No doubt your summer celebrations this weekend will leave you little time to catch up on reading. To help you out, we’ve compiled a handy roundup of this week’s most helpful, informative and inspiring stories.
We’ve celebrated iPhone’s birthday, we’ve pondered celebrity impact on social good, and we’ve laughed over geeky gadgets. This week Mashable overflowed with engaging content. Find out what you missed!
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How much do you know about protecting the computer you carry with you every day — your mobile device?
As mobile gaming, mobile commerce and mobile computing in general explode, so do the opportunities for mobile exploits. Put simply, tapping the wrong link on your phone can land you in just as much trouble as clicking the wrong link from your laptop or other computer.
A phishing attack — wherein a user is prompted by a seemingly legitimate page to enter certain log-in credentials such as PayPal or banking information — isn’t a sophisticated hack that programmatically sifts through your data or bricks your hardware. Rather, it relies on a certain lack of caution and naiveté on the part of users.
And given the state of mobile applications, cybercriminals can often use the same mechanisms — Facebook scams, spam email, etc. — that they’d use to nab your data while you’re using a more traditional computer.
Mobile security firm Lookout has done some research on mobile phishing attacks and compiled the data into this infographic.
Is mobile security something you think about or are concerned about?
Click image to see larger version.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DougSchneiderPhoto
More About: Mobile 2.0, phish, phishing, security
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Unless you live under a rock (that is, a rock without cable TV), you’ve probably noticed the food truck phenomenon that has made meals on wheels chic and inspired several shows on the Food Network.
But while food trucks may be booming, stationary restaurants still have one distinct advantage: You know where to find them. When struck with a craving for tacos, it’s easier to Google the Mexican restaurant down the street than to track down a Kogi Korean BBQ truck.
Using Twitter feeds, GPS and truck-reported location data, several apps are aiming to even the reliability playing field by plotting gourmet food trucks on mobile maps. None of them have achieved an exhaustive or completely accurate system, but depending on where you live, these five apps will give you a much better shot at tracking down your favorite mobile meals.
Food Truck Fiesta is a simple $.99 iPhone and Android app based on a blog of the same name. The site posts updates about new food trucks and food-truck events, maintains a catalog of food trucks and tracks trucks on a live map using their Twitter feeds. The app is basically the map in mobile form. Clicking a truck’s location pulls up its Twitter feed.
Food Network’s Eat St. show highlights the most innovative mobile cuisine in North America. Its free iPhone and Android apps are attempting to help viewers track down gourmet meals on wheels near them.
With somewhat of a different approach than most of the food-tracking apps on the market, Eat St. allows food truck owners to update their own locations, menus, hours and profiles. Other food trucks can be added by users, but their profiles remain barren and their locations dubious.
“We’re devoted to finding new ways to keep locations accurate and are constantly improving,” reads the current app description. “In the meantime, the most accurate cities are those with mostly stationary food carts. L.A., New York, Miami and San Francisco have mainly roaming food carts and while the database has grown, it’s best to get location from the carts’ Twitter feed.”
These limitations aren’t unlike those of most food truck tracking apps — Eat St. just seems to be more honest about them.
Like Food Truck Fiesta, Roaming Hunger is a blog that chronicles food truck news and events. Its scope is much larger than L.A., however, and its catalog includes a smattering of trucks in most major cities.
The free iPhone app uses tweets and calendars to keep track of the trucks. You can search for trucks near you, those recently tweeted, most liked, savory, sweet or vegetarian. It also allows you to plan ahead by searching for trucks that are open at different times.
Because it covers many cities, its library isn’t as extensive as some city-specific apps, and like most apps that rely on Twitter and calendars, its map points represent predictions rather than actual locations.
L.A.-based RoadStoves sells food trucks and books food trucks for promotions and events. Its free iPhone and Android apps use actual GPS location to track food trucks.
This makes its map one of the most accurate, but also one of the most sparse. Most of its trucks are in Los Angeles, and only about 15 of them are GPS-enabled. The app makes it easy to access the Twitter feeds and menus of other trucks, but it doesn’t put them on them on the map.
TruxMap’s free iPhone and Android apps plot open food trucks near you in green, and soon-to-open food trucks in blue. It uses the trucks’ Twitter feeds to track and plot their locations.
