SingTel launches location tracker service for subscribers

SINGAPORE: SingTel has started a new service which will act as a location tracker.

The new service, Locator, will enable users to know the whereabouts of those whom they wish to keep track of.

SingTel said it will be useful for customers when they are away from their loved ones and need to make sure they are safe.

The service will display up to three SingTel postpaid mobile users' locations on the phone via a map. Accuracy ranges between 50 and 500 metres.

When customers add mobile numbers to their Locator list, a notification will be sent to the mobile owners seeking their consent to be located.

The person being tracked can choose to participate or withdraw his consent anytime.

SingTel said its customers have been requesting for such a service, which costs S$5.35 monthly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New online payment system protects personal data

SINGAPORE, 22 OCTOBER 2008 -- Customers can avoid sending personal data over the internet when shopping online, following the launch of a new e-commerce payment system.

Collaboration between MasterCard, Formosa Technology, FarFax and Shin Kong Commercial Bank has resulted in the Credit Card Dynamic Password Authentication and Dynamic Secured Payment System.

According to MasterCard, the system is the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific, using the MasterCard OneSmart Chip Authentication Program (CAP) and Credit Card Personal Account Number mapping.

With the solution, customers can make online payments without having to enter personal data such as a credit card number, expiry date, cardholder name and three-digit CVC2 code, MasterCard said. The user only needs to enter the CAP token and complete payment authorisation upon confirmation of identity.

Online shopping popularity

Online shopping has attracted the interest of more Asia-Pacific consumers, reflected by a jump in electronic transactions. According to MasterCard, the Asia-Pacific online shopping market is expected to grow at a rate of 23.3 per cent annually, reaching US$168.7 billion by 2011.

Despite the growing popularity of online shopping in the region, users still cite information security as a top concern, MasterCard said.

Formosa Technology and FarFax will work with participating internet merchants to deploy the Credit Card Dynamic Password Authentication and Dynamic Secured Payment System platform.

According to MasterCard, the system improves information security by offering two-factor authentication on EMV chip technology. This means that the customer would employ something only he or she knows, such as a PIN, in tandem with something he or she has (an EMV chip card in this case).

Security system

Cardholders insert their EMV chip card into a simple handheld card reader, and enter their PIN into the device, creating a unique, one-time password, MasterCard said. The password must be entered to permit the user to conduct online banking or e-commerce transactions.

Based on EMV and CAP technologies, the password only works once and becomes invalid when the transaction is completed.

MasterCard claimed that the system gives internet users peace of mind from Trojans or hackers intercepting personal information such as account numbers and passwords. By eliminating customers' need to provide personal information to merchants, identity theft may be prevented, the company said.

For the near future, Formosa Technology is seeking to extend the system to online shopping, online auction and television shopping merchants.

Singapore firm scores mobile wallet success abroad

By WINSTON CHAI

WITH Singapore's efforts to promote payments via mobile phones slow to get off the ground, a local firm is dialling overseas to exploit the market potential of this emerging technology.

Following the success of earlier trials, Cassis International is working with a Malaysian operator on the commercial rollout of its mobile wallet initiative, according to company CEO Chua Thian Yee. This comes on the heels of a similar deployment for Korea's SK Telecom in 2007.

The homegrown tech upstart, formed in 2002 by a group of executives from the smartcard industry, plays an integral role in realising the payment promise of near field communication (NFC), the technology that is being used to allow consumers to tap and pay for purchases with their handsets.

This is because Cassis provides the solutions needed to allow financial services players to securely distribute credit-card and other payment applications over the air to NFC-enabled mobile phones. By loading the relevant applications, the phone can be used to pay for everything from train rides to burgers and movie tickets.

Cassis was roped in for all the NFC trials that were sanctioned by Visa International, and is the only Asian firm on the payment provider's international mobile payment platform consortium.

Helped by the two overseas projects, the firm is expected to maintain its revenue growth at 30 per cent in 2008, but its big break could come within the next year with more commercial rollouts around the world.

'2009 will be a big year for us,' Mr Chua told BizIT in an interview on Tuesday, without disclosing details of the deals in the pipeline.

To tackle its overseas projects, the company currently has a team of 70 staff across Malaysia, China, Korea, France, and its headquarters in Singapore.

While inter-operability and fragmentation issues dogged earlier attempts to promote mobile payments, Mr Chua is confident that the outcome will be different this time around with NFC.

Instead of loading credit-card applications into the chip of a plastic card, the data is instead sent over the cellular network to an NFC handset. There is no need to replace existing payment terminals, Mr Chua stressed.

'NFC uses a standard that has already been established. It's not about introducing new equipment but merely using another form factor (the mobile phone instead of a plastic credit card) to pay using the same transaction terminal,' Mr Chua said.

While telcos in countries such as Japan and Korea have introduced mobile payments, local operators here are just starting to dip their toes into the fledgling technology.

Singapore Telecommunications and its partners Nets and United Overseas Bank are assessing the feasibility of a new coupon redemption feature with NFC-enabled handsets.

