(Clint Boulton, eWeek) Nielsen's survey of 200,000 mobile Web users from June 2009 to June 2010 indicated that e-mail use devoured 41.6% of mobile Web users' time. That's a lot of messaging on Apple's iPhone, Google's Android devices and RIM's BlackBerry smartphones.

Social networking on Facebook, Twitter and other Websites may dominate on the desktop, but time spent consuming e-mail rules the roost on mobile devices in the United States, according to Nielsen. This Nielsen clock/pie chart shows how mobile Web users spend an hour on their mobile devices, such as BlackBerry devices, Apple's iPhone or smartphones based on Google's Android operating system.

Note that users spent on average 25 minutes in an hour using e-mail, or three and one-half times as much as the 7 minutes the average respondent spent on Web portals such as Yahoo or MSN. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter consumed 6 minutes of the average mobile Web user's time.

(Brad Reed, NetworkWorld) Like all good things, the increase in speed and power comes with greater risks: added data capacity, connection speeds makes 4G smartphones more vulnerable. This article describes what any smart IT department should know before allowing a 4G device onto its network.

The increased mobile data usage is only expected to intensify in the enterprise as more executives could try to use their favorite devices for both work and personal use. Mike Siegel, a senior director of product management at McAfee, says this will put a particular strain on IT departments' abilities to protect data across multiple operating systems and applications. "We have senior executives now who are pushing on IT to support Android or iPhone," he says. "With iPhone and Android, you have a propagation of applications that have connections back to sensitive corporate data in the cloud. So these devices now are very much a data leakage vulnerability."

What is to be done? Read more by clicking the "full article" link.

(Chad Perrin, TechRepublic) Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, but they are still limited in their usefulness. This is actually a boon for their security, at least for now — because they have not been effectively secured well enough to replace a desktop or laptop computer for a lot of high-risk activities.

With the growing popularity of smartphones, people are beginning to speculate about whether there will be an explosion of security issues in the near future. When will the storm of viruses appear? When will smartphones — relatively low-power by the standards of personal computers, but online pretty much all the time — become a platform of choice for botnet nodes?

Some security experts are skeptical of the idea that smartphones will ever be much of a target for malicious security crackers to build botnets, or otherwise hijacking resources. Maybe the botnet threat will never materialize for the smartphone platform, because it is so limited compared to the general-purpose desktop and laptop computer. On the other hand, even if malicious security crackers are not directly targeting our smartphones yet, the ability to transfer files between a smartphone and a more general-purpose computer means that a smartphone can become an important vector for spreading viruses and other mobile malicious code.[...]

(Tim Lohman, Computerworld) Almost by the day, enterprises are becoming more receptive to the consumerisation of IT and introduction of mobile devices and platforms into their environment. But introducing smartphones, netbooks or newer technologies such as the iPad and e-readers, can pose security issues to an organisation - and to any customer or business included in the data held on the devices.

Threats such as Trojans and drive-by-downloads which attack and exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in software installed on an endpoint, rogue security applications, spyware, botnets, worms, viruses and phishing attempts are all threats that apply as much, if not more-so, to consumer devices as office-bound PCs. And once commercial data makes its way onto an employee's device, which is often unmanaged, the enterprise can no longer control its spread or usage. [...]

IT managers must also bear in mind that while employee devices perform a dual role - as a personal device and a company device - the protection of any organisational data held on the devices is totally up to the company, says senior marketing manager for Websense, David Brophy.[...]

(Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb) Just as businesses in the PC-based Web spent years in the 90's wondering if a desktop app or web browser based service was the best choice, in 2010 the same question applies to mobile phone applications.

1. Native App and/or Browser Based?
Organizations are asking themselves: should we build a native mobile phone app, or should we build a cross-platform browser-based mobile service? If they choose the former, which platform(s) do they focus on first? The choices include iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
2. Privacy
Location-based mobile apps have been a big trend in 2010, but there are significant privacy implications for these apps.
3. Emerging Wireless Standards
Think your smart phone is cool now? Wait till it gets RFID chips, then it'll truly be 'smart.'