The app makers say they’re tracking trucks in 21 cities, but the majority of them are in Los Angeles, Austin and New York. Users can request new trucks be added to the app via the website.
The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. In New York City or San Francisco and want a free scoop? Follow @BenJerrysTruck and @BenJerrysWest for details!
Photo courtesy of Flickr, alykat
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PayPal has just hit a new milestone: The payments platform has more than 100 million active accounts.
The news, announced by PayPal President Scott Thompson, also comes with a bold prediction: By 2015, the wallet will become a thing of the past.
“As the trend toward digital currency continues to gain momentum, we are focused on delivering solutions that are not just new and different, but better than what is currently the norm today,” Thompson said in a blog post.
“We believe that by 2015 digital currency will be accepted everywhere in the U.S. -– from your local corner store to Walmart. We will no longer need to carry a wallet.”
To back his assertion, PayPal is launching a new campaign that will challenge five Bay area residents to only use digital currency to pay for all of their purchases — no cash allowed. It’s an intriguing campaign that could become a good marketing tool for the company.
PayPal has been on a tear in recent years, generating more and more of eBay’s total net revenues and profits. The company is expected to facilitate more than $3 billion in mobile transactions this year alone.
The payments company faces some powerful challengers, though. Google recently unveiled its mobile payment solution, Google Wallet, to the world. PayPal has sued the search giant, accusing two of PayPal’s former executives (now with Google) of stealing and sharing trade secrets.
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Four years ago today, Apple released the original iPhone. The hype that preceded the release of the so-called “Jesus Phone” was nothing short of staggering.
Analysts, tech blogs and consumers oscillated between hyping the phone as the second-coming or deriding it as much-ado about nothing. In 2007, I was both an Apple fan (I purchased my first iPod in 2002) and a mobile phone fanatic. Still, I had my doubts about the iPhone because of its outlandish price, its carrier lock (and the carrier of choice) and the lack of third-party applications. I thought, OK, the iPhone will probably sell pretty well, but it’s not going to change the mobile phone industry.
The details and investment into the narrative surrounding the iPhone’s launch wasn’t like other tech products — or even other Apple products. It was more like a highly promoted, well publicized and much buzzed about movie. The only question was, would the iPhone be an Ishtar (a highly publicized failure), or a Titanic (surpassing even the most hopeful expectations)?
In four years, the iPhone has utterly transformed the mobile industry. One can debate how much Apple innovated versus refined when it comes to certain features (touchscreens and app stores existed before the iPhone), but when we look at the mobile industry, there is a very clear line between what happened before June 29, 2007, and what happened after. I would argue that every major smartphone that has gone into production since the iPhone’s release has, in some way, been a response to the iPhone itself.
The iPhone not only transformed the mobile industry, but changed Apple as a company. In 2007, Apple was nearly 10 years into a fantastic business turnaround. Propelled by the early success of the iMac and pushed further into the black with the iBook, iPod, iTunes and the transition to Intel processors, the iPhone took Apple into an entirely different direction.
As our lovely infographic showcases, Apple’s stock has nearly tripled over the past four years. The company now has a market cap of more than $300 billion, exceeding that of Microsoft. Apple’s revenues are now higher than Microsoft’s, too — something that would have been a laughable suggestion four years ago.
Four years after the first iPhone was released, a lot has changed in the mobile space. Smartphone adoption has finally gone mainstream. The fortunes of Nokia, RIM and Palm (now HP) have significantly changed. The big leader in the mobile OS space is Android, Google’s open source OS that debuted a year and a half after the original iPhone.
One thing that hasn’t changed (aside from Apple’s aversion to Flash on mobile devices) is the hype and furry that the iPhone still incites in both its supporters and its detractors. Rumors of the iPhone 5 are likely to continue to build throughout the summer, ebbing the hype to the point that all of us will ask, “Can anything really meet these expectations?” Only this time, we know how this story ends.
After all, if the iPhone was Titanic, the iPad was Avatar. Now we just have to wait for the sequels.
More About: apple, apps, infographics, iOS, iphone, Mashable Infographics, Mobile 2.0, stats, trending
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Owners of Windows Phone 7 devices, rejoice: The time to crush those dastardly pigs with angry, feathered projectiles is nigh!
Yes, Angry Birds is now available for WP7, and it goes for $2.99.