Rival StarHub, however, has chosen to join hands with Japanese operator NTT Docomo to test out the latter's Osaifu-Ketai mobile wallet platform in Singapore.

StarHub to launch Asia's first integrated IM app on mobiles

Reuben Lee | Jun 13, 2008

Singapore telco StarHub will soon be launching what it claims is Asia's first IM application for mobile phones that combines both Yahoo and Microsoft Live Messenger services. Called Chat Anywhere, this value-added service is aimed at giving IM addicts (or simply anyone who wants to stay online all the time) peace of mind with its S$5.35 monthly flat rate. Expected to be available in the later part of June, this service is open to all StarHub post-paid mobile subscribers with cellular handsets that support Java. Users need to download the application and install it on the phone. Connectivity is via GPRS, 3G or HSDPA whichever is available. No extra data charges will be incurred when using this service, according to StarHub.

Citysense Uses Mobile Data To Pinpoint Night Life Hot Spots

The mobile map application takes data from cell phones and uses it to identify locations with high activity at any given moment.

By K.C. Jones, June 9, 2008 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208402912

Sense Networks has launched an online tool for discovering and navigating nightlife activities.

The company announced the launch of the application, Citysense, on Monday. It also announced a separate platform that analyzes historical and current location data from cell phones.

Citysense is a mobile map application, released in alpha. It highlights hot nightspots in San Francisco in real time. Users can spot locations on Google and Yelp and identify those with high activity at any given moment or view locations that historically draw the biggest crowds.

"Citysense demonstrates the power of combining anonymous, aggregate location data for social navigation," said Sandy Pentland, chief privacy advocate and co-founder of Sense Networks.

Pentland, who also serves as the director of human dynamics research at MIT, said the system resembles the way GPS in cars share road speed conditions so drivers can avoid congestion. It aggregates anonymous location data and analyzes it on a macro level and an individual level. So the system shows different locations for different users to reflect where they are most likely to find others with similar tastes and interests.

Users can choose not to maintain a personalized profile and delete their data at any time.

"You created your data: you own it," Sense Networks explains on the Citysense Web site. "But showing up in Chicago for the first time and seeing the top places you're likely to find people with similar tastes as yourself at midnight -- that's pretty useful."

The company says it maintains anonymity when collecting and sharing data, does not collect e-mail addresses or phone numbers, and never uses passwords.

"In fact, we have a revolutionary new data ownership policy wherein people actually own any information they create," the Citysense privacy policy states. "Citysense is opt-in, all the time. Anything Citysense collects, users can delete. You'll find the delete button easily accessible whenever you open the program."

Users can download Citysense for BlackBerry phones at Citysense.com. A version for Apple's iPhone will be available when the iPhone App Store launches.

Sense Networks also announced Macrosense, software that analyzes historical and real-time location data from mobile devices and cars. "Location data is monetized by companies and investors who receive value from understanding emerging trends in real time, while consumers receive compelling applications free of intrusive mobile advertising, remaining completely anonymous," Greg Skibiski, CEO and co-founder of Sense Networks, said in the announcement.

The software platform analyzes new data points in the context of billions of historic location data points, giving companies and investors insight into consumer behavior and macro trends, according to Sense Networks.

"Just as Google indexed pages on the Internet to optimize Web discovery, Sense Networks has indexed the real places in a city and characterized them by activity, versus proximity or demographics, to better understand the context of consumers' offline behavior," said Tony Jebara, chief scientist and co-founder of Sense Networks.

Everyone Is Talking About Mobile Social Networking

MAY 8, 2008

Big opportunities. Big challenges.

eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

"This population will comprise current online social networkers who are extending their digital lives to mobile as well as a growing number of mobile-only social networkers," said John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer senior analyst and co-author of the new report, Mobile Social Networks. "Early reports suggest strong user demand for mobile social networks."

For example, MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. "It wasn't until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones," Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.

Facebook claimed 4 million unique registrations. Mobile-only social networking players such as airG, Mocospace, myGamma and itsmy.com all reported several million users soon after launch.

"Along with the rapidly growing audience, marketers are drawn to mobile social networking because it creates a unique context in which to promote their goods and services," said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and co-author of the report. "It goes beyond simply linking people with digital content by adding the immediacy of sharing with friends—a very powerful marketing proposition."

"Even if only a tiny percentage of the 3 billion worldwide mobile phone users take up mobile social networking," said Ms. Williamson, "the potential advertising inventory reaches mind-boggling levels."

"Marketers, online social network sites, mobile carriers and mobile content providers all face enormous challenges to reach that potential," cautioned Mr. Gauntt. "Marketers are trying to determine which digital marketing techniques and ad units are relevant for the mobile social networking environment."

