campustechnology.com - The use of mobile devices for all activities computing-related has also driven an evolution in emergency management in education. According to the Tomi Ahonen Almanac, the average user checks his or her mobile phone 150 times per day. That puts the smart device on the front lines of communication for crisis situations. In Case of Crisis, a company with a mobile app that lets organizations maintain and distribute role-based emergency information in a mobile format, has identified four trends worth noting for the coming year.
Two-way communication is on the rise. Increasingly, said Chris Britton, general manager of Irving Burton Associates, schools are putting an emphasis on getting emergency response into the "hands" of the community by allowing those closest to the situation to communicate via their phones with first responders.
Mobile apps are being integrated. Universities will "mash-up" more technologies and software tools into mobile apps in the coming year. This will include integrating home-grown and commercial services to increase the overall adoption of the app.
Specialized emergency or security devices are on the decline. As mobile devices begin to serve as the unifying vehicle for communication, specialized gear and practices such as standalone alarms and emergency blue light systems, and even 911 calls will begin to disappear.
GPS and geo-fencing technologies will come to the forefront. As more GPS manufacturers begin to offer floor-by-floor detailed interior guidance and other mobile technologies such as geo-fencing, first responders will be better able to isolate the location of certain emergencies in closer or wider proximities, depending on the situation. That locational data, said Britton, will allow participants in the emergency to have greater insight and clarity to minimize disasters and better communicate with others.
"While traditional emergency and business continuity plans are intended to help save lives, mitigate disasters, and provide other instructions for unexpected events, the reality is that they are often not actionable in the midst of a crisis or emergency situation," said Britton. "The impending paradigm shift of intelligent mobile solutions is empowering organizations and individuals to work collectively to overcome crisis situations with safety as the paramount outcome."
In Case of Crisis is currently in use by College of William & Mary, the University of Georgia, and Northwest Missouri State University, among others. The service is available to run on iOS and Android devices.

information-management.com - The past year has seen a frenzy of activity in the mobile apps and devices market, with a slew of product announcements from hardware and software vendors. It was also a year that saw lots of analysis of the industry. Here's a summary of findings and observations on the mobile market from leading IT research and analysis firms.

mobileworldlive.com - Apple and China Mobile finally confirmed a long-anticipated deal which will see the world's biggest mobile operator selling the iPhone, with its debut scheduled for early in 2014.
The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile's retail stores as well as from the vendor's retail network beginning 17 January 2014. Preregistration will begin on 25 December 2013.
Pricing details will be released "at a later date".
The operator said that the launch of the device will be "a big boost to the development of China's homegrown 4G/TD-LTE technology".
Updating on the status of its 4G rollout, the company said that by the end of 2013 its service will be available in 16 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
By the end of 2014, it intends to complete the rollout of more than 500,000 4G base stations, which will cover more than 340 cities with 4G services.
"iPhone customers in China are an enthusiastic and rapidly growing group, and we can't think of a better way to welcome in the Chinese New Year than getting an iPhone into the hands of every China Mobile customer who wants one," said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.
The Apple/China Mobile deal has been anticipated for some time, with China Mobile being the only one of China's three operators not to offer the device.
While this has not been aided by the operator's choice of 3G technology - TD-SCDMA - which has not been supported by earlier versions of the iPhone, the move to 4G (TD-LTE) sees China Mobile moving to a more widely-adopted technology.
But there is still a significant issue in terms of pricing: with the iPhone being a premium device, it is not immediately obvious how big the potential customer base will be.
However, coupled with 4G services, it will provide the operator with an attractive proposition to attract high-end customers - a market where it has lost some influence through its 3G choices.

mobileworldlive.com - The installed base of "big brand" tablets F from vendors such as Apple and Samsung - will pass 285 million units at the end of 2013, according to ABI Research.
In the US, which has been "the largest single tablet market since inception", the total is more than 70 million, or about one for every four people.
Jeff Orr, senior practice director for the company, said: "The initial iPad shipments are aging out with the first wave of replacement tablets expected over the next six months. We believe about 51 per cent of the tablet installed base is coming from iOS and 40 per cent Android when all is said and done in 2013."
The company also noted that Samsung "continues to make gains in the Android tablet segment", with 20 per cent growth in the third quarter of 2013.
The South Korean giant has increased its marketing spend as it promotes several tablet sub-brands, "and looks to receive some halo effect from the success of its Galaxy S4 smartphone and the Galaxy Gear companion smart watch device".
Apple has also "shored up its two-year ASP haemorrhaging" by increasing its iPad value "nearly 1 per cent to $439".
Unit shipments in Q3 were down 4 per cent from the prior sequential period and revenue down about 3 per cent, ahead of the launch of the iPad Air and second-generation iPad Mini.

mobiwork.com - Florida based MobiWork® today announced that Support Cargo, a Brazilian leader in the logistics market, has selected MobiWork® MWS for its supply chain management operations.
"MobiWork helps us increase our overall productivity and visibility in our supply chain management operations," said João Carlos Nehring, Support Cargo Founder and President. "Real-time insight is critical to properly monitor our complex operations, guarantee our service level agreements and respond to any events with fast and accurate decisions."
Hervé Rivère, founder and CEO of MobiWork® stated: "Support Cargo is a world class organization and we are extremely pleased to be working with such a highly regarded company in the supply chain management and overall logistics market. We look forward to expanding our relationship in the years to come."
MobiWork will be attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 24th, 2014 through the 28th and will be available to demonstrate its solutions on-site.
About Support Cargo
Support Cargo® is one of the leading logistics and supply chain management providers in Brazil. Support Cargo has been providing logistic solutions for more than 25 years to major companies including Electrolux, WhirlPool, General Motors, Goodyear... Support Cargo operates a fleet of more than 400 vehicles on a daily basis and generated revenues in excess of 100 million R$ in 2013.
About MobiWork
MobiWork® is a privately held software technology company based in Florida, specializing in smartphone and cloud based mobile workforce solutions for field sales, field services and logistics. MobiWork® solutions increase productivity, improve information exchange and customer satisfaction. They are deployed in minutes, cost effective, highly customizable, easily integrated with existing software, and reflect best business practices.
For more information visit http://www.mobiwork.com or contact 1-888-MOBI-WRK or sales(at)mobiwork(dot)com.

computerworld.com - Apple has won the hearts and minds of small- and mid-sized businesses, which have overwhelmingly adopted Cupertino's mobile devices over rivals powered by Android or Windows, an Exchange hosting vendor said last week.
According to Intermedia, 76% of the customer-activated mobile devices for the year through October ran iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. The majority of them were iPhones.
Samsung and Motorola mobile devices -- both of those companies rely mostly on Android -- came in second and third with 12% and less than 6%, respectively.
Windows-powered smartphones and tablets accounted for just 1% of all activations in the 10-month period, about the same as the sinking BlackBerry.
Intermedia measured mobile device preferences by tallying activations of ActiveSync, Microsoft's de facto industry-standard synchronization service that keeps email, calendars and contacts in step on smartphones and tablets. Mountain View, Calif.-based Intermedia claims to be the world's largest Exchange hosting service outside Microsoft itself, and touts 90,000 customers that serve 700,000 users.
Mobile PCs, such as notebooks, were not included in Intermedia's numbers, as they access the hosted Exchange servers directly, without needing ActiveSync.
But the company's statistic revealed some notable trends, said Michael Gold, Intermedia's president.
"Interestingly, iPad activations have held relatively steady over the last 36 months, even as iPhone activations have continued to grow," Gold said in an email reply to questions. In October, for example, iPhone activations outnumbered those for iPads by more than four to one.
Since the introduction and start-of-sales for 2013's iPhone models, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have picked the more expensive iPhone 5S 82% of the time, said Intermedia. Its conclusion: Businesses have prioritized functionality over price.
About 23% of the devices activated in the first 10 months of 2013 were from vendors that power the bulk of their smartphones and tablets with Google's Android, giving iOS an advantage of better than three to one.
And Gold was bullish on Microsoft, even though its Windows Phone and Windows operating systems accounted for a puny percentage of activated devices from January through October.
"Windows smartphone and tablet activations ... grew by roughly 93% over [the] period," Gold wrote in an email. "Microsoft's planned purchase of Nokia, along with their aggressive mobile agenda, could make them a viable threat to Samsung and even Apple in the medium term."
Perhaps.
But data on Surface tablet activations provided by Intermedia at Computerworld's request showed that Microsoft's own hardware brand has gained little ground in the SMB space, a market the Redmond, Wash. company dominates on the desktop and one it's hoping can be convinced to swing from iOS and Android.
During the last three months of 2012 and the first ten of 2013, Intermedia counted just 1,700 Surface activations of all types, or less than half the number of iPads for October alone. Surface RT tablets, the lower-priced of the two lines, dominated, accounting for 62% of all Surface activations.
Both the Surface RT and the first-generation Surface Pro showed up in higher numbers on Intermedia's log at their sales start -- October 2012 for the former, February 2013 for the latter -- then trailed off significantly. Surface RT activations, however, began to climb in July, when Microsoft slashed prices to get rid of excess inventory, and then hit a 10-month high in October 2013, when Microsoft rolled out the second-generation Surface 2 but continued to sell the original for $349.