The megapopular game has been spreading to a variety of platforms like wildfire in the past year, including Windows, Facebook and even Roku, so it was definitely time to see it on Windows Phone 7 as well.
You can get it here, and if you’re not ready to spend the money right now, don’t worry, a free trial is also available.
More About: angry birds, microsoft, Mobile 2.0, mobile platform, smartphone, windows phone, windows phone 7, wp7
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Onavo
Quick Pitch: Onavo helps smartphone users reduce, understand and manage their data usage.
Genius Idea: Data shrinkage.
It’s likely the coveted unlimited mobile phone data plan will soon become a relic of a simpler, less data-hungry mobile past. And yet, our data consumption will only grow exponentially on mobile as devices become more sophisticated and our lives become more centered around them.
“As a society, we’re addicted to data, especially on mobile devices,” says Guy Rosen, co-founder and CEO of Onavo. “There just isn’t the infrastructure there to see this addiction. This is how Onavo came into being.”
Onavo launched its first application for iPhone in April of this year to give mobile users transparency and control over the data they consume.
“Our mission is to empower mobile users to take back control of their mobile data,” Rosen says. “It’s a resource. You’re paying for it. You should get to decide how it’s used, when and how much.”
Onavo, says Rosen, saves you money, plain and simple. “It connects your phone to what we call the ‘magical shrinking machine.’ This means that all the data you consume on your phone is compressed … we shrink it by as much as 80%, which means you pay less.”
How Onavo shrinks your mobile data is a tightly kept secret — all Rosen reveals is that the startup has developed an array of compression techniques. The magical shrinking machine is mysteriously working away; it’s saved app users more than 6.5 million megabytes since launch. “That’s about 75 megabytes a minute,” Rosen says. “Megabytes consumed by more than 55,000 apps,” he adds.
In addition to data shrinkage, Onavo provides the iPhone user with visibility as to which of their applications are consuming the most data. The intention, says Rosen, is to inform mobile users and help them make smarter choices and ultimately save money.
Eventually, Onavo hopes to mature into an even more intelligent service that watches users’ backs as they consume mobile data.
“Today we focus … on compression. What we’re working on is to expand the level of information that we can provide to users,” says Rosen. The idea, he says, is to have an application that manages your data usage for you.
In the more immediate future, Onavo will release an Android build for beta testers. Rosen says the application will be slightly different in nature, but equally impressive.
Onavo is a venture-backed startup with $3 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Magma Venture Partners.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sd619
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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While near field communication and QR code marketing campaigns are all the rage, the 2D bar codes pushing mobile payments are a little less sexy. Starbucks Card Mobile is a three-part system that includes 2D bar codes, scanners and mobile phone applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and now Android.
This seemingly simple system — especially when stacked up against Google’s pending NFC mobile payments program — allows Starbucks customers to pay with their phones at roughly 9,000 locations in the U.S. It has also helped the coffee company stand alone as the only large-scale mobile payments provider.
In fact, by March 2011, nine weeks after the nationwide rollout of its mobile payments program, Starbucks had processed more than 3 million payments.
In an interview with Mashable, Adam Brotman, Starbucks’ vice president and general manager of digital ventures and the man overseeing the mobile payments project, sheds light on the company’s approach to innovation, how it successfully predicted a trend in the making and how it used accessible and consumer-friendly technologies to bring the solution to market immediately.
“Sometimes, innovation isn’t about doing something that is overly complicated; it’s about seeing something that’s right in front of you and seeing it in a way that other people haven’t thought about,” says Brotman.
Brotman’s words typify the company’s internal technology maxim: improving the in-store customer experience should drive technological innovation, and not the other way around. This is how Starbucks Card Mobile came to be.
Prior to 2009, the Starbucks Card and loyalty program — the plastic cards for purchase and the then-newly introduced My Starbucks Rewards loyalty program — were beginning to take off, explains Brotman. At the time, the company’s card and loyalty team began to think about now they could build mobile payment options into the existing program.
As Brotman tells the story, Chuck Davidson, Starbucks’ category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card, had an early breakthrough with his team after realizing that most stores already have bar code scanners.
The idea, says Brotman, was that “we could essentially replicate, in a very secure way, our Starbucks Card…with 2D bar codes.”
