Michael Flanagan, the chief technology officer at Arieso noted that “I use the iPhone 4 myself and when I first heard of the iPhone 4S features I was not compelled to rush out and get one. However, the data usage numbers I am seeing make me wonder what I am missing.”

The report, which was covered by Reuters, indicate that this doubling in data usage may be due to increasing use of online services like the virtual personal assistant Siri, which was bundled with the iPhone 4S.

This is not necessarily a good thing though. Arieso warns that the capacity issues plaguing mobile operators around the world will worsen in 2012.

According to Flanagan, “The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks”. Because of this, he suggests that the mobile industry needs new investment and new approaches to boost network performance and manage the customer experience.

iPhone 4S Users are the “Hungriest” Data Consumers: Study originally appeared on GreyReview.com on January 9, 2012.

According to the report, with the increasing market, thanks to the expanding number of smartphone users, many providers are introducing services, which includes to some degree, mobile VoIP.

The report quotes Amy Cravens, a senior analyst at In-Stat as saying: “While VoIP is a well-defined market, mobile VoIP is still in its infancy, with most offerings only being developed over the past several years, and because it’s in its nascent stage, there are significant opportunities for companies to develop the market.”

The main avenue for these providers to offer their mobile VoIP services is through the OS application store like iTunes and the Android Market.

The report also estimates that the revenues generated by mobile VoIP usage will increase to over $4 billion in 2015 and that LTE operators are not likely to have a significant impact on the mobile VoIP market until 2013.

Mobile VoIP Users Tripled in 2011 originally appeared on GreyReview.com on January 5, 2012.

These days, everybody loves Path. Tech connoisseurs and casual users alike have given the latest Path mostly positive reviews. Path 2 is definitely one of the most beautiful apps of 2011!

A little more than a year ago, Path was quite a different app. Path, which is founded by Dave Morin, ex-Facebook executive (co-inventor of Platform and Connect on Facebook) and Shawn Fanning (creator of Napster), differentiated itself from the prevailing conception of social networks by being ultra private. Today, Path is a marvelously designed app encapsulating the symbiosis of personal-public (with personal being the default). Path is one of the first high-profile apps that address privacy within the social networking context. Now, let’s look at some of the key moments of Path product evolution.

A Personal Network

Path 1.0 was launched on November 15, 2010. At its core, Path is a social photo sharing app. However, the app positioned itself as a personal network. You don’t follow or add friends on Path. Instead, you share moments (photos/videos) with your friend. If she accepts it, your moments will appear on her Path stream.

It is designed for users to share stuff with a small circle of friends. User can only add up to 50 friends. Why 50? Path explained:

We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time. Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.

Path 1.0 was already good. The tap photo to expand vertically was an especially graceful feature. Posting photo on Path was pleasantly fast and easy. However, I disliked the idea of rigidly categorizing each posting to People, Place or Thing. And the use of relative dates (i.e. 23 days ago) rather than absolute dates (i.e. Dec 21 2010) on each photo made it hard to quickly recall when exactly the photo was taken. Then, many disliked Path including Om Malik of GigaOM.

Path 1.0 version features include:

• Capture and share “moments” (or photos) with up to 50 close friends and family.
• Tag each moment as people, place, or thing.
• Explore your friends’ moments on a map.
• See who has viewed the photos.
• Tap to horizontally expand photos.

Moments in the Stream

Share a Moment in Places

Video of Path 1.0

On Becoming More Social Friendly

In the ensuing months, Path introduced various enhancements and features on its app. Notably, in Path version 1.5, released on April 15, 2011, users can finally share photos and videos on Facebook Wall. Previously, photos can only be shared to friends and family on Path. Path 1.5 also introduced lenses for users to stylized photos and videos. Activity function was introduced to enhance greater visibility of friends’ reactions to your shared moments.

Path 1.5 version features include:

• Activity: Seeing how your friends respond to you.
• FriendRank: Guessing your top friends by analyzing your Facebook interactions.
• Lenses: Free and premium lenses to style photos and videos in real time.
• Share: Able to post photos and videos on Facebook Wall.

Private / Public Share Switch

Style your Moments with Lenses

Disruptive Path

After version 1.5 release and unimpressive uptake, the Path team went back to the drawing board and asked “Okay, what are people really using Path to do?” For the next six months, the team re-imagined Path.