zdnet.com - Many tech and e-commerce brands are primarily concerned with the holiday season, but Intuit is looking several more weeks down the road toward tax season.
It was clear during the software company's quarterly conference call on Thursday that analysts and investors were keen to know more about how Intuit plans to continue growing QuickBooks Online.
Earlier on Thursday, Intuit highlighted amid its fiscal first quarter earnings report that the cloud-based accounting software platform's user base now stands at roughly 516,000, up 29 percent.
The platform appears to be gaining more appeal overseas as the subscriber count outside the U.S. surged by more than 80 percent to over 37,000.
Intuit CEO Brad Smith emphasized during the call that Intuit continues to ramp up international efforts. But he specified that the focus is currently on the following five markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India.
Nevertheless, despite the figures that make the rapid growth look easy, Smith acknowledged there was a challenge around education potential customers:
In fact, with QuickBooks Online, the challenge we had [was] getting people into the actual product and have them be productive as quickly as possible. It took 40 minutes in the old QuickBooks classic to get it set up for you and what times you would need if you had inventory. Now, by using the date in the cloud and finding customers who look like you out of the 500,000 other subscribers, we can get you set up in seconds. We erased the scenes between payroll and payments. You add an employee, and in a three-step process, you're literally paying your employee with payroll. So we're seeing a stronger uptick in the early indicators for attach, which we think will go further into the roll-out.
To keep things moving along, Smith outlined some more details about the roadmap, which includes some developments from earlier this week.
For example, Intuit introduced a revamped Apps.com on Tuesday to simplify the process of developing third-party apps on the QuickBooks accounting software platform. Intuit also made the API for QuickBooks Online available for free in order to draw these third-party apps into the ecosystem in the first place.
And despite still being in beta mode, Intuit also continues to roll out the QuickBooks Online and Square package deal.
"It's about two-thirds of the business in the U.S. that operate on wheels. They paint houses, mow lawns, clean pools," Smith described. "That continues to be a nice complimentary service to our payments offering."
But Intuit's bigger picture, in regards to the Square deal, is to go after the retail and restaurant industries, reiterating a win-win potential scenario here.
"We think between that offering and our on-the-go offering and the fact they all work with QuickBooks as an operating system, this will be a net add to the total payments opportunity, and we believe it will be incremental to our business as well," Smith promised.
Finally, as one more reminder of the changing times, the company chief also hinted at a priority to move QuickBooks users from desktop versions to Online as much as possible.
"The desktop customers that want to up load their data in the cloud continues to grow strong for us, but we are trying aggressively trying to get them convert into QuickBooks Online instead of simply updating their data into the cloud," he remarked.

searchconsumerization.techtarget.com - Companies worldwide will give mobile devices to more employees in 2014 as mobility continues its assimilation into the enterprise.
TechTarget recently surveyed more than 4,100 IT professionals across the globe to learn about their priorities and get a sense of where IT trends are heading in 2014. There was a series of questions related to enterprise mobility and its increasing role in the everyday lives of both IT and end users.
With more devices being provisioned, the biggest opportunity is just being scratched -- and that's with applications.
IT professionals who responded said their companies invest more in hardware, but not as much on back-end management or application development for mobility.
There's also a gap between how big and small companies implement bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, and what kind of choices they allow employees to make about hardware and software.

searchconsumerization.techtarget.com - In September 2013, CNBC commissioned Mobile Elite 2013. Fieldwork was carried out by independent research agency T-Poll, and is the fourth in a series of surveys involving over 1,750 European executive interviews to date. The survey focuses on how the mobile technology revolution is affecting businesses, the explosion of multiple device ownership, changing behaviour of mobile and tablet users, and the impact of social media in a business context.

crn.in - Driven by the twin necessities of resource optimization and business agility, more than 37 percent of organizations across the industry verticals such as FSI, manufacturing, retail, communication and healthcare, in India, consider mobility a top enterprise IT priority for the next fiscal year, according to a newly published research report by IDC titled Enterprise Mobility 2013 Trends and Priorities in India.
The survey was conducted with 430 key decision makers comprising CIOs, CTOs, IT heads, IT Director, etc in India. The major objectives of the study were to identify the current usage and future plans of adoption of such solutions, drivers, and major challenges faced by enterprises.
Mobility is en route to being adopted in the mainstream. IDC expects enterprise mobility to undergo an unprecedented boom to become a necessity for businesses that aspire to lead and compete aggressively. There is a paradigm shift in the IT strategy of 67 percent-a major chunk of vendors that are willing to re-engineer their business processes to implement these solutions and derive business and competitive advantage.
"Young and tech-savvy people for whom mobility is native, are changing the workplace dynamics today. Resource optimization, and the need to increase employee productivity are the top reasons behind the interest evinced by Indian enterprises. Organizations are making the transition from mobilizing the people to mobilizing the business processes," said Jaideep Mehta, VP and Country General Manager, IDC India.
To allay the security and integration concerns of the enterprises, heavy investments would be made in the mobile security and mobile device management spaces in the next 12-24 months.
"With management of employee owned devices becoming a primary concern for most organizations in their mobility journey, mobile device, content and application management tops the list of mobile solutions that organizations will be looking to outsource in the next 12 months," added Shalil Gupta, Director, Insights and Consulting, IDC.

