Wireless expert Chetan Sharma’s new book is out.  Look forward to reading it.   It is co-authored by Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi and is published by John Wiley.  Joe Herzog is the Senior Director, Search Products, InfoSpace.  Victor Melfi is the Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Vice President, VoiceBox Technologies.  You can check out the Table of Contents and even download the first chapter here.  You can buy the book here - Amazon has a special deal on it.

Congratulations Chetan Sharma!

The Carnival of the Mobilists #111 is up on the VisionMobile blog.  Great work by Andreas Constantinou as usual.  Thanks for hosting it.

The 2008 GSMA Mobile World Congress is being held in (hey, where else?) Barcelona from 11-14 February this year.  I did not attend this time.

Here are some links to coverage of the event:

  - Infoworld summarizes the top 10 trends at the Mobile World Congress. 

  - VC Richard Wong has a very good post on Venturebeat about the possible end of an operator-dominated era. 

  - Junko Yoshida of EE Times describes how Android prototypes are stuggling against Nokia’s latest. 

  - Rudy De Waele provides the details of the Mobile Jam Session he co-organized as a side show of the Mobile World Congress. 

  - Engadget talks of Dolby and SRS Labs bringing surround sound capability to mobile phones. 

  - Textually.org has the story about Nokia’s Remade concept phone which will be made of recycled materials. 

  - Earlier, Engadget talked of TI chips for pico projectors and HD recording on mobile phones.

  - Businessweek has a slide show of the new handsets unveiled at the show. 
 

Thanks to Debi Jones at Mobile Messaging 2.0, the Carnival of the Mobilists #110 is live.

Jan Chipchase, the well-known anthropologist with Nokia has come out with another one of his illuminating blog posts on the sharing of the mobile phone in Uganda.  You can read the blog post here.  It also provides a summary of the post and a 7MB Powerpoint presentation.

The study uncovered six shared phone practices summarized here:

1. Sente is the informal practice of sending and receiving money that leverages public phone kiosks and trusted networks. In Uganda the word Sente has two meanings the first being ‘money’ and the second ‘the sending of money as airtime’.

2. Beeping, flashing and missed calls are all ways to describe the practice of calling and hanging up before the recipient answers. It is in essence the cheapest form of lo-fi personal convenient communication and can be found anywhere where there are highly price sensitive consumers - from students in Helsinki to village dwellers in Uganda.

3. In Uganda most phone kiosk communication is mediated through a kiosk operator who completes parts of the calling task normally carried out by a sole device user.

4. Pooling is the collective buying of air time that exists amongst peer groups - students, colleagues, friends who each contribute to buy the lowest available denomination of airtime.

5. Phone kiosk owners often use a large notepad to document phone numbers used by their customers and over time it represents a form of address book and call log for the local community.

6. Step Messaging is the process of delivering either a text or verbal messages via shared mobile phone or kiosk where the message is delivered the last mile on foot.

Did you know that for 2008, there are approximately 200 malware threats for mobile phones?  Check out the details here. That should give an indication of a slow but definitely rising problem in the mobile world.

Recently the SANS Institute published its Top Ten Cyber Security Menaces for 2008.  The fourth menace was related to mobile:

Mobile Phone Threats, Especially Against iPhones And Android-Based Phones; Plus VOIP

Mobile phones are general purpose computers, so worms, viruses, and other malware will increasingly target them. Google’s recent announcement of “android” and the formation of the “open handset alliance” is a watershed moment for the mobile industry. A truly open mobile platform will usher in completely unforeseen security nightmares. The developer toolkits provide easy access for hackers. And hackers are taking note. The author of Metasploit, H.D. Moore, plans a mobile payload presentation webcast this month.

Attacks on VoIP systems are on the horizon and may surge in 2008. VoIP phones and the IP PBXs have had numerous published vulnerabilities. Attack tools exploiting these vulnerabilities have been written and are available on the Internet. In short, the VoIP attack surface is enormous.

Last month, Fortinet researchers found a new, socially engineered Symbian OS worm that is actively spreading on mobile networks as users unwittingly send the malware to their unit’s entire address book.  Although it currently runs on specific Nokia models, it is likely to infect other brands of smartphones running the Symbian OS (about 100 million mobile devices run Symbian OS).

In its Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Volume XII, Symantec says that the attackers are getting more organized and professional in their approach.  Their method and detail depends on the geographical region that is targeted.  There is a lot of convergence in their approach (trojans, bots, malaware, etc all mixed together and served up in a truly malicious recipe).

As I discussed before, the WSJ has a report stating that Sprint and Clearwire are dancing together again, with support from investors including Intel, Google, retailer Best Buy and some others (even an ‘un-named foreign investor). That is certainly heartening and gives all these players a shot in the arm.

Meanwhile, Clearwire is strengthening its offerings on WiMAX by buying the Nortel VoIP softswitch to provide its subscribers with ‘the main choice for VoIP’. Essentially, the subscribers can get their VoIP from anybody.

In order for WiMAX to take off really well in the USA, a number of things need to happen.  First, Sprint needs a shot in the arm.  With the departure of Gary Foresee and the falling apart of its loose coupling with Clearwire, it is in a bad shape.  The Xohm testing has just had a soft start.  It badly needs WiMAX to work.  Second, Clearwire needs a shot in the arm.  Although its loss per subscriber has been improving, it has a long way to go to move into black and recover the investment in spectrum-shopping.  Third, WiMAX needs to take off really quickly.  After months of hype and hoopla, it finally seems to be delivering in other parts of the world.  With competition breathing down its neck (LTE, HSDPA, etc), it needs to start generating revenues soon.  Fourth, the 700MHz auction could be utilized for WiMAX and so that has perked up a number of players.  Cisco, (which has not bid) showed its WiMAX seriousness by buying Navini.  Google, (which has bid, but …) is eyeing the mobile world in multiple ways and any means of connectivity is game for its feast.  AT&T, which sold the 2.5GHz spectrum to Clearwire has little stake in WiMAX.  Verizon has announced its backing of the LTE race-horse for 4G and will lean heavily on Qualcomm’s current opposition to WiMAX.

In all this, Intel has a big stake in WiMAX.  Its long-delayed PC card will finally see the light of the day some time in mid of this year.  It has invested heavily in Clearwire.  It badly needs WiMAX to hit off in order to justify its spending on WiMAX.  So, inspite of the recent resignation of Intel bigwig Arvind Sodhani from the Clearwire board, all indicators point to a stronger Intel-Clearwire tie.  Alexei Oreskovic, the Senior Writer at TheStreet.com has written in detail about this. 

This drama could unfold in a number of ways.  The humming blogosphere is coming up with lots of ideas.  One old idea is that Google will buy or invest in Sprint.  The other is that it is participating in the auction to ward off the big carriers and will lend its support to an underdog.  Of course, in exchange it would demand access to the connected customers using this spectrum.  It could invest in ClearWire to galvanize the WiMAX rollout and therefore get access to those connected customers (after all, Paul Otellini is on Google’s board).  That way, Google, Intel and Cisco could team up with ClearWire/Sprint to have the WiMAX party, where the music would come from an ad-supported mobile revenue model.  Google still gets to attend ‘the other party’ (of mobile carriers) thanks to OHA, Android, search and partnerships.  Motorola and Samsung also get to attend and benefit from both parties.  Hark!  Did I hear somebody knocking on the door?  I suspect it’s Apple.

These are interesting times indeed!