On November 29, 2011, Path 2.0 was unveiled. The latest iteration is a total makeover of Path. It is now a smart journal. The app now comes with an expanded sharing capability. Users can now share status updates on popular social networks namely, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

Path has evolved from a personal network for photo / video sharing to become a social diary. You can now log your social activities and thoughts, in the forms of photo, video, text, song, and location check-ins on Path. Friends’ list also expanded from 50 to 150 (150 is the commonly used value of Dunbar’s number). Despite the makeover, privacy remains the bedrock of Path.

The Swiss-Army Knife of Your Online Social Life

Path launched With app in June 07 2011, which enables users to share who they are with, what they doing on Twitter. The With feature is now embedded into Path 2.

Other “old” features like photo-taking, lenses, weather (appearing on status updates, and awake-sleep postings) and Activity are still available on Path 2.0.

Path 2.0 is a successful release. Users are now sharing an average of 12 moments per second and Path is “seeing 30x the number of daily active users, going from 10K to 300K in two and a half weeks.” (Source: TechCrunch)

Path 2.0 version features include:

• Design: A totally transformed user interface.
• Share Path stories on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
• Post Check-ins on Path and also, Foursquare.
• Tell your friends what are you listening to right now.
• Post status updates.
• Increased friends count from 50 to 150.
• Photos: All photos are now in full-view mode (no longer tap-to-reveal-all).

Profile Cover on Path

An Entry in Path Journal

Status Updates Pop-up

Video on Path 2.0

Evolutionary Path from a Personal Network to a Smart Journal originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 28, 2011.

Twitter just unveiled its latest interface iteration. It now neatly arrange into four key sections – Home, Connect, Discover and Me.

• Home The landing page where you see all the tweets of those you’ve followed. And I like the fact that photos and videos are now embedded directly in the Tweet streams.



• Connect Here you can see your Interactions and Mentions. Previously, “Interactions” is known as “Activity” and “Mentions” is known as “@[your username]” on Twitter web. These two are now available on mobile apps.



• Discover Discovery is a cornerstone for Twitter. For users to discover interesting and relevant stuff, Twitter is extending beyond “Who to follow” and Trends listing. It introduces Stories to enable users to discover interesting news and information. Stories are personalized news stream, based on user’s current location, what she follows and what’s happening around the world.



• Me This is Twitter personal profile, redesigned.

This isn’t an exciting upgrade. It mostly involves re-arranging and re-organizing Twitter features into new containers. However, Twitter is getting thumbs up from me for enabling full Twitter experience on mobile apps. Previously, the Twitter mobile apps are scaled-down version of the full Twitter web version. Now, whatever you get on the web, you can get them on the apps too.

You can now see the new Twitter design on both iOS and Android apps. The web version will be made available over the next few weeks.

New Twitter Design: Tightly Coupling Web and Mobile originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 9, 2011.

Apple released their latest and grandest operating system for their iDevices, the iOS 5 on 12th October 2011. I’ve had it installed on my iPhone and iPad 2 for a week now so I thought I’d share my views of it so far.

My verdict: It ROCKS!

The new notification center is definitely well executed. Although it takes a leaf out of the Android playbook, its execution in iOS 5 is so much more refined. There fact that there is a good amount of configurability available for it is also a plus point.

iMessage is another tasty morsel. Is it better than 3rd party apps like WhatsApp Messenger or Kik Messenger? Not really, but it is the simplest, considered that it is built into the OS. The keyboard display has also been tweaked so that it disappears when you scroll up to look at an earlier part of a conversation.

Synching your iPhone through WiFi is not exactly walk in the park, but once you get the hang of it, it works like a charm. No more cables for me!

Tabbed browsing in Safari is a long awaited feature and well implemented. On the iPad, the split keyboard takes a little getting used to, but is a boon for browsing in landscape.

And you can now delete calls from your Call List, unlike before where you can only clear the entire list. Useful for those people who frequently make incognito calls (wink wink).

You can also designate your own custom SMS tone (previously you can only do that for ringtones). Mine is now set to the famous Wilhelm scream.

Getting to the camera from the lock screen isn’t as fast as I’d hope it would be; you have to double-press the home button before the camera button appears. But using the volume up button as the shutter key is a much welcomed addition after years of fiddling with its on screen counterpart. The photo editing features are minimal but the cropping tool is very useful.

I haven’t played around with Twitter integration yet and don’t really see myself using it very much.

Overall, iOS 5 feels faster, snappier, and more user friendly. Too bad you’d need to upgrade to the iPhone 4S in order to fully appreciate iOS 5, i.e. the Siri voice recognition feature. But those not willing to upgrade to the 4S can try Vlingo or Dragon Dictation for the voice recognition needs.