laboratoryequipment.com - Smartphones have the ability to be as transformative in the lab as they have been in our personal lives.
Envision a company on which millions rely for clean, safe drinking water. To deliver that vision, and ensure the region's water is contaminant-free, the company uses a high-tech water sampling platform that relies on field technicians accurately and efficiently collecting and testing samples from reservoirs, water treatment facilities and even customers' homes.
The sampling process includes many steps. Once technicians fill sample bottles, they manually transcribe the barcodes, check their watches to note the time and record their location using GPS. This is all written down in paper notebooks. When field technicians return to the lab, notebook information must be manually transcribed into a database and combined with the test results. The inefficiencies in this process are patently obvious.
The solution to sampling inefficiency may already be in a field technician's pocket: a smartphone. In fact, with a smartphone, not only are the field-related steps consolidated and streamlined, but the data no longer travels to the lab in a notebook, it arrives wirelessly before the technician even leaves the site.
Today, smartphones are as potentially transformative in the lab as they have been in our personal lives. And the mantra to "go paperless" truly extends beyond the physical constraints of the laboratory itself. With modern laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and advanced mobile technologies, information can flow bi-directionally between the field and the lab, eliminating error-prone manual transcription and dramatically increasing productivity. This creates a next-generation sampling program where the entire chain of custody exists under a secure umbrella, improving regulatory compliance and traceability while maximizing productivity in the lab and potentially across the whole organization.
New opportunities
Mobile devices are designed to be spokes in a massive hub, capable of capturing and reading data in near real-time-and laboratories crave data, provided that it is accurate and properly managed. If, for example, the water sampling technicians described above possessed a company-issued smartphone, the GPS, wristwatch and notebook are effectively obsolete. Location and time are automatically recorded, the sample barcode is scanned and sample readings only keyed in once. And the workflow built into the LIMS can walk technicians through each of the required steps when collecting a sample to ensure consistency.
A mobile-enabled sampling program is also more dynamic. When smartphones or tablets are integrated with a LIMS, scientists have access to interactive data and not just static images, enabling them to drill down to the level of individual test results if necessary. The LIMS can even provide automated alerts on sample runs so that an outlying result can be flagged immediately and a retest ordered while personnel are still in the field. This prevents costly return trips and accelerates the overall sampling program.
Because smartphones and other mobile devices enable a more dynamic environment for data, laboratory staff can become more creative about designing sampling workflows. This new mobile ability can change a time-consuming, error-prone process into one that is streamlined and efficient-a true enabler of improved productivity.
Challenges of mobile devices
While mobile devices can play a big role in laboratory transformation, adoption is not without challenges. The well-publicized "bring your own device" (BYOD) trend is one such challenge.
Allowing employees to use their own mobile devices at work-or do their work remotely-has many benefits including cost-savings and better overall productivity. But consenting to or requiring BYOD also exposes enterprises to IT security risk, problems with regulatory compliance and issues with software compatibility. These risks, problems and issues have, understandably, prevented many laboratories, especially in regulated industries, from adopting BYOD policies.
Despite widespread concerns, the industry continues to explore solutions that could soon make BYOD policies viable. Some laboratories are experimenting with technology that keeps personal data separated from business-related data on mobile devices. In this model, business-related activity occurs in a "sandbox" over which the IT organization has control. If the device is lost or the employee leaves, all company data can be erased remotely. While this strategy may still be too untested for many CIOs, especially in pharma, it does move us a step closer to addressing legitimate security and intellectual property concerns.
Beyond the obvious security and compliance risks, there are other challenges that must be overcome before mobile devices are useful for all applications. Mobile devices aren't an answer for everything, at least not yet or without further innovation. For manual data entry in a field or lab setting, a smartphone isn't always the ideal device. To address this particular challenge, the user interface in Thermo Scientific SampleManager LIMS, for example, is specially designed to accommodate the unique smartphone interface. When users access the LIMS on their mobile devices, the interface is designed specifically for phones' smaller form factor. Similar solutions can accommodate tablets and other mobile devices.
Mobile labs innovators
Which industries are early adopters? Process industries, such as water and environmental testing labs and oil and gas companies, which require remote sampling across a wide area, have been the earliest adopters. For example, today, many large petroleum companies routinely use mobile devices to scan barcodes or radio frequency identification tags and submit samples to the LIMS, providing management with nearly instant access to data from the field. This enables greater agility in even the largest enterprises, driving just-in-time decision-making with valuable data that may find its way into the LIMS from someone's personal smartphone.
Even highly regulated industries are testing the waters with mobile devices and LIMS, including several life science companies that are supplying mobile devices for use within both R&D and production labs. In one case, mobile devices are being used to scan barcodes of samples thawed during preclinical testing. Because samples can lose integrity during multiple thaw and freeze cycles, it's critical to monitor the process with uncompromising accuracy. In a manual process, there is always a risk that data about thawing and freezing could be incomplete and lead to questions concerning sample integrity. With mobile devices capturing data and delivering that data directly to the LIMS, sample condition data is always accurate up to the minute.
Environmental monitoring, such as water and air quality, is another natural fit for mobile devices working in tandem with LIMS. Mobile devices are particularly useful in applications that rely on extensive remote testing and reporting. The need for accurate timestamp, location and chain of customer data, often in highly remote settings, is paramount, especially the ability to identify contamination or out-of-spec readings early enough to enable rapid remediation.
Smartphones and other mobile devices are transforming our personal lives, but businesses, in their efforts to build more agility into their operations, must also focus on getting as much of the "smart" out of mobile devices too. For labs already going paperless, the benefits of a broader mobile strategy are obvious. State-of-the-art LIMS are already advancing to embrace the new technology. Today's LIMS are perfectly suited for advanced mobile technologies, and they can foster valuable bi-directional flow of data between the field and the lab, within the lab, across supply chains and every place where data integrity and speed of analysis are pivotal-which is nearly everywhere. A next-generation program enabled by mobile technologies doesn't just improve regulatory compliance, traceability and auditing, it can help improve productivity in the lab and across the enterprise; and in the process, transform a business from one reliant on paper and manual processes to one more agile and reliant on real-time data for business optimization.

businessinsider.com - In the U.S., it sometimes feels as if everyone has an iPhone. And historically, Apple has dominated in terms of offering users the most apps, and offering developers the most lucrative place to sell apps.
But Apple's dominance in mobile apps appears to be slowly slipping away, especially in Asia, according to new data from Distimo, which measures app downloads in the Apple Store and Google Play.
The news ought to terrify Apple CEO Tim Cook. People don't buy phones because they like phones. They buy them because of what they can do - and that means apps. The iPhone has dominated apps in the last few years because its app universe was massive. But in huge markets like South Korea, Japan and China, Apple is no longer the automatic top choice in the app world, according to Distimo.

businessinsider.com - Korea's ETNews reports that Samsung may be introducing a new tablet next month at the annual Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The tablet is said to have a 10.5-inch screen, which is larger than the 9.7-inch screen on the iPad Air and 10.1-inch screen on Microsoft's Surface 2.
A few weeks ago, CNET wrote that the Samsung was working on an 8-inch and 10-inch tablet in order to compete with the iPads.
Based on recent information found in a shipping manifest, this could be the new Galaxy Tab 4. For now, its unknown how much this could cost but 2014 is shaping up to be a really busy year for Samsung.
We've also heard that Samsung plans to make a big push in tablets in 2014, so this could just be the start.
On top of this potential reveal, the company could be unveiling up to five new smartphones next year including the Galaxy S5. As CES approaches, more information should become available.

mobiwork.com - Florida based MobiWork® today announced that DC Services, a leader in the assembly, installation and retail delivery services, has selected MobiWork MWS® for its field services operations.
"We have over 15 years of experience in our industry and we have evaluated multiple field services management solutions over the years. None of them come close to what MobiWork offers in terms of features, configuration and integration capabilities, and ease of use." said Trent Harvey, Founder and CEO. "We successfully deployed the MobiWork MWS® solution to more than 300 users across the country and we look forward to expanding our operations in the coming months."
Hervé Rivère, founder and CEO of MobiWork® stated: "We have been very impressed with DC Services' level of expertise and professionalism. We are thrilled to be a part of DC Services growth and expansion".
MobiWork will be attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 24th, 2014 through the 28th and will be available to demonstrate its solutions on-site.

cmswire.com - Samsung overtook Apple as the market leader in smartphones and is currently the key driver for mobile device innovation on a global basis
The iPhone is quickly transitioning from an innovative groundbreaker to a standard, much as Blackberry was in the mid-2000s and Palm was in the early 2000s. Given what we know about Palm and Blackberry, Apple should be concerned.
Mobile application platforms continue to be bought up left and right
SAP started this trend with the acquisition of Sybase and its Unwired Platform in 2010, Motorola acquired RhoMobile in 2011, IBM acquired Worklight in 2012, SAP bought another mobile app platform in Syclo later in 2012, and Pivotal (a spin-off of corporate giants EMC, VMWare and General Electric) continued this trend in 2013 with the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. Not to give away all my predictions, but this trend is going to continue over time.
Multi-platform mobile device management became commoditized
Mobile device management platforms have always ultimately been acquisition targets for endpoint management and endpoint security solutions because they are a piece of the holistic enterprise endpoint puzzle. This year, the market validated that mobile device management is a niche IT management solution by steadily driving the price down.
BYOD got a lot more press from large enterprises such as Cisco, Dell and Intel, but this PR belies the fact that BYOD has actually plateaued
Regardless of whether one looks at numbers from Gartner, Aberdeen or Forrester, the adoption of BYOD has settled at around 70 percent of companies, while the other 30 percent simply are not following based on their own business logic.

infoworld.com - Go to any of the dozens of conferences on mobile technology, networking, IT management, and related topics, and you'll be assaulted with security fears brought on by employee adoption of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. For several years, control issues have been the major IT focus.
Meanwhile, users and business departments are focused on a more important task: Doing their jobs better and increasing the success of their business. Mobile devices are a tool for such improvement, or they should be, and only now are IT organizations beginning to realize there's a reason the business is using these devices despite the security fearmongering.
[ Bob Violino and Robert Scheier show how businesses today are successfully taking advantage of mobile tech, in InfoWorld's Mobile Enablement Digital Spotlight PDF special report. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]
Security is important, but it's not the end all, be all of IT. It turns out that mobile devices are much safer and less susceptible to attack than the workhorse user technology, the Windows PC. If security is that important, then IT should be replacing PCs with iPads.
Admittedly, that's not really possible. PCs can handle many important duties a tablet cannot, but mobile devices are becoming important in many business endeavors, sometimes instead of PCs but more often as a companion.
Mobile devices are essentially PCs running new operating systems. They share a common technology layer: Internet browsing and the email/contacts/calendar combo best represented by Microsoft Exchange. They run office productivity tools that do what most users need to do. And they have all sorts of uses in the field that are awkward to do on a computer, which is why they are quickly displacing PCs in hospital wards, client sales visits, logistics such as delivery, and other field services, from hospitality to retail checkout.
Mobile devices are different in both form and function, so they often puzzle IT departments used to a legacy environment and the tools and processes designed for that environment. By contrast, those organizations that view mobile constructively are seeing real competitive value as a result, just like those companies who viewed PCs in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s as a new platform to do more and better things.
It's time to reframe IT's approach to mobile from "how do we lock them down or isolate them?" to "how do we take advantage of them while ensuring they do no harm?" In InfoWorld's Mobile Enablement Digital Spotlight PDF special report, veteran technology journalists Bob Violino and Robert Scheier show how large companies are benefiting today from this mental transition. You'll learn about some of the new enabling technologies that help make this possible and some of the opportunities mobile brings that the PC-only environment doesn't, along with compelling case studies of those pioneers who point the way for others.