Read more by following the "full article" link.

Moreover, you can learn here how to setup your mail server on your smart phone and enjoy access to messages, contacts, calendars and tasks anytime, anywhere (via Push email & PIM synchronization).

(Jon Oltsik, NetworkWorld) Large organizations now realize that endpoint security (and management) extends beyond PCs to mobile devices like Blackberrys, Droids, iPhones, iPads. Mobile device security is one of those areas that should get more attention. Users want better data security and integrated solutions.

So which security technologies are most important for mobile device protection? According to a recent ESG Research survey, here are the top 5:

1. Device encryption (51% of respondents rated this as "very important", 34% rated this as "important")
2. Device firewall (48% of respondents rated this as "very important", 37% rated this as "important")
3. Strong authentication (46% of respondents rated this as "very important", 41% rated this as "important")
4. Antivirus/Anti-spam (45% of respondents rated this as "very important", 37% rated this as "important")
5. Device locking (44% of respondents rated this as "very important", 41% rated this as "important")

(Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb) According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014.

The market was just over $400 million this past year, report says, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.[...] 

Enterprise Drives Mobile Growth - Like the earlier report from ABI, Juniper also sees the enterprise as a major force behind the move to the cloud. 75% of the mobile cloud-based application market is enterprise, notes the report. Mobile apps allow corporate users to access company data, share files, collaborate on projects and more via their smartphones. This business need will help fund the growth and development of the mobile cloud-based app market.[...] 

(Chris Silva, ZDNet) While mobile enterprise seems to be a lot of futurespeak, it turns out it does actually matter to CIOs, and has been highlighted in Forrester’s  recent “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report.

According to the report, all three areas - mobile networks gaining in power, mobile devices strengthening and mobile apps going mobile - represent an area of high business impact. The upside of arming your users with the combination of these three technology elements can reap great rewards in productivity, user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Thinking about mobile as not just a “now” technology, but taking into account networks, devices, and software as one connected ecosystem will ensure an investment in one of the three, key areas of mobility does not adversely affect the others. After all, successful implementations of technology will allow it to change business for better, not for worse.

(hjkim, MailRadar community) In the recent years, the buzz words were collaboration and unified messaging. Even though these continue to drive how email server companies design their products, customers just want to be able to get their email and reduce their operational expenses.

In this tough economy, the only function that customers are concerned about is getting and sending email. Because of this, they are willing to settle for free email services. They are also concerned about security with the ever increasing spam and virus attacks. However, at this time, advanced collaboration features are not their priority. The most surprising finding is that customers will continue to invest in purchasing mobile devices where they can get their email remotely - in other words, wireless email is growing.

(Bill Detwiler, TechRepublic) AppShopper, a Web site which tracks iPhone and iPod Touch applications, has noted that Apple’s App Store has surpassed 100,000 approved apps, although just over 93,000 are available. This revelation and the raging debate over the iPhone’s usefulness as a business device, got me thinking about just how many “business” apps were available in the App store.

After a little browsing and some quick math, it seems that as of this writing there are just over 2100 apps categorized as “Business” in the App Store. I arrived at this number by selecting the Business category from iTunes’ App Store drop-down menu, counting the number of apps displayed on the page (20), and multiplying that by the number of pages withing the Business category (109). 20 * 109 = 2180. If we take our total of 2180 and divide it by 100,000, we get 2.18 percent.

Now, I know this number is a very, very rough estimate. It’s likely that the last page of the Business category actually has fewer than 20 apps listed on it. It’s also much more likely that not all apps used for business are categorized under Business in the App Store. For example, the Facebook app is listed under the App Store’s Social Networking category, but I would argue that a great many people actually use Facebook for business. The same can be said for a great many other apps, such as the navigation utilities, time management apps, email tools, and more

But even if my 2 percent count is off by even two, three, or even four times, the App Store’s relatively anemic business offering only strengthens the argument of those IT pros who decry the iPhone as a glorified MP3 player and not a true enterprise mobile device.

