Symantec and Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) signed an agreement today to collaborate on developing protected security applications for smartphones and tablets. The partnership is significant because the collaboration will address a major obstacle in mobile security which has been holding back the reliance on smart devices for critical applications. The cooperation aims to leverage the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a hardware technology which aims attest the authenticity of a platform and the operating system (OS) in order to ensure that an authentic OS starts up in a trusted environment. TEE consequently allows the trusted OS to deploy addition security capabilities. G&D offers the Trusted Service Manager (TSM) and the underlying TEE to protect cryptographic keys and credentials. Symantec will use the TSM to re-enforce security in its Symantec Validation and ID Protection Service (VIP) two-factor authentication.

BAE Systems and Vodafone announced this week a five-year partnership to provide businesses with a range of advanced communications and security products. The collaboration will be initially focused on smartphones and tablet, with a first product announced for spring 2013: the Vodafone Mobile Threat Manager, a “cloud-based mobile security solution”. The solution looks to be a network-based one, scanning traffic on the carrier’s network for malware and other suspicious data. The cloud platform intimates that the mobile client will likely be light and able to run on a variety of different brands, ideally using minimal power and with real-time updates. More details will undoubtedly emerge closer to launch. The Threat Manager will be provided to Vodafone’s 1,500 enterprise consumers, as well as to BAE System’s 35,000 UK employees – a well-populated testing ground for the product launch.

The government of Myanmar, formally known as Burma, is planning to issue telecommunication license to four operators (two local operators and two foreign operators) by the first half of 2013.

"If 3G will only be here for a short while, we would rather skip the generation and put our money where the future is," the country manager of Essar Telecom, Kenya, Madhur Taneja said. Operating under the brand "yu," the telco is the only one out of the four tier-one mobile carriers which has yet to offer 3G services.

It has been widely commented on that NFC is now happening (at last) - but how widespread is this mood of optimism?  I have lost count of the number of times friends have asked me "What can I do with my new phone?  It's got NFC but I don't know what to do with it?"

This TechCrunch column about the differences between B2C and B2B start-ups reminded me of one issue that I’ve been pondering lately, as part of our mobile application storefronts research. (Yes, I rather dogmatically keep calling them app or application storefronts and not simply “app stores”, just to distinct the term from Apple’s, eh, app store. And yes, it’s a mouthful and I sometimes do feel quite apologetic about it.) Very much the same difference – the lesser opportunity for going viral if you’re a B2B player, and the correspondingly greater need to invest in sales and marketing – applies to enterprise mobile apps in comparison to their consumer-facing counterparts. A large part of this bottleneck is related to the discovery loop of the apps, and specifically in the sense that enterprise apps still lack proper go-to marketplaces to distribute them. The consumer apps tend to have it much easier, since they can benefit from the halo effect that comes from all those eyeballs that are drawn to browse App Store (sic), Google Play, and the others.

The IPv4 – IPv6 debate has almost exclusively focused on when the internet addresses will actually run out. Vendors and technical standards organizations have done most of the groundwork to facilitate a smooth transition. Further than that however, many businesses have not really thought about the implications of this transition. And they should be because the transition will not be automatic. For enterprise security especially, action is necessary. In fact, failure to act will leave the corporate network vulnerable to all kinds of malware and cyber threats. 

In the middle of last year, this market research company published a report (RR-TWEEN-12) on top-end smartphones suggesting a possible new segmentation within the mobile device market. Phablets, or larger-than-usual smartphones, are those measuring between 4.6 and 6.5 inches diagonally across the touchscreen. Some may point back to Dell's attempt at a larger smartphone, the Dell Streak. Most people, however, will consider Samsung's mammoth Galaxy Note to have been the first successful phablet device. Despite its success, upon the Note's release, many people criticized its bulging dimensions and believed that only travelling businesspeople/professionals and artistic/designer types would be drawn to the new device.

For much of 2011 and 2012, it looked like mobile carriers were just the utility companies for the Web 2.0 economy. Apple with Siri, Google with its mapping and search capabilities, Facebook with its social networking clout… but we are now starting to see carriers fight back. The first time I started to hear about this possible reality was from the CEO of Korea’s Uplus 4G mobile carrier, Sangchui LEE, who talked about 4G enabling “rich media mash-ups” in mid-2012. More recently, AT&T held a Developer Summit at CES and it certainly seems AT&T is keen to get to that new rich media mash-up reality.