mobileworldlive.com - Vodafone Group outlined the timetable for completing its disposal of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless with the transactions and "return of value" expected to be completed "on or around 21 February 2014".
Payment of cash entitlements under the return of value is slated for 4 March.
Further timetable details were given in a shareholder circular which Vodafone said will be posted shortly.
The circular contains notices convening a Court Meeting and a General Meeting, both held on 28 January "to consider and if thought fit, approve the transactions, the return of value, the share consolidation and related matters".
Approval from Verizon shareholders is also required. They have a special meeting on 28 January as well.
Vodafone Group, in September, confirmed its anticipated deal to sell its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless to partner Verizon Communications, in a $130 billion (£84 billion) cash and stock deal.

businessinsider.com - We're not exactly sure what to make of this, but it's interesting.
Jana, a mobile rewards program focused on emerging markets, surveyed 2,500 smart phone owners in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, The Philippines, and Vietnam about their smart phone purchases.
Its survey revealed that the number one phone that people want in these markets is the iPhone.
The problem, of course, is that they're not willing, or able, to afford the iPhone, which goes for over $600 in these places. The majority of people surveyed are paying $200 or less for their phones.
We're not sure how/if Apple deals with this dilemma. It's unlikely to lower its prices to meet demand in emerging markets.
But, we suppose this is a good sign overall for Apple. It isn't losing its "cool" around the world.

businessinsider.com - The world is awash in data.
CIBC, a Canadian bank, predicts that information-generation growth will increase 50 times over the next decade. IDC, a market research firm, similarly forecasts a 44-fold increase in data volumes between 2009 and 2020. Mobile, social, wearables, and The Internet Of Things are playing a large part in driving this explosion in data.
Apple upended the electronics business six years ago with the release of the iPhone. The iPhone ushered in an era when design, both of software and hardware, became the paramount concept in the tech world.
Could data be the paradigm that anchors the next revolution? Many think so.
In a recent report from BI Intelligence on Big Data and Mobile, we define big data, examine mobile's connection to it, analyze its potential, practical applications, and pitfalls, look at how it's collected, and answer some of the most frequently asked questions about big data and mobile.

businessinsider.com - The technology analyst Benedict Evans recently tweeted the chart below, which is based on data from Enders Analysis.
Evans notes that the estimated number of smartphones in use is about to pass the number of PCs in use - probably in the first half of 2014.
The number of smartphones sold per year blew past PCs sold per year a couple of years ago. But the installed base of PCs is more than 1.5 billion, and they generally last a lot longer than smartphones. Tablets, meanwhile, which will probably start outselling PCs next year, are still a distant third in terms of installed base.
In a follow-up tweet, Evans notes that the PC installed base is estimated using 5-year trailing PC sales, while the smartphone and tablet installed base uses 2-year trailing sales.
Based on a still-functioning home-office PC from 2005 that I still use occasionally, as well as an only recently deceased iPhone 3GS, both usage lives may be conservative.

businessinsider.com - Biometric smartphones are expected to become mainstream next year as leading handset makers follow the lead of Apple Inc. into fingerprint recognition technology, an Ericsson report on consumer trends showed on Wednesday.
In September, Apple launched its iPhone 5S which was the first smartphone with a sensor to recognize fingerprints, improving security and ease of use.
"A total of 74 percent believe that biometric smartphones will become mainstream in 2014," Ericsson, the world's biggest mobile network maker, wrote in the report.
Wider use of biometric technology will be good news for Swedish firms Fingerprint Cards and Precise Biometrics, which are leading suppliers in the field.
Fingerprint makes sensors while Precise Biometrics makes software for such sensors.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Fingerprint's CEO said he expected 7 or 8 of the world's top smartphone makers, including Samsung, to launch phones using the technology next year.
Ericsson interviewed over 100,000 people in over 40 countries as part of the survey.

mediapost.com - Some retailers may be missing the grander picture around mobile commerce.
In a recent survey about CMOs backing away from mobile technology, only roughly a third (38%) of retail CMOs said mobile is part of their marketing strategy this holiday season, a significant drop from just a year ago.
Natalie Kotlyar, a partner at BDO, which conducted the survey, said that mobile commerce is growing, pointing out that consumers are using their phones for research but not for the actual purchase.
Many studies continue to measure mobile activity at the transaction stage of a purchase. This is one of the reasons it appears tablet commerce is ahead of smartphones, since more people make an actual purchase from a tablet than from a phone.
The notion of where the physical transaction - where the money actually changes hands - is but one stage in the mobile path to purchase.
Mobile creates a totally new dimension around the transaction, and that actual moment of purchase is being influenced multiple times outside of that moment.
Rather than there being a disconnect in phases of the Mobile Shopping Life Cycle , they are intertwined.
When someone researches on a smartphone, sees product photos or videos on a tablet, texts back and forth with friends about an intended purchase, taps into a geo-targeted message, responds to a location-based coupon offer and then makes a purchase in a store, there is a significant mobile influence.
The particular retailer may not see or measure any of this when a shopper makes an in-store transaction.
When looking at smartphone and tablet transactions, retailers are seeing only one piece of the mobile shopping cycle.
Mobile commerce is not just about the transaction. It is really about the new mobile shopping process.

thehindubusinessline.com - With more organisations embracing mobility solutions that allow employees to work on the go, the share of IT spending on mobility by Indian companies is expected to rise by 15 per cent over three years, a report by global IT major CA Technologies says.
According to the study, 41 per cent respondents from India said they have had to rethink their IT strategy as mobility changes the way the business operates, especially as concerns over security and privacy of enterprise data escalates.
The study, titled 'TechInsights Report: Enterprise Mobility - It's All About the Apps' was conducted by Vanson Bourne covering 1,300 senior IT leaders in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector and telecommunications in 21 countries.
Nearly 85 per cent of the respondents in India said they either have a strategy already or plan to do so within 12 months, compared to 95 per cent in China, 60 per cent in Singapore and 49 per cent in Japan.
Companies said they have experienced 21 per cent to 31 per cent improvement in business in the form of increased revenue, faster time-to-market, improved competitive positioning, enhanced customer experience, better employee productivity and lower costs.
"Today, CIOs are under enormous pressures to address the rapid pace of technology change and evolution. Mobility has dramatically elevated the complexity of what is needed both for internal users and customer-facing systems," CA Technologies Vice President (Solution Strategy - APJ) Vic Mankotia told PTI.
Mobile security is crucial and unless companies adopt an effective and integrated mobile device management technology, the mobile devices quickly become mobile paperweights, he added.
"The potential of not complying with key regulations, inadvertent dissemination of corporate information, or negatively impacting brand reputation because of a poor mobile application shopping experience, are few examples of risks faced by organisations that do not have an enterprise-wide mobility strategy," Mankotia said.
The study found that the proportion of IT spending on mobility by Indian organisations will increase by 15 per cent over three years.
Also, the proportion of expenditure on mobility outside of IT will also grow by 11 per cent over three years, indicating that IT departments need to prepare for not only for more mobility work in general, but also for inter-departmental mobility projects.
The study found that enterprise mobility deployment has moved beyond supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and CIOs are now focusing on specific strategies for balanced servicing of customer, IT and employee needs.

business2community.com - Smart devices such as tablets and iPhone have changed the way consumers and businesses interact with each other. Increasingly, consumers are turning to mobile devices for functions such as search and shopping.
The ability to access information quickly and easily on the move has become a luxury that most want to enjoy in both their personal and work environments. According to the Walker Sands, Quarterly Mobile Traffic Report, visits from mobile devices accounted for 28 percent of total website traffic in Q3 2013, up 67 per cent since Q3 2012, and other surveys put the figure much higher.
However, it's not just the consumers who are seeing the benefits of being mobile in today's fast paced society. For businesses internally, having access to business critical information on the go has meant that they are able to make better more informed decisions based on real time information.
Sales staffs are able to take their work with them when they are out on the road, checking stock availability before entering orders on the go via their iPads or tablets. Being mobile helps increase customer satisfaction as stock is checked for availability before an order is placed meaning no stock outage.
For users working in the service industry having the use of mobile technology helps them bill more hours, improving utilisation. By entering their hours on the go they are able to save hours every week in admin, replacing paper forms with mobile apps and dispatch processes. By mobilising your workforce, businesses can increase their billable hours each week, helping to increase their overall profitability. Managers can monitor project status from the office in order to anticipate when and how each client can be billed for work completed. With real time visibility into the entire bid to bill or quote to cash cycle managers are able to understand how productive their consulting staff are being.