“There was the notion that a 2D barcode was feasible,” he adds, indicating that replicating Starbucks Cards with 2D bar codes on mobile phones would allow the company to release a solution immediately. No need to wait for mobile phone technologies to catch up to more sophisticated solutions.
The mobile payment system went into production in 2009. By September of the same year, Starbucks was ready to pilot an early version of the program at 16 stores in Seattle and the Bay Area.
The company measured the pilot according to three specific parameters: Could Starbucks roll out scanners to all stores? Would mobile payments offer customers an easier way to pay? And, would store baristas understand and embrace the system?
The answer to each of those questions was yes, Brotman says. “One of the things that we learned in the test was that mobile payments gave the store partners and our customers an extra moment to connect.”
Brotman describes Starbucks’ internal corporate culture around technology as trend and technology-agnostic. “We are not about technology for technology’s sake,” he says. “We are not deploying cutting-edge technology just for the sake of trying to do something for us.”
Instead, the customer experience drives the innovation process at Starbucks, Brotman says. “Any time there’s an opportunity to enhance the customer experience through innovation, the company rallies behind it.”
What role is Starbucks playing in the broader mobile payments sector? A substantial one, when you consider that the company has not only proven that customers do indeed want to pay with their phones, but that it has deployed a fully-functional nationwide system now accessible to 90% of smartphone owners.
Starbucks is also exploring ways to extend the program and make Starbucks Card Mobile a payment option wherever consumers buy Starbucks products. Starbucks Card payments now represent 20% of all in-store transactions.
Brotman, however, seems less interested in cementing Starbucks’ name as the flagship company pushing the mobile payments space forward.
“We do not worry about what role we play in some overall movement. We worry about how we can continue to innovate and push initiatives forward that make our customer experience better,” Brotman says. “Given the size of our footprint and our traffic, by definition, almost anything we do in this space will be important and probably leading in some respect.”
The movement is palpable and the push is happening. Google, Square and a slew of carriers and startups are pushing full-speed-ahead on their own mobile payment systems. Both Google and Square also consider the mobile phone a type of wallet, but they differ in how to process the “electronic cards” stored in consumers’ mobile wallets. Google Wallet payments are initiated via tap-to-pay markers and NFC-enabled phones, while Square transactions are entirely application and name-driven.
Not surprisingly, just as is this case with Starbucks Card Mobile, each initiative attaches loyalty program tie-ins. And while Starbucks’ low-tech, 2D bar code approach to pay-by-phone is not being replicated by either Google or Square, the company’s pre-2009 hypothesis that mobile payments would work best as a natural extension to a loyalty program has certainly proven influential.
The Tech Innovators Series is supported by Lenovo. Lenovo makes machines specifically for the innovators. The creators. The people who move the world forward. Machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad, meticulously engineered with visibly smart second-generation Intel® CoreTM processors to help the people who do, do what’s never been done.
Images courtesy of Flickr, GlobalX and GraceOda
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Half a million Android devices are activated every day, a number that’s growing 4.4% each week, Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin revealed in a tweet.
Android’s growth has been amazing in the past couple of months. In May, Google said 100 million Android devices had been activated and 400,000 devices are activated every day. It took Google’s smartphone platform a month-and-a-half to reach half a million daily activations, and at such an astonishing growth rate, it might reach one million activations per day before the end of the year.
Up until one point, Apple was proudly pointing out the number of daily activations for iOS devices, however, we haven’t heard an official number from the company for a while. According to GigaOM’s recent calculations, Apple has lost this battle and is now trailing significantly behind Android. In terms of market share, Android has been the most popular smartphone platform for quite some time, both globally and in the U.S.
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Samsung will be the manufacturer to create the first smartphone based on the upcoming flavor of Google’s Android platform, Ice Cream Sandwich, BGR reports.
The device, which is reportedly slated for a Thanksgiving release, will be the high end of Android smartphones, with a dual-core 1.2 or even a 1.5 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 4G (LTE) connectivity.
BGR also claims that this will be the first device to sport a 720p, Super AMOLED HD display, manufactured by Samsung. A possible name for the device is “Google Nexus Prime”.
While all of this fall strictly under rumor territory, we definitely wouldn’t mind seeing such a beast as a flagship phone for Ice Cream Sandwich, which will be the version that unifies Android for smartphones, tablets and other connected devices.
[via android, Google, ice cream sandwich, Mobile 2.0, samsung, smartphone
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