Santa Claus should take note that <a href="http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html">NORAD</a>, the Colorado Springs-based military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the United States and Canada, has been especially nice this year. The outfit has gone beyond its usual satellite-based Santa tracking by delivering free mobile device apps and games.
Google must be pleased to know that Android users aged 18-44 tend to keep their apps all in the family – the Google family, that is.
The Android blogosphere is abuzz that Google might have a Siri killer called Majel out by year-end.
Google says its Android Marketplace has surpassed 10 billion app downloads - a growth rate of 1 billion app downloads per month.
IDC researchers say some big battles will be brewing in 2012 in the cloud, mobile and Big Data arenas, so much so that "companies like Microsoft, HP, SAP, RIM, and others - including Apple- will face 'crossroads moments' in 2012. By the end of the year, we should have a good idea which vendors will - and won't - be among the industry's leaders at the end of the decade," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC in a statement.
It's the biggest shift in IT in years: the consumerization-of-IT trend that gained major traction with the advent of the iPhone and other modern mobile devices, causing most businesses to let employees bring -- or at least choose -- their own smartphones and tablets, all in fewer than two years.
All new malware being written for mobile devices targets Android, according to a McAfee report on malware trends in Q3 2011.
It's clear by the increasing use of analytics software that companies are struggling to get their hands around the huge amounts of data it takes to run a successful business. But developing social, mobile, cloud computing and other applications are also driving the need for new technical skills.
Good Technology and ActivIdentity today jointly announced an effort to bring federal-level authentication to Apple iOS devices, such as the iPad and iPhone, and Google Android devices. And Apperian released its Enterprise App Services Environment (EASE) product for Android devices, which lets businesses provision and manage apps, and manage content delivered to those apps. EASE can manage Android Market apps, in-house Android apps, and HTML5 apps, and also provides push notification and updates.
It's no secret that more and more people are opting for touch-based smartphones and tablets as their computers of choice: iPads, iPhones, Androids, now BlackBerrys, and soon <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/watch-out-apple-windows-8-could-trump-the-ipad-172971">Windows 8 PCs and tablets</a>. For developers, touch-based systems means grasping a whole new set of guidelines, including understanding their audience's new context and careful interface design, say prominent developers in the touch space.
<a href="https://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/120101-iphone-quiz.html">iPhone</a> developers are in demand across the United States and Canada, causing salaries to skyrocket for those with experience creating complex, mobile <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/applications.html">applications</a> on <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/060309-apple-quiz.html">Apple</a>'s iOS platform.
A new study finds that more mobile users are downloading apps, but many seem to rely on just a few. Downloaders tend to be the young, the well-educated or the well-paid.
Microsoft has rolled out a new mobile app for Bing built with HTML5 and available first only to iPhone and Android users, not to Windows Phone users. It may be another indication that Microsoft is turning its attention away from its home-baked development platforms .Net and Silverlight and toward the industry-standard HTML5.
A new client-server application lets most mobile devices now wirelessly use corporate printers, without having to make changes to smartphones or tablets, or to the printers.
Google had better hope you get more than one shot to make a good first impression. That's because the shiny new Gmail app rolled out for the iPhone and iPad on Wednesday contained a pretty serious bug that Google acknowledged broke notifications and "caused users to see an error message when first opening the app".