Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple iPhone, a Research in Motion BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems. The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones.
Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.
This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.
When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.
Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.
There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.
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