mobileworldlive.com - Samsung is reportedly planning a "Lite" tablet device for release early in 2014, enabling it to battle rivals such as Amazon's Kindle Fire line and Google's Nexus devices.
According to website SamMobile, the device will launch in the second week of January - meaning it may debut at CES 2014 - and will be accompanied by a portfolio of Lite smartphone variants also intended to target more price-sensitive consumers.
It was suggested the device will come in Wi-Fi and 3G versions, in "cream white" and "ebony black" colour versions.
The move is interesting because, so-far, Samsung is one of the few device makers that has been able to build a tablet business on more expensive products - the other notable company in this camp of course being Apple.
The launch of the original Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus-branded devices (which has included Samsung-made smartphones and tablets) saw high-spec devices offered at very competitive prices, in order to drive consumption of content and apps from the Amazon and Google stores respectively.
And since then, a number of vendors (primarily from markets such as China) have offered lower-cost, lower-spec devices on a white-label basis, providing entry-level devices such as those sold by various retailers.
This has made it tough for many vendors to compete, due to the challenges associated with developing appealing and suitably specified differentiated products which are then offered at a low price.
What is not so clear is Samsung's motivation for offering a low-cost tablet. The company has achieved a reasonable market share with its more expensive products, and according to IDC was the second-biggest vendor in this market during the third quarter of 2013.
Between them, Apple and Samsung make up 50 per cent of tablet shipments, with numerous "others" making up another 35 per cent. Third-placed Asus, which manufactures Google's Nexus 7, had a share of 7.4 per cent, has less than half of that of Samsung (20.4 per cent), with fourth-placed Lenovo having less than a quarter (4.8 per cent) of the South Korean company's volume.
A lower-cost device may give Samsung the opportunity to boost its market share closer to Apple's 29.6 per cent (IDC figures), but potentially at the expense of margins - much depends on how effectively it can control its costs.
But there is also the problem that it may end up cannibalising its own sales. If the company is unable to convince buyers of the potential benefits of its more expensive devices, it may find customers opt for the lower cost, but still Samsung-made, alternative.
Separately, it was reported that Samsung is set to offer two tablets, with 8-inch and 10-inch screens, using the AMOLED screens it uses in its smartphones.

businessinsider.com - How fast are e-commerce and mobile commerce coming to define holiday shopping?
If the results of this past Thanksgiving Day weekend are any indication, 2013 will be remembered as the year when many Americans began to equate holiday shopping with e-commerce, and particularly tablet- and smartphone-based retail spending. Understanding this pattern is key to success in the increasingly "omnichannel" world of retail, in which physical and digital storefronts are fragmented across locations and devices.
In a new report, Business Insider Intelligence compiled and analyzed the best data available on how e-commerce and mobile commerce performed in the United States on the three key shopping days at the end of November: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. We also looked at e-commerce trends in Europe and China.

nasdaq.com - The telecommunications services industry is riding on the high-end smartphone and tablet vogue. Unprecedented growth in high-speed mobile Internet traffic, in particular toward wireless data and video, has transformed the industry into the most evolving, inventive and keenly contested space. Any new network standard aims at faster data connectivity, quick video streaming with high resolution and rich multimedia applications.
A recent report by Infonetics Research estimates telecom operators globally to generate approximately $2 trillion in revenues in 2013. This is slightly better than the $1.9 trillion revenues in 2012. More importantly, the report also stated that these telecom carriers are spending more on capital expenditures in order to update their networks with the latest technologies. In 2013, carriers' expenditures have risen 6% year over year and are expected to rise at a CAGR of 2% from 2012 to 2017, reaching a significant $355 billion by that time.
While the U.S. is expected to maintain its speed of telecom growth in the near term, most of the impetus will come from the emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil and Russia. Carrier expenditures have increased in Japan and even major telecom operators of the Western Europe, which is the economically most vulnerable region, have also raised their budget to some extent.
Infonetics further stated that the market size for Carrier routers and Carrier Ethernet switches grew 7% year over year to $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2013. This market size is expected to reach $20 billion by 2017.
The GSM Association's research wing, GMSA Intelligence, recently revealed that there will be more than 1 billion LTE connections globally by 2017. Currently, there are approximately 176 million LTE connections worldwide. By 2017, there will be around 465 LTE networks across 128 countries.
GSMA Intelligence further reported that LTE users consume an average of 1.5GB data per month, twofold of what is consumed by non-LTE users. In the developing countries, LTE users can generate 20 times higher average revenue per user (ARPU) to carriers than non-LTE users, whereas in the developed countries, ARPU can be 10-40% higher for LTE users instead of non-LTE users.
We remain optimistic on U.S. telecom giant Verizon Communications Inc. ( VZ ) and AT&T Inc. ( T ) as well as on cable MSO Comcast Corp. ( CMCSA ). Currently, all these stocks carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). However, AT&T and Verizon are significantly expanding their subscriber base for both wireless network and fiber-based video network. Similarly, Comcast is also significantly expanding its high-speed broadband subscriber base.
The mobile chipset maker Qualcomm Inc. ( QCOM ) currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and the stock is likely to continue is strong performance. Additionally, all these four companies are regular dividend payers.

gfi.com - Cuba Gooding, Jr. won an Oscar® for his role as Rod Tidwell, the gum-flapping NFL wide receiver whose four-word mantra is perhaps the most memorable line from the 1996 blockbuster Jerry Maguire.
You know it. Heck, you've probably said it. But if you're a managed service provider (MSP), you need to live it when it comes to mobile device management - particularly the phenomenon known as "bring your own device", or "BYOD". Go ahead. Clear your throat and shout ...
"Show me the money!"
How does that catchphrase relate to MSPs? Simply put, they are struggling to monetize BYOD.
Findings from a recent GFI MAX study hammer that point home. Did you know nearly three-quarters (72%) of GFI MAX MSP customers are not, in some form, monetizing mobile device support? But that's not all. Consider these statistics:
35% - MSP respondents that said they are not organized to support mobile devices.
28% - MSPs that said they have not considered selling mobile support.
26% - MSPs providing mobile support but don't sell it as a major offering.
25% - MSPs that have started supporting their customers' mobile devices, though there isn't a specific charge for the service.
2% - MSPs providing their customers with mobile device support and doing it well.
Which of those figures do you consider most alarming? It's a loaded question, considering they all speak to a larger, common point: MSPs are missing a golden opportunity to create a recurring revenue stream with mobile device management (MDM).
As this post on MSPAlliance® says, "To suggest that MSPs should simply ignore BYOD and advise their customers that they must continue to assert control over users may not be a dead idea, but it may be limited in its scope."
That article was published late last year. So if the idea was limited in scope at that time, it may not be an option to businesses four years from now. IT research company Gartner predicted earlier this year that 50% of companies by 2017 will require employees to use their personal smartphone, tablet or other mobile device on the job.
In other words, an MDM solution capable of supporting the BYOD use case is rapidly becoming a necessity for businesses that need to secure and manage an array of devices.
"We're finally reaching the point where IT officially recognizes what has always been going on: People use their business device for nonwork purposes. They often use a personal device in business," said David Willis, Gartner's vice president. "Once you realize that, you'll understand you need to protect data in another way besides locking down the full device."
Spiceworks recently reported that 61% of small to mid-sized businesses support BYOD. However, a mere 17% of IT professionals surveyed said they implement MDM technologies.
Digging a bit deeper uncovers the best argument MSPs can make for adding MDM to their range of services: Nearly one quarter (23%) of IT pros feel managing and supporting BYOD is "a headache for our department." The percentage grows for businesses with 100 to 249 employees (29%); it's even higher for businesses with 250 to 999 employees (31%). In fact, only 17% of respondents to the Spiceworks survey said they "fully embrace this trend" of MDM.
BYOD clearly isn't going away. It's equally clear that many businesses prefer MDM be handled for them. Opportunity is knocking for MSPs, and they can capitalize with a cloud-based MDM solution offered through the vendor's remote management platform.
Key MDM security features include:
Remote lock, memory wipe and password reset - Ensure your customers' data remains protected in the event a mobile device under your management is lost or stolen.
Device tracking - Monitor in real time the whereabouts of your customers' mobile devices and, by extension, the business intelligence at their fingertips.
Automated provisioning - Configure the mobile devices you manage for email and wireless networks, and set security policies.
In-depth reporting - Receive additional insight into the status of devices registered to the network, enabling you to better protect your customers from data theft or data loss.
At the end of Jerry Maguire, Tidwell celebrates in humorous fashion; he learns his pass-catching ability is being rewarded with a new contract.
How mobile devices in the workplace are managed - and who manages them - is a script that's still being written. MSPs have the chance to play a starring - and lucrative - role.