The six secrets to mobile computing success

By Tom Krazit, CNET News.com Apr 27, 2008

There are six things that developers need to keep in mind when developing for mobile computers, six things that don't necessarily come into play when thinking about PCs. That's how Ben Bederson and John SanGiovanni, co-founders of Zumobi, described their philosophies of mobile computing: Immediacy, adaptability, one-handed use, visual elegance, put the user in control, and thinking differently. The two engineers hosted a session during the waning days of the Web 2.0 Expo for Web developers interested in making products for smart phones, mobile Internet devices, or whatever convention we settle on to describe the next generation of mobile computing. Bederson is a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and spends much of his time researching human-computer interaction, which is getting a fresh look after 20 years of desktop computing. The surge in interest in mobile devices gives researchers a clean slate to figure out how people want to use computers, and Bederson and SanGiovanni have their theories. Let's take those one by one:

Immediacy. People have no tolerance for an hourglass on their smart phone, Bederson said. Developers should aim for a 15-second interaction: Take the phone out of the pocket, access the information, put the phone back in the pocket. It should only be out of that pocket for 15 seconds, otherwise, you're going to frustrate the user.

Adaptability. The iPhone may have made D-pads and QWERTY keyboards passé for now, but those types of input methods aren't going to disappear overnight, SanGiovanni said. Software for early smart phones was all about capitalizing on the "up-down-left-right" action of the D-pad, which resulted in a "lowest-common denominator" experience, he said. Instead, developers have to free themselves from the D-pad and design applications that aren't tied to one method of input or another, if they want to spread their work far and wide.

One-handed use. Bederson pulled out some data for this one. People tend to use two hands when they are producing content, and one hand when they are consuming content. But mobile device users consume far more data than they produce. "The basic principle of HCI (human-computer interaction) is support the most common activities excellently, and the other activities adequately," Bederson said. This directly relates to the size of the icons or buttons that you use on your application, he said. If you ask users to try and hit buttons that are 1 centimeter wide, error rates average about 5 percent, but they grow exponentially as the buttons get smaller. The iPhone gets close to that target, with buttons that are around 7 millimeters to 8 millimeters wide, but other devices use buttons that are far, far smaller and almost necessitate the use of a stylus, and two hands.

Visual elegance. SanGiovanni pointed to four popular mobile devices, including the iPhone and Nintendo's DS gaming system. The common thread across all four is that they use hardware acceleration to produce rich graphics, and you have to take advantage of that if you're making an application for those products. Think about transitions, moving through screens in your applications or into and out of applications: This has to be visually pleasing to the user.

Put the user in control. In the past, computers haven't always been designed for the user, Bederson said. They've been designed for the developer, or the IT manager. There were good reasons why that evolution took place, but it can be frustrating to the end user. And with mobile phones, carriers have historically controlled just about all the applications on a home screen, which doesn't sit well with many people.

Different patterns of use. This is sort of the core idea behind mobile development; it's a whole new world. For example, SanGiovanni points out that when you design a Web application with desktop users in mind, you want it to be "sticky," where people spend a lot of time using your particular application. A mobile application, on the other hand, has to be "bouncy," allowing people to "fly in and fly back out" of your application. They'll reward you by coming back if you make the product easy to use on the go. As with anything in life, the factors above all involve trade-offs. Immediacy can be a function of the network speed. Designing larger buttons to make one-handed use easier means you can fit less information on the screen. Rich graphics can sap performance. The iPhone is a prime example. Bederson and SanGiovanni referred multiple times to the iPhone during their presentation, praising it as a breakthrough in human-computer interaction in the mobile world. "It was a pebble dropped in the pond of a static phone industry," SanGiovanni said of Apple's first smart phone. But while Apple's iPhone designers made users feel like they were in control with gesture-based control, they maintained a hammerlock on the applications you can run (officially, anyway) on the iPhone. They designed an intelligent touch-screen keyboard that can predict what letter might come next in a given word, and expand the surface area of that key to improve accuracy. But they didn't give users direct feedback on which application key they hit off the home screen, zooming in on that application from the center of the screen each time it's activated rather than the key itself. That last one seemed a bit nitpicky to me, but I'm not a design geek. However, it's very early in the historical development of these devices. Apple didn't invent any of the major selling points of the iPhone, such as multitouch, use of accelerometers and sensors, or zooming into the screen. But what they accomplished might even be more impressive, according to SanGiovanni: The successful amalgamation and commercialization of design tidbits that had been circulating for years. "The synthesis of these things is the more impressive achievement than somebody who has spent their whole life working on virtual keyboards. Innovation doesn't just mean spending ten years of your life diving deep on just one concept," he said. (Originally posted in "One More Thing" blog at CNET News.com)

Welcome to the bar, would you like webcam or non?

Whether you love or hate crowded bars - or just like blurry people-watching - a growing phenomenon now appearing in cities like Boston, Minneapolis, and San Diego could help you find what you're looking for: the bar cam.

Using the live video stream (Hog's Breath in Key West, Fla. for instance)

potential customers can call up the live video stream online or by mobile phone so they can survey the crowd before venturing out.

Regarding privacy, promoters say the video isn't clear and isn't recorded, so it's not archived.

"If your wife or husband has enough suspicions to watch us, then they're going to drive down there and walk in on you," Jesse Newsome, founder of Barmigo in Phoenix, Ariz. told CNet.