(Jeff Dray, TechRepublic) After years spent supporting mobile devices and more years as a user of mobile data products, you may find that,  in some ways, mobile working is a liberating experience, but if you’re not careful, it can follow you all the way home.

1. Portable equipment breaks. If you keep your Blackberry or PDA in your shirt pocket, don’t lean over to look at things, it will fall out. Whether it falls onto a hard floor or down a toilet, the effect will be the same. If this does happen to you, take plenty of pictures, then you might be able to publish it as a PDA “unpacked” article.
2. Synchronization is essential. A daily backup of your mobile device means that vital information isn’t lost when the inevitable happens (see #1 above). If your diary is maintained by the office, it is essential to download the next day’s appointments.
3. If you are going to lose, leave behind, or forget something, it isn’t usually something minor, it will be the AC adapter, USB cable, or the item itself.
4. Murphy’s Law applies especially to mobile devices. In the UK it is known as Sod’s Law, but the effect is the same. You will drive out of network coverage just as you are getting details of a brilliant money-making opportunity or vital information about a key project. Know your geography as far as it relates to network coverage and find somewhere to stop if you think you are about to lose connection.

(Marin Perez, InformationWeek) While Google, Nokia and Palm take different approaches to the mobile space, executives from each company agreed that the mobile Web will play a significant role in future application development.

At the MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco, the companies discussed what makes up a winning mobile platform. The executives agreed that the most important thing was ensuring the end user has a good experience with apps, as well as making the platform attractive to developers.

Mobile program makers are facing an increasingly fragmented world, as the smartphone space consists of Apple's iPhone, Google's Android, Nokia's S60 Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Research In Motion's BlackBerry, and Palm's webOS. Additionally, most content creators also have to make apps for the various versions of J2ME if they want to reach a broad audience of feature phone users.

Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, said even the search giant isn't rich enough to support this many platforms at a sustainable rate over the long term. Gundotra said the Web will become a strong mobile development platform as things like HTML 5 and offline improvements become standardized. "We've decided to look to the future, and what we see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers," said Gundotra. "What that does for our costs is stunning."

(Polly Schneider Traylor, TechRepublic) Increasingly sophisticated smartphone capabilities are making it easier for road warriors to accomplish business tasks. When you’re away from the office with only a mobile phone in hand, the application you most desire is email — or for those with less patience, SMS. But beyond messaging, you need much more from your phone if you view it as your business partner. Some requirements are crucial, such as security tools. Other additions just make life much easier. Here are some tips on maximizing your mobile phone productivity.

1. Choose the right platform for your business and role. There’s no single best platform for business, even though many say that for office workers, the Blackberry is still king (sorry, Apple). What’s essential is choosing a device that maps well to your business and to your individual job requirements.
2. Consider battery life! If you’re often working away from the office, you better have hearty battery life in that smartphone. If you treasure fast data connections and use Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi, your battery life will be compromised even more.
3. Don’t overlook these two security imperatives. Increasingly, smartphones support remote wipe so that you or your IT administrator can erase all the data from your phone if it has been lost or stolen. Then there is encryption, which may or may not be automatic and easily configured in your device. If you have ultra-sensitive data on your phone and/or regularly access your corporate VPN from it, there are more protections to consider.

(Jack Wallen, ZDNet UK) Open source brings far more benefits to the mobile market than just cost savings. The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition (iPhone, Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold).

Two of those entries may outshine the rest for one simple reason — open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons:

1. Open Standards
2. More Applications
3. Security
4. Customisation
5. Connectivity
6. Cost
7. Multitasking
8. Push Gmail
9. Developers
10. Creativity

Naturally, cost is one of the biggest advantages that open source brings to the mobile market along with the other 9 reasons and being a part of the open source community will certainly benefit any member of the smartphones’ world.

(Robert Bredlau, CMS Wire) Only by living on Mars could one have avoided hearing about the iPhone or BlackBerry and their entrances into the corporate world. Millions of consumers and business people are testament to the popularity of the handheld devices that have made accessing the web on the move cheaper and easier.