appstechnews.com - A research report from IFS has revealed that enterprise mobility schemes are happening "quickly" in the UK because of business benefits - with security concerns often being overlooked.
The report, which covered 200 UK-based CIOs and IT managers, focused on the state of enterprise mobility, why companies are investing - or not - and the most popular applications used.
Primarily, UK enterprises are investing in mobility solutions because it enables a more flexible workforce, according to 83% of respondents, whilst more than two thirds (68%) claimed it boosted company productivity, which the report notes is "effectively two sides of the same coin". Similar reasons were set out lower down the scale, with quicker response times (45%), saving IT costs (43%) and keeping the business competitive (42%) all popular.
In contrast, the main reason why companies don't invest, by some distance, is "a lack of business criticality" - a roundabout way of saying 'it's not important to us'. Security concerns (46%), a lack of IT resources (31%) and not having a scheme which is suitable for the workforce (23%) were also cited.
The most important apps, in the main, aided business productivity. Email and calendar apps (57%) were the most popular, followed by sales and CRM (52%) and business admin apps (45%).
However, the report noted the differences in industry sector. Expense apps were the most popular in the retail distribution and transport trade (72%), whilst CRM apps were most popular in manufacturing and production (71%).
Yet security can often be overlooked by companies. Even though many companies didn't see it as critical to their business, security was still key. Perhaps not surprisingly, the financial services sector was most concerned (95%) about security, although every sector showed high levels of concern; IT and telecoms (93%), utilities (90%) and manufacturing and production (85%) respectively.
So what are the key takeaways from this report? Enterprise mobility is here - that much we know, with enthusiasm "widespread" according to the research - yet with a few provisos.
The report asks whether there's ambivalence in some industries over the definition of enterprise mobility - particularly retail and distribution, because technologies such as stock scanners and wireless networking "have been in use...for decades."

appstechnews.com - Mobile-based transactions, including mobile payments and e-commerce, will only account for about 2% of total U.S. credit and debit card transaction volume this year, and 4% globally, according to BI Intelligence estimates.
But that figure is going to grow explosively in the next few years, especially as mobile-enabled purchases at the point-of-sale begin to make a real dent in total transaction volume.
Mobile payments, which we define as the use of a phone or a tablet to enable an in-store transaction, whether on the merchant or consumer side, are becoming more convenient every day.
In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we find that consumer and merchant uptake of mobile payments has finally risen enough to have a major impact on the payments landscape. As the industry consolidates and awareness increases, mobile payments transaction volume will make big leaps.

reuters.com - SBA Communications Corp said it would acquire 2,007 telecom towers from Brazil's Grupo Oi SA for about 1.53 billion reais ($645 million), giving the U.S. company ownership or control over more than 5,000 towers in Brazil.
SBA and its U.S. peers American Tower Corp and Crown Castle International Corp are in a scramble to beef up assets in Brazil ahead of the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games to be hosted there.
American Tower said in August it would acquire about 4,500 telecom towers in Brazil and Mexico from Latin American telecom service provider NII Holdings Inc for $811 million.
SBA said on Wednesday it expected the new towers to contribute about 110 million reais of cash leasing revenue and $70 million reais of tower cash flow to its results during 2014.
"These are very good sites, concentrated in the most populous areas of Brazil, with demonstrated attractiveness to tenants," Chief Executive Jeffrey Stoops said.
The company bought 2,113 towers from Oi in July for about $302.6 million.
SBA started operations in Brazil last December with the acquisition of 800 towers from an unnamed broadband wireless carrier for 362.8 million reais.
Oi has been working to reduce debt since it announced its merger with Portugal Telecom in October. Net debt at Oi was 29.3 billion Brazilian reais ($12.58 billion) at the end of the third quarter.
Oi's common shares jumped nearly 8 percent to 3.81 reais in Sao Paolo. Nasdaq-listed SBA's shares were untraded before the bell.
The deal, which is expected to close by the end of March, will also boost cash available for strategic investments, Oi said in a filing. SBA will assume the cost of operating, maintaining and expanding the cell towers.
Wireless carriers in Brazil have been making sale-leaseback agreements on their towers to help pay down debts and boost results in the face of an economic slowdown.

business2community.com - While technology is infiltrating nearly every area of field service, enterprise mobility is giving some processes a complete face-life. Find out how, and why firms need adapt quickly in order to keep up.
I'm sure enterprise mobility is a phrase you've read about a hundred times. Everyone from hobbyist bloggers to major news sources are weighing in on the topic and everywhere you look, businesses are frantically trying to evaluate how they can adapt to the changing mobile landscape. Long paper forms, clunky computer hardware, painfully ugly file cabinets...all of these traditional office items are victims of the trending preference towards mobility and paperless enterprises.
And these trends are true for field service as mobility and process automation are becoming two of the most important factors determining a service organization's future success. As business modernization takes place and mobile technology becomes the wind in the proverbial sail, leaders in field service organizations must establish mobility and automation as top operational priorities as they plan the road ahead.
According to the Aberdeen Group's 2013 report, Mobility and Consumerization of Field Service, "63% of leading field service organizations highlighted how investments in mobility top the list of strategic initiatives to improve field service performance." Field service is clearly evolving, in large part, thanks to mobile advances. Don't let yourself fall behind by ignoring these three major areas in which mobility is changing field service.

mobileworldlive.com - Apple saw its smartphone market share spike in October - the first full month of sales for the new iPhone 5C and 5S models - but the uplift was not as impressive as the one sparked by the iPhone 5's release a year ago.
This is one of the key findings from the latest smartphone sales data compiled by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech for the three months to October 2013.
Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar, said that in almost all markets the iPhone 5S and 5C releases gave iOS a "significant bounce" compared with the previous month.
He added, however, that Apple's share of the smartphone market still remains smaller than when the iPhone 5 was released, although this should not be entirely unexpected.
"Shoppers tend to react more positively to 'full' releases than incremental improvements, such as the 5S and 5C," said the Kantar analyst.
According to Kantar's figures, Apple's iOS market share across Europe's big five markets (Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) in the three months to October was 15.8 per cent, down from 20.8 per cent during the same period in 2012.
Android, meanwhile, enjoyed an "EU5" market share increase, going from 64.5 per cent to 70.9 per cent.
There was a similar story in the US. While Android's market share increased - going from 47.7 per cent to 52.6 per cent - Apple's iOS headed in the other direction (down from 47.2 per cent to 40.8 per cent).
Even so, the October spikes - in some cases - were impressive.
Helped by NTT Docomo distributing iPhones for the first time, Apple's share hit 76.1 per cent during October.
In the US, Apple's October share reached 52.8 per cent.
"The cheaper 5C appeals to a broader audience than Apple usually attracts," added Sunnebo. "In the US, the biggest demand for these mid-end models is coming from lower income households."
And the good news for Apple is that this wider appeal is attracting significant switching from competitors.
"Almost half of iPhone 5C owners switched from competitor brands, particularly Samsung and LG, compared with 80 per cent of 5S owners who upgraded from a previous iPhone model," said the Kantar analyst.
Windows' progress was also noticeable. Its EU5 share now exceeds 10 per cent (under five per cent a year ago) and is close to 5 per cent in the US (up from 2.5 per cent).