A short video on iOS 5:

Apple iOS 5: A week later originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 19, 2011.

Anyone can download contents off Mobile9. Out of the 30 million active monthly active users, 9 million are registered members. Majority of the users are from India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines and also, Germany and the US.

Malaysia-based Mobile9 has over 1.6 million free mobile contents – apps, wallpapers, ringtones, screensavers, etc. To date, the site has registered over 11 billion free downloads. The mobile contents sharing portal also has an impressive 600 million impressions a month!

Essentially, Mobile9 aims to enable a better contents and apps discovery experience for users of today’s leading mobile operating systems. It acts as a platform agnostic intermediary between content creators and content consumers, targeting the Asian region.

Content creators can post free contents on Mobile9; only registered users can post contents. Non-registered and registered users can download for free the contents various popular handsets, namely Apple, BlackBerry, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and LG. The most popular platforms are Symbian and Android; Apple iOS is showing impressive growth. The company generates most of its revenue from online ads.

A Page on Mobile9 Website

Mobile9 Delivering 100 TERABYTES of Mobile Contents Per Month originally appeared on GreyReview.com on August 18, 2011.

At the just concluded ChinaJoy Expo 2011, Rovio Mobile Ltd. announced a slew of Angry Birds merchandises in China – namely, shoes, hat, bags and also, mooncakes (reported by a China-centric tech site M.I.C. Gadget). The Angry Birds creator will be using the mooncakes to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival) with Angry Birds fans in China. In addition, there will be a “Mid-Autumn Festival” theme edition on Angry Birds Season, which will be released in early September 2011 (Moon Festival falls on September 12th this year).

Angry Birds Mooncakes

Source: M.I.C. Gadgets

Mid-Autumn Festival Edition of Angry Birds Season

Source: M.I.C. Gadgets

Merchandising is part of Rovio’s strategies to monetize the millions of Angry Birds players community, across the globe. There are over 300 million Angry Birds downloads, worldwide and China is the world’s second largest market for Rovio. The company aims to further expand its user base in the world’s largest gaming market and is targetting to reach 100 million Angry Birds downloads in China by end of 2011.

Angry Birds Shoes

Source: M.I.C. Gadgets

Eat Angry Birds Mooncakes, Play Mid-Autumn Festival Theme Angry Birds Seasons originally appeared on GreyReview.com on August 1, 2011.

By using the Yes Life app, users can avoid roaming charges. The app allows you to make (and receive) carrier-grade calls using any broadband networks – WiFi or 3G (not necessary Yes 4G broadband service). Someone just tested it on McDonald’s WiFi and said “No lag and the voice is quite clear too.” Users can call Malaysian numbers with RM0.09 per minute; RM0.09 for each SMS sent. IDD rate starting from RM0.09 per minute for calls to over 200 countries.

With FaceTime app, iPad and iPod Touch users can already video-chat with one another over Wi-Fi. With mobile social text-messaging tools like Kik Messenger, Mogwee and Facebook’s Beluga, users can exchange instant messages with one another. So, where are the propositions for the Yes Life app? Key differentiators possibly include a personal mobile number, send SMS to other mobile numbers, carrier-grade mobile voice calls, Quality of Service for its 4G network and maybe, app performance.

Looking forward to hear comments from Microsoft/Skype and Viber about these performance results.

Now, Yes Life for iOS app users will get RM5 free credits pre-loaded (valid until July 12 2011). Android and BlackBerry versions will be available soon.

Interfaces of Yes Life app

Some other latest details about the Yes 4G services:

• Since March 2011, data volume increased by 117% (from 104TB to 226TB), voice by 75% (from 1 Million minutes to 1.75 million minutes) and SMS messages sent by 28% (from 670,000 to 859,000).
• Yes Life for PC, downloaded 55,000 times already.
• Yes network with 1700 base stations, to date.

Yes Life video

YTL launches Yes Life app for iOS, competing with FaceTime, Skype, Kik, Beluga, etc. originally appeared on GreyReview.com on May 12, 2011.

• reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
• ceases backing up this cache, and
• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

These upgrades are mostly invisible to end-users. Apple also released series of Q&A to address some of the concerns raised during the past 1 week, since the discovery of iPhone tracker.

