads to a sleek, scrollable list of businesses, with a Google Map at the top of the screen that changes dynamically to show the locations currently being listed on the screen. It’s all so smooth and snappy that, if you weren’t using Places much before, you may start to.

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David Murphy, PC Mag, 5/1/2011

Just how important is location-based data to Google? Just how important is it for the sun to rise each morning? Same deal.

This question comes in the wake of eyes turning toward mobile handsets—specifically, Apple’s iPhone and smartphones based on Google’s Android OS—for the information they collect about the various wireless access points and cell phone towers the devices connect to (or notice) throughout the course of a given day.

We’ve already covered Apple’s response to the allegations that the company tracks one’s location via iPhones: It doesn’t, says Apple. The information found on one’s iPhone isn’t personal movement tracking, rather, a subset of a larger list of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular access points that gets downloaded to one’s iPhone. This list is used by the iPhone to help it more quickly triangulate its position and connect to available access points, a process that would take much longer if the smartphone relied on a GPS-based lookup of its location each time.

So what about Google?

In Google’s case, the concept is the same, but the reasoning for doing so is a bit different. Google needs to be able to pinpoint the location of wireless signals emanating into the airwaves, for it uses this information to better help a smartphone triangulate its position. And, in doing so, this presumably allows a smartphone to know where it is for services like Foursquare or location-based advertising, among other products.

“Information about the location of WiFi networks improves the accuracy of the location-based services, such as Google Maps or driving directions, that Google provides to consumers,” said Google last year in a letter to U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman. “Because GPS and cell tower data can be unreliable or inaccurate, in some cases using the location of Wi-Fi access points can enable a smartphone to pinpoint its own location more quickly and accurately.”

However, the information Google receives about nearby wireless points from Android smartphones—an opt-in process—has been made even more critical, for the company has chosen to no longer collect this Wi-Fi information using its fleet of Street View cars. Google abandoned the practice late last year after it was revealed that the company unintentionally collected “payload data” from unsecured wireless networks as its Street View cars drove by.

A memo between Google product managers and now-CEO Larry Page, sent last year in the wake of Motorola opting to use a different location data service over Google’s, reveals just how critical Android Wi-Fi tracking has become.

“I cannot stress enough how important Google’s wifi location database is to our Android and mobile product strategy,” wrote Google location service product manager Steve Lee. “We absolutely do care about this (decision by Motorola) because we need wifi data collection in order to maintain and improve our wifi location service.”

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