tlnt.com - If there's one universal challenge business leaders have all faced in recent years, it's their ability to adapt to change.
The advent, maturation and broad embrace of cloud computing and the proliferation of mobile devices have fundamentally altered the business landscape. Organizations today are more agile and flexible than ever before, as "adapting to change" has moved from the conceptual into the operational phase.
Much of this change is reflected in the composition of today's decentralized workforce. The tools to support mobile communications and in-the-cloud workflow have been in place for some time. Today, company policy and attitudes have caught up, as workforce flexibility has become a major business imperative.
Employees working out of the office will hit 26% by 2015
Indeed, more organizations are turning to distributed mobile labor for a number of reasons - from freeing them from the conventional constraints of time zones and work schedules, allowing work to be done 24/7, to shifting resources to better manage budgets and more easily deploy resources regardless of geographical location.
Industry analyst IDC divides the mobile/remote workforce into three categories:
While there's a huge amount of variety in all three categories, a significant number of industries rely on distributed labor - including construction, health care, building services and maintenance, hospitality and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, staffing, and energy, to name a few.
By 2015, the percentage of employees who will spend at least one day out of the office will grow to over 26 percent, according to the Work Design Collaborative.
The increasingly mobile workforce makes time and labor management an immediate and growing challenge. Keeping up with a mobile distributed labor workforce requires flexible and scalable technology designed to adapt to today's business and workforce needs. Companies require more than time tracking - they need deeper and broader visibility into an increasingly complex, hard-to- manage workforce, from insights into employee performance to the ability to build budgets.
How to "ground" a mobile management solution
The decentralized nature of a distributed labor force makes a uniform approach to time and attendance a business necessity and a real challenge.
Within any company, diverse functional areas - from Human Resources to Payroll, and Operations to the CFO - need a solution that is not only flexible and scalable, but also delivers information and data in a manner that allows each to make critical business decision that impact the bottom line. At the same time, a time and labor management solution needs to serve the demands of a distributed workforce working under different circumstances, in different environments and locations.
Going forward, a best-of-breed solution can "future proof" your organization for the trends that will impact workforce management, specifically distributed labor, in the years ahead.

womencitizen.com - Apple's iOS doubles Android in worldwide ad impressions
Android may be leading iOS in phone and tablet shipments, but Apple beats Google's mobile OS in ad impressions, suggesting the iPad and iPhone are being actively used by the folks who buy them. According to mobile advertising buying platform ... Continue reading ?
Apple's iOS doubles Android in worldwide ad impressions
According to mobile advertising buying platform Adfonic, Apple's iOS devices accounted for 63 percent of all global ad impressions in Q3 2013. This is up 3 percent from an earlier quarterly report. While iOS climbs, Android is on the decline, dropping 6 points in Q3 2013. It now rests well below Apple with a 32 percent share of ad impressions. Beyond the top two is BlackBerry with a 3 percent ad impression share and Windows Phone with 0.9 percent.
Looking at manufacturers, Apple (63%) was number one with Samsung (20%) in the number two spot. Together, Apple and Samsung are responsible for 83 percent of ad impressions globally. The remaining 17 percent is shared by the other mobile manufacturers including LG, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola.
The leading device on the iOS platform is the iPhone with 35 percent of ad impressions and the iPad with a 21 percent share. The iPod touch accounted for 6 percent of ad impressions. Not surprisingly, the iPhone was the top mobile device and the iPad was the top tablet, with 49 percent and 76 percent ad impression share, respectively.

international.to - According to a new market research report, "Bring-your-own-device Market [Enterprise Mobility; Consumerization of IT; Mobile Device Management (MDM); Mobile Application Management; Telecom Expense Management] - Global Advancements, Business Models, Market Forecasts & Analysis (2012 - 2017)", published by MarketsandMarkets (www.marketsandmarkets.com), the total BYOD and Enterprise Mobility market is expected to reach $181.39 Billion by 2017 with a CAGR of 15.17%.
Browse 144 market tables spread through 385 pages and in-depth TOC on "Bring Your Own Device Market [Enterprise Mobility; Consumerization of IT; Mobile Device Management (MDM); Mobile Application Management; Telecom Expense Management] - Global Advancements, Business Models, Market Forecasts & Analysis (2012 - 2017)".
Early buyers will receive 10% customization of this report.
BYOD and Enterprise Mobility concept is getting huge traction in the technology market nowadays. This is one of the hot topic in the market after cloud computing. The reason behind the market growth is that, enterprises are going mobile and they need to be in touch with their mobile workforce anytime anywhere. Companies are getting instant return in terms of visibility, time management, cost saving, and positive work environment.
Employees are using their own devices such as smart phones, tablets, and laptops, for the official work to be connected with the enterprise network anytime, anywhere. Thus Bring-your-own-device phenomenon is entering enterprise IT, and will change the way users and organizations address the network security concerns.
Employees want to use the device which they would like to use. The organization is not forcing them to do so. BYOD and Enterprise Mobility is allowing them to use the same. There are software and security vendors which are helping the companies to provide an environment where employees can connect their devices to the enterprise network without having any security related issues and this is driving the growth of the BYOD and enterprise mobility market.
Global Bring Your Own Device Market is expected to grow from $67.21 billion in 2011 to $181.39 billion by 2017, at an estimated CAGR of 15.17% from 2012 to 2017.
North America commanded the largest share; i.e., 36.10% of the overall managed BYOD & Enterprise Mobility Market in 2011 at $24.26 billion; and is expected to reach $58.60 billion by 2017, at a CAGR of 12.9% from 2012 to 2017.
In addition to market sizes and forecasts, the report also provides a detailed analysis of the market trends and factors influencing market growth, offering in-depth geographic analysis of the BYOD & Enterprise Mobility Market in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa. The report draws the competitive landscape of the bring-your-own-device market, providing an in-depth comparative analysis of the technological and marketing strategies. The key players are adopting in order to gain an edge over their competitors.

crn.com - A new wave of vendors that focus on secure workspaces on smartphones and tablets may help boost the capabilities of mobile device management platforms.
While MDM platforms can address some fundamental security issues by helping IT control mobile device features and configurations, secure mobile workspace products go even further from a security standpoint.
Secure mobile workspaces separate the personal and corporate sides of a mobile device and add enterprise-grade authentication, encryption and VPN features to the latter, Andrew Braunberg, a research director at NSS Labs, an information security research and advisory firm, said in an interview.
The MDM market is in a state of constant change as companies attempt to address mobile security and establish bring your own device policies, Braunberg said.
In addition to adding secure mobile workspaces, MDM vendors are embracing mobile application management to address BYOD challenges, he said.
"Corporate data is increasingly co-mingled with personal devices," Braunberg told CRN. "This idea that end points are becoming increasingly un-trustable is being driven by mobile device use, and the next phase in this evolution is to focus on the applications and the data, not necessarily the device itself."
But with the MDM market in considerable flux, businesses should move cautiously when evaluating potential secure workspace technologies, Braunberg said.
Peter Hesse, president of Chantilly, Va.-based Gemini Security Solutions told CRN that businesses are increasingly turning to mobile application management to keep track of employee owned smartphones and tablets.
Businesses need a way to manage the work data on the device, and to limit configuration changes that impact the user's personal data, Hesse said. "There's never going to be a complete comfort with BYOD, especially in the enterprise," he said. "Using an application or hardware capability with a split workspace is very appealing."
Verizon and AT&T are among the first carriers to work with secure mobile workspace vendors as part of their go-to-market strategy.
One startup that has been flying under the radar is Enterproid, now known as Divide, which received $12 million in Series B funding in October led by Google Ventures. Its secure container technology includes cloud-based management.
Another startup, OpenPeak sells its ADAM secure mobile workspace platform as a cloud-based service, and also white-labels its technology through AT&T and other carriers.
Tel-Aviv-based vendor Cellrox takes a different approach. It developed a version of Android that is designed to support a hypervisor -- which it calls "ThinVisor" -- on top of the custom Android Kernel, which can be shared to host multiple environments.
Red Bend Software, Waltham, Mass., sells MDM software for a variety of products, including those used in the automotive industry. The company supports mobile virtualization and touts its ability to update firmware over cellular networks. It sells software to mobile device manufacturers and service providers, and partners with Samsung via its Knox program.
MDM vendors with secure mobile workspaces include AirWatch, Citrix and Fixmo, all three of which have partner programs. Braunberg said MobileIron, GoodTechnology, and Fiberlink, now part of IBM, are also strong in this area.
Traditional network access control vendors are also stepping into the market. Braunberg said Aruba Networks sells a secure workspace as part of its network access control and mobile security platform.
"The pure plays are much more interested in sticking to their knitting and collaborating broadly with the mobile ecosystem, while Aruba is saying they can do a lot of this themselves," Braunberg said. "There are other players that are thinking of going down this route."

