mobile application

A Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba Group is developing a mobile operating system which will be launched in the third quarter, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The mobile operating system, to be developed by Alibaba's cloud computing unit, will also provide mobile applications, the paper said quoting an unnamed source close to the matter.

Baidu, Chinese top search engine, is also developing its own mobile operating system based on Google’s Android platform, according to recent reports in the local media sources
 

US lawmakers said that mobile privacy rules should be applicable to third-party app developers along with wireless carriers.

Thursday, representatives Edward Markey and Joe Barton, co-chairs of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, released letters they received from Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc, Sprint Nextel Corp and T-Mobile in response to their inquiries last month about the collection, use and storage of location data.

An investigation has been launched by the US authorities into how customer data is used by some popular applications created to run on mobile platforms of Apple Inc and Google Inc.

In a regulatory filing this week online radio service Pandora reported that US Federal grand jury subpoenaed the service to provide information. According to the company it is not a target of investigation and similar subpoenas were sent to the publishers of numerous other smartphone applications.

Amazon.com is being sued by Apple for infringing a trademark by illegally using App Store name for its mobile software marketplace. Bloomberg reported that Apple filed suit on March 18 seeking to prevent Amazon from using the app store name and to win unspecified damages.

A new analysis by a supporter of open source software revealed that 7 out of 10 Android and iOS applications marked as containing open source "failed to comply with basic open source license requirements.”

OpenLogic, which makes open source software support, scanning and governance tools, reported that it had analyzed 635 mobile applications for Android, iPhone and iPad, out of which 66 contained open source software under the Apache, GPL or LGPL licenses. The vendor found that 71% of the 66 apps violated key obligations required by the open source licenses.

According to the forecast made in the Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015 compiled by research2guidance over a third of 1.4 billion smartphone users in 2015 will be running some kind of mobile healthcare application.

While the possible benefits of mobile health applications have been much discussed for over a decade it is only now the market is taking off, says Ralf-Gordon Jahns, head of research at research2guidance.

According to the latest research conducted by Forrester Research and Shop.org, increasing popularity of mobile applications among consumers is driving online retailers to speed up their mobile marketing initiatives.

Thus far, almost 75% of online merchants currently have or are developing a mobile strategy. At the same time, 20% have a mobile strategy already settled.

It is getting a common thing or Microsoft to release apps for the products of its utmost rivals. In December 2008 the company launched an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. Later it introduced another application called Tag, into Apple’s App Store. This time the same thing has been done to Android.

Microsoft launched Tag developed specially for Android, it is the first time the company designs the app itself for the Google mobile platform. Apart from Android and iPhone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.

A new alliance is being formed by the 24 telecom operators to overtake Apple App Store. Three device makers such as LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson support the move according to the GSM Association. Analysts and experts of the industry express their doubt the initiative will go far enough to pose at least the smallest challenge to the brainchild of Steve Jobs.

Millions of Citi’s US credit card customers are now enabled to  manage their card accounts trough the downloadable Citi Mobile appfor the iPhone device.

Issuu, the leading publishing platform for digital magazines, newspapers and catalogs, launches its first mobile app for Android-powered devices.
After successfully creating the web's best digital reader for publications and documents, Issuu is now doing the same for the mobile platform. Issuu's new EasyRead (beta) technology automatically enhances the text of any publication enabling users to read text on small-screen devices while still maintaining the visual layout.

The mobile phone is increasingly being used for a wide variety of applications - from games, to Internet browsing, checking email and personal banking. According to some estimates, about 60 per cent of all mobile phone users in Singapore do just that. But some mobile phone users are finding it hard to track their data usage - with many suffering from bill shock when their phone bills are significantly higher than expected.