Some interesting points:

• Apple said that it is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple acknowledged that confusion is mainly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.
• Apple elaborates on why iPhone is logging user’s locations:
  

  The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

• As mentioned above, Apple will cease to backup the crowd-sourced cache in the upcoming software update.
• Apple highlighted two bugs (which will be fixed in the software updates next week) – (i) storing so much location data on the iPhone and (ii) even with turn off Location Services, iPhones continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database.
• Besides the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi and hotspot and cell tower data, Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.
• Apple iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads

Apple Q&A in full

April 27 2011

Apple Q&A on Location Data

Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.

Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

* reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
* ceases backing up this cache, and
* deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Apple offers Software Updates and Answers to remedy the fiasco of iPhone Tracking originally appeared on GreyReview.com on April 27, 2011.

Nielsen also surveyed those who have purchased a smartphone in the past 6 months. Half of them said they have purchased an Android device. Only 25% have purchased Apple iOS devices, followed by BlackBerry 15% and Windows 7 7%.

Another latest report – Mobile Developer Report found that mobile developers remain bullish about the iOS platform. Appcelerator and IDC surveyed a total of 2,760 Appcelerator Titanium developers in early April 2011. 91% of the developers surveyed are “very interested” in iPhone development and 86% for iPad. For Android, 85% saying they are “very interested” for Android phones and 71% for tablets. Microsoft’s Windows 7 in distant third with 29%.

Mobile Developer Report by Appcelerator / IDC (Full Report)

Google Android desired by consumers; Apple iOS attracted more mobile developers originally appeared on GreyReview.com on April 27, 2011.

Imagine a room, a command center of sorts, illuminated by dozens of monitors in front of which nameless observers sit scrutinizing the data displayed before them. On the room walls are bigger displays; one showing the map of the country, some showing overhead views of several cities while others track the movements of selected individuals, identified only as numerics. On the door we see an emblem; not the crest of the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency… but an Apple.

This imagery is not from Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State, but rather it was what came to my mind when I read about the discovery made by two security researchers – Pete Warden, Founder of Data Science Toolkit and Alasdair Allan, Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter, that the Apple’s iOS 4.x mobile operating system records the user’s location for iPhone and iPad into a hidden file on the devices, named “consolidated.db”.

Warden also created an open source program “iPhone Tracker” for iPhone and iPad users to output their location file into an interactive map, so they can see for themselves.  The software requires OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

It was also further revealed by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that Apple isn’t the only one; Google’s Android smartphones also regularly transmit their locations back to Google. According to WSJ, Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their cellphones and these databases “could help them tap the US$2.9 billion market for location-based services—expected to rise to US$8.3 billion in 2014”.

Location-based services have been a feature included in most recent smartphones, supposedly as an accompaniment of the phones’ global positioning satellite (GPS) function and to help users look up local businesses nearby their location as well as to enhance social networking. But this new revelation about the hidden tracking abilities embedded in Apple’s and Google’s software raises significant privacy issues.

Following Warden’s and Allan’s findings above, US Congressman Ed Markey has taken Apple to task. The congressman wrote a letter to Apple CEO requesting more details about Apple tracking mechanisms. In a statement issued by him on Thursday:

Apple needs to safeguard the personal location information of its users to ensure that an iPhone doesn’t become an iTrack. Collecting, storing and disclosing a consumer’s location for commercial purposes without their express permission is unacceptable and would violate current law. That’s why I am requesting responses to these questions to better understand Apple’s data collection and storage policies to make certain sensitive information can’t be left behind for others to follow.

Much of the concern about these hidden tracking abilities stem from the devices logging the users’ physical location without users knowing it, and the susceptibility of such unencrypted information to abuse by unscrupulous individuals like malicious hackers.

Earlier, Google has responded to Mobilized, All Things Digital:

All location sharing on Android is opt-in by the user. We provide users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices. Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user.

So far, Apple has not responded. Hopefully, the most valuable company on Earth can comment on the tracker findings, as well as explain the measures they are taking to ensure that the information mined by these devices will stay secure and only be used for their originally intended purposes. This iPhone tracking fiasco, yet another side-defect of location-based social networking?

Watch Warden and Allan discussing their findings:

Addendum: It is ironically interesting to note that when Apple released the Macintosh in 1984, they created an advert in which an unnamed heroine (representing Apple Macintosh as indicated by her white tank top with a cubist picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) saves humanity from “conformity” to Big Brother (representing IBM), an allusion to George Orwell’s famous novel 1984.

Credits for Images: The Guardian and Desktop Nexus

Location-Based Services and Privacy Violations by Apple iPhones and Google Androids originally appeared on GreyReview.com on April 23, 2011.