international.to - ReportsnReports.com offers "The Mobile Device & Network Security Bible: 2013 - 2020" and "The Mobile Device Security Bible: 2014 - 2020" research reports in its store. Mobile networks around the globe generate more than 50 Exabytes of traffic annually. The immense volume of traffic together with the growing adoption of open source Operating System (OS) platforms such as Android has opened up new security threats. Mobile malware, SMS spam, cyber attacks and unlawful eavesdropping are an ever-increasing problem for enterprises, consumers and mobile network operators around the globe. This has in turn led to significant investments in integrated security appliances and content security gateways by both enterprises and mobile network operators, besides opening doors for emerging submarkets such as mobile Security as a Service (SEaaS).
On the devices front, installation of Anti-Malware/Anti-Virus client software is fast becoming a de-facto requirement for most smartphones and tablets. Furthermore, mobile device OEMs are also integrating advanced biometrics such as fingerprint sensing into their smartphones and tablets, amid growing popularity of security sensitive opportunities such as mobile payments.
Driven by the thriving ecosystem, "The Mobile Device & Network Security Bible: 2013 - 2020" report estimates that mobile device and network security investments will account for nearly $9 Billion in 2013 alone. The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 21% over the next 7 years.
This report presents in-depth assessment of the global mobile device and network security market, and covers four individual submarkets. In addition to covering key market drivers, challenges, future roadmap, value chain analysis, deployment case studies and vendor service/product strategies for each submarket, the report also presents comprehensive forecasts for the mobile device and network security market from 2013 till 2020. Historical revenue figures for 2010 - 2012 are also presented. The forecasts and historical revenue figures are individually segmented for four submarkets, 17 product/service categories, six geographical regions and 34 countries.

mobileworldlive.com - Visa Europe has announced that V.me, its digital wallet service, is now live in France, Poland, Spain and the UK.
The UK's Nationwide building society made its own launch announcement today, claiming to be the first financial institution in the UK to offer V.me.
BPCE and LCL, issuers in France, are on board with Visa's digital wallet. ING Bank Slaski is running a pilot in Poland.
Visa adds that multiple V.me pilots are underway in Spain.
The payments platform provider says other major issuers will launch soon in all four markets.
This is the first stage of a pan-European launch, claims Visa.
V.me customers can access more than 1,400 merchants online. Soon-to-launch retailers, says Visa, include Universal Music in the UK, and Allopneus, Aquarelle, Brandalley, Leclerc Drive, Made.com and Pecheur.com in France.
Visa has set the target of up to 4,000 merchants accepting V.me by January 2014.
"V.me by Visa gives merchants and issuers an acceptance mark that will work across Europe," said Steve Perry, Chief Commercial Officer at Visa Europe.

businessinsider.com - Android is open source and that puts devices that run on the operating system at a considerable disadvantage in the security-sensitive enterprise space. Letting a decentralized group of developers change the platform to suit their needs naturally increases the risk of security flaws.
Apple's "walled-garden" approach to iOS, which privileges tight control, decreases the probability that someone will create an accidental flaw in the system.
Things may be changing, according to CIO. Devices produced by Samsung now account for over 60% of Android devices.The large number of people who use Samsung's devices means that the company's devices will be increasingly better understood by developers and thereby less prone to flaws.
Samsung also recently developed and released a new security feature, Knox, for a number of its devices. Knox uses two operating systems to partition certain functions of a user's phone. The result is that companies can more easily secure things that they would like to keep private like emails and dropbox folders, while at the same time allowing employees to use their devices seamlessly for work and personal functions. (CIO)

businessinsider.com - For the first time, BI Intelligence has estimated the total global installed base of smartphones, broken out by operating system.
Installed base data refers to devices actually in people's hands at the time, in contrast to many market share numbers that look at how many new smartphones sold in a given quarter ran operating systems like Google's Android or Apple's iOS.
Our analysis shows that out of the world's 1.5 billion currently active smartphones:
Android has the largest share: 72%, up from 55% during the same period last year. Android is currently on about 80% of smartphones sold globally every quarter, so its share of active smartphones is likely to increase.
iOS comes in second with an 18% share of installed smartphones, down from 19%.
The also-rans are way behind. BlackBerry's operating system share shrank to 4%, dropping from 9% a year ago. Windows Phone gained less than a percentage point of share climbing from 2.6% to 2.9% between the second and third quarters this year.
For more data-driven analysis on the mobile computing and Internet industries, and downloadable charts and data sets, subscribe for a free trial of BI Intelligence today.
The foundation for our installed base estimate is based on our earlier work on smartphone shipments and adjusted for a two-year average upgrade cycle.
The data shows that despite the popularity of Apple devices in the U.S., Android has all but won the global platform war. A huge factor in Android's dominance is the success of the platform in emerging markets like China and India, where inexpensive devices are favored.
Android, iOS and Windows were the only major operating systems for which the number of active devices increased quarter-over-quarter.

businessinsider.com - Amazon, eBay and Wal-Mart have achieved something remarkable. With millions of apps and websites competing for attention, each has carved out a mass audience on mobile and have become the top three mobile commerce properties in the U.S.
How have they succeeded? For the three, mobile isn't just a "sales channel," but a thoughtful means of connecting with customers, to draw them in, earn their loyalty, encourage their sharing of useful data, and nudge them toward more lifetime purchases.
In a new BI Intelligence report, we look at the statistics behind eBay and Amazon's transition from PC-based e-commerce to the mobile computing era. Their success wasn't a given. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, is perhaps the biggest surprise mobile retail leader. The company is striving to move faster on mobile than it did in PC-based e-commerce.

ciol.com - TheFind, the largest personalized shopping platform in North America, today announced its mobile and search trends for the biggest shopping weekend of the holiday season, along with predictions for which device will dominate mCommerce to round out Q4. With showrooming and tablet browsing at an all-time high, TheFind saw a spike in the number of searches and scans from mobile devices in Q3.
A combination of empirical data and mCommerce trends lead TheFind to predict that tablets will dominate browsing and m-commerce purchases this shopping season with high growth in smartphone usage for price comparison and in-store searches.
National Retail Federation estimates that 63.2 per cent of tablet shopper will use their devices to shop and compare prices as they search for the best deals on hot products and trends this holiday. Based on searches by over 2 million app users, TheFind expects to see Nike, Michael Kors, Vans, Ugg Australia and Apple as industry frontrunners post-Cyber Monday.
"Tablets are becoming the device of choice for consumers and that's why we made it a priority to optimize our shopping app for not only smartphones but tablets as well," said Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind. "By blending traditional shopping and retail technology, we created a shopping platform that complements the modern consumer who often begins shopping on one device or in-store and completes his or her purchases elsewhere."
Spending on smartphones and tablets is up 26 per cent from last quarter according to comScore and several mCommerce reports speak to the remarkable growth and diversity of mobile shopping. According to Internet Retailer Mobile 500, $991 million will be spent via mobile sales in 2013 and over half - $544 million - will be spent shopping on tablets.
To give consumers the best possible omni-channel experience, TheFind's entire platform works together, providing a consistent experience whether the consumer is browsing on the Web at TheFind.com or using the app to shop on the go.

articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com - With the growing usage of smartphones, tablets and laptops in the country, about 86 per cent of Indian employees prefer to enhance their corporate skills through mobile devices, according to a recent report.
"About 86 per cent of learners surveyed in India prefer to access learning on their mobile devices," according to a survey 'Learning and Development Trends in Asia Pacific' by cloud-based learning solutions provider Skillsoft.
However, only 46 per cent of organisations surveyed in the country provide their employees with this option, it said.
The survey further said the other 54 per cent of respondents from organisations, which have deferred the implementation of mobile learning, cited network integrity and security as the prime barriers to adoption.
"There is a noticeable shift across organisations in India towards the adoption of e-learning. The survey indicates that organisations are rapidly integrating learning programmemes customised to individual development needs and also delivering it across platforms that include mobile devices and tablets," Skillsoft Country Manager, India, Vinay Pradhan said.
About 93 per cent of learners surveyed reported that learning directly impacted their work performance when customised to their individual needs, he said.
The Skillsoft, a pioneer in cloud-based learning solutions, survey includes data from more than 300 businesses and organisations across 20 industry sectors in Asia Pacific, with IT or technical services and education or training services representing 42 per cent of the sample.
It revealed that 67 per cent respondents in India saw growth in their organisational budget on learning over the last two years, whereas in the rest of the Asia Pacific region saw tightening of budgets on the same.
About 75 per cent of companies in India spend around $ 800 per learner on learning and development, it said.
It also found that 74 per cent of respondents reported that skills gained from learning programmes had a direct positive impact on their work performance, while 81 felt they were able to effectively apply the skills gained from these.
"The report has shown that both decision makers and learners are keen for more learning opportunities, and the e-learning market is set to grow," Skillsoft Vice President and Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Glenn Nott said.
Blended learning that combines both classroom learning and e-learning is also on the rise.
This has been identified as one of the top trends to emerge in the knowledge delivery industry with 92 per cent of surveyed organisations offering this, the survey said.