However, despite this revolution in communications, businesses have been alarmingly slow to capitalize. According to an e-Spirit survey of 100 CIOs, two thirds of UK businesses are failing to deliver high-end customer experience by not optimizing their websites for the latest devices.

The trouble is that too much web content is designed for viewing on standard-size screens, so viewing them on anything smaller can result in a poor user experience.

A modern Web CMS allows businesses to use content developed for other channels, such as standard web pages and delivers it to mobile devices without any loss of integrity.

As with any free-flowing information, the issue of governance always remains high on the agenda. The freedom of mobile content has important implications for the business world, as critical information is leaving the confines of the firewall on a daily basis.

The challenge for businesses and mobile vendors is how to move with the times, modifying responses as technology evolves. Intelligent and flexible content management technology is a must for companies who face these challenges head on.

(Jason Hiner, TechSanityCheck) Google created the Android mobile OS because it wants its search engine to remain relevant as the world migrates more toward mobile computing. But Google’s biggest challenge in mobile search is not other search engines or platforms, it’s apps — particularly iPhone apps.

When I filled up the iPhone with mobile apps as part of my recent experiment, one of the first apps that I downloaded and put on the iPhone home screen was the Google app. Since Google is the home page on all the PCs and laptops that I work on, I assumed my behavior on the iPhone would be similar to the computer. I was wrong.

Once I downloaded a fleet of useful iPhone apps, I quickly discovered that I used Google far less on the iPhone than I do on a computer - even over Wi-Fi, and even when doing many of the same activities. That is partly due to the fact that mobile search needs to improve, but it is also do to the nature of the smartphone itself.

When I’m sitting at a computer, I typically use Google at least 2-3 times per hour. It’s usually the first place I go to get information. Google is not as much of a sleuth as it is a concierge. For example, when I’m pulling up a site, I often don’t use a bookmark or type the URL into the address bar. It’s just quicker to open my home page (Google) and type in the company name. This behavior is a bit lazy, but it’s effective because it’s the path of least resistance.

However, the opposite is true on smartphones — especially the iPhone with so many specialized apps and no qwerty keyboard. In my tests with the iPhone, I discovered that Google is usually my last resort for finding information. In fact, I typically only use Google search 2-3 times per day from the iPhone.

Typing is just not as fast on a smartphone (even with the full qwerty keyboard on BlackBerry). Pointing, scrolling, and selecting are all much easier and quicker. As a result, many of the things that I would usually do with a Google search from my computer, I do through an app on the iPhone.

(Jason Hiner, Editor in Chief, TechSanityCheck) Google is making a big run at new markets with business software and mobile phones. However, it will not succeed in either market unless it changes the way it builds its products. Both of these markets will reject Google’s “continuous beta” philosophy.

It’s easy to argue that the primary reason Microsoft has become the world’s largest software maker is that the company has repeatedly shown the ability to ship products. Even though the products may not be perfect and they may not meet the original ship date, Microsoft has proven that it almost always knows when the products are good enough to release to the market.

Google is emerging as one of Microsoft’s key competitors in the software business - perhaps even its biggest competitor within a few years - but Google has not mastered the “good enough” principle. Google software engineers have arguably created only two highly-profitable hit products: the ubiquitous Google.com search engine and the Web-based email client Gmail.

However, Google’s “continuous beta” approach that it used to build those two products will not satisfy the customers of two new market segments that Google wants to win: smartphone software and enterprise software.

While the complexity and requirements that large scale solutions must achieve have greatly increased during the last few years, a growing number of service providers have also started to include support for enterprise functionalities in order to better meet and adapt to their customers’ ever changing messaging needs.

With email quickly becoming the primary means of communication for both corporate and individual users, the competition in the market also gets tougher every day. Consequently, a new breed of email services has to be appended to already existing portfolios in order to attract new customers and keep current service subscribers happy. This is where offering mobile email functionalities such as the Push technology or PIM database synchronization can make the difference.
This whitepaper introduces you to AXIGEN Mail Server's advanced mobile email services enabling instant access to information regardless to time and location.

