Apps Tech News

Nearly every day features news of high-profile hacks; clearly the “old school” password just doesn’t cut it anymore. PayPal’s chief information security officer Michael Barrett certainly agrees.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet has had a rocky start, with the International Data Center (IDC) pegging Q1 2013 estimates at just 900,000 (compare to Apple iPad’s 19.5 million!), causing IDC analyst Tom Mainelli to slam it with: “It’s just not there yet.”

Later this week, a bill by the name of ‘CISPA’ (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is being brought back from the grave after getting unceremoniously ditched last year. The bill is being “reworked” before voting at a closed hearing by The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

I can safely say it’s been quite a long time since I mentioned the company HP but yesterday, as news from their shareholders meeting started to trickle out, I have to say I realised that something groundbreaking may be coming our way from HP and sooner rather than later.

How many devices are being activated per day? How many apps does the average user have? Do all the apps in the app stores really get downloaded? How long do people spend on their mobile devices? What are they doing? Who’s using smartphones the most? All those questions are answered in this handy infographic from New Relic.

At its New York roadshow at the end of February 2013, Salesforce.com announced new mobile capabilities for its Service Cloud customer service platform. The announcement was part of discussions that focused on the vendor’s new messaging about the customer-centric enterprise.

An infographic from mobile advertising and data platform Millennial Media has shown how users kept up to date during the Super Bowl on February 3. One of the more interesting titbits from the game, won by the Baltimore Ravens, was that 13% of the connected device traffic came from tablets, with that figure hitting 20% at post-game.

The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the usual media frenzy, with as many new technology announcements as ever. Although CES focuses on mass-market, consumer products, entertainment, and services, it does provide a preview of technologies and products that will most likely enter the enterprise market eventually. It also gives IT departments some idea of what the corporate end user is going to expect in terms of corporate IT services, user interfaces, and service flexibility.