1. An Introduction to Mobile Email

Instant access to messages, contacts, calendar, or tasks regardless of time and location makes it easier for mobile workers to manage business operations, to stay in touch with customers and partners, and abreast of the latest changes and events on the market. It also ensures a better balance between professional and personal lives, enabling frequent travelers to keep in close contact with family and friends at all times. As a result, instant email retrieval has become more and more popular in both business and personal communication environments.

Today’s business world is fast-paced, highly versatile and mobile. Multiple branches, employees traveling from one city to another for weeks in a row, customers from multiple countries and time zones become commonplace, forcing companies to rely more and more on mobile devices to stay ahead. As instant access to information regardless of time and location becomes mission critical, it triggers the exponential growth of mobile email communication.

Quick access to one’s inbox, appointments and tasks leads to increased productivity and efficiency, business-wise, and, on a personal level, allows road warriors and frequent travelers to stay in touch with their family and friends. Take a tour of AXIGEN’s advanced mobile email and collaboration features to learn how to get the best of the high-end technology already at your fingertips.

1. Mobile Webmail
The AXIGEN messaging solution uses an advanced mobile webmail interface that supports all mobile web browsers compatible with the XHTML format for page rendering. The mobile webmail is integrated into the same server module and therefore provides seamless access to information to all users just like the regular webmail interface. When accessing the AXIGEN webmail interface, the end-user Mobile Browser ID String (User Agent ID) is identified and the mobile webmail is loaded and rendered automatically.

The AXIGEN mobile webmail interface provides access to features such as:
- Basic email access (read, write, reply etc.)
- Advanced email access (move, delete, attachments etc.)
- Folder management
- Public folder access
- Advanced email search
- Sharing and permissions management and much more.

Moreover, the new Mobile Browser ID String (User Agent ID) can be further added, therefore extending the integration capability of the AXIGEN mobile webmail with newer terminals.

One of the more important benefits of unified messaging - the integration of e-mail, voice and fax communications in a single mailbox - is the time savings that it affords users. Here's a stab at quantifying just the voicemail-related benefits of unified messaging:

• Assume that the typical user receives five voicemails per day. During a 250-day work year, the typical user would receive 1,250 voicemails.
• Further assume that a single voicemail accessed by telephone takes an average of 30 seconds to process, while one in a unified mailbox takes only 10 seconds. In the latter case, there are visual cues (e.g., the identity of the number that called you) that speeds the processing time per message.

Using these assumptions, a user would spend 10 hours 25 minutes per year processing voicemails via telephone, or 3 hours 28 minutes per year processing them in a unified messaging system. At a fully burdened annual salary of $80,000 for that user, the savings of nearly seven hours per year translates to a savings of $267 per user per year. In an organization of 2,500 users, that translates to productivity savings of nearly $670,000 annually.

Unified communications represents the goal of many workplace decision makers - the integration of e-mail, telephony, presence, fax, mobile communications, collaboration tools, audio conferencing, Web conferencing and videoconferencing into a coordinated and centrally managed communications system, all of which will be accessible via a single address. I believe that's where most workplace communications is ultimately headed, with the ultimate goal being truly intelligent communications. The only real question is how do you get there? There are three basic paths you can follow:

1. Start with unified messaging – the integration of e-mail, voicemail and fax into a single mailbox. This is a “light” form of unified communications and offers users the advantage of receiving their most important communications in a single place, making it easier for users, particularly mobile users, because they have only one location to check for these different communication modes.

A consensus on the definition for "unified communications" may be harder to establish than you might think. For example, here are some possible definitions:

     - A unified communications system routes voicemail sent to one or more telephone numbers and faxes to one or more fax numbers into an e-mail inbox where they can be heard and viewed in a manner similar to e-mail.
     - A unified communications system routes conventional voicemail, conventional faxes, SMS messages, instant messages, e-mail, VoIP traffic and other content to an e-mail inbox where this content can be viewed using a single interface.