Best Buy Mobile: "Free Smartphone" is Hard to Ignore

Best Buy Mobile is giving away new phones (on contract) every day this month. Every day throughout December, Best Buy Mobile will feature a minimum of four free smartphones (one from each carrier) in all Best Buy Stores, in all 157 Best Buy Mobile specialty stores, and on their website.

Among the devices to be features are the:

Droid Incredible (Verizon)
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 (AT&T)
LG Optimus S (Sprint)
LG Optimus T (T-Mobile)

Hard to dismiss an offer of a free Droid, huh?

Best Buy Mobile launches major holiday sale | Android Central

Location as a Security Feature

A new venture from location provider Location Labs and fraud detection service Finsphere hopes to use a user's mobile location to enhance security and prevent identity theft and fraud.

The two companies have launched Finsphere's "PinPoint" identity validation product, which helps to fight identity theft and validate a user's identity with the use of Location Labs' "Universal Location Service."

The concept behind the service is simple: PinPoint tracks the location of a credit card transaction and matches it to the location of the end user's cell phone. If the two are far apart, it raises an alert.

The end user will then be sent a text message or email to verify whether or not the transaction was legitimate. Think of it as sort of a 'first responder' to the possibility of a stolen wallet, stolen credit card or any other financially-bound identity theft.

Beyond the Check-in: How Location Services Can Now Fight Identity Theft

StarHub Pilots Mobile Payments Using Near Field Communications

StarHub Pilots Mobile Payments Using Near Field Communications

One thing is clear as ecosystem participants begin to maneuver for a secure position in the "near field communications" part of the mobile payments business. Each type of participant is looking for ways to secure a position that is less reliant on the approval or cooperation of some of the other participants.

For example, StarHub is working witha bank and a transport company to create its own mobile payments capability, without directly requiring handset manufacturers to approve.

StarHub will be running a trial of NFC payments in Singapore with DBS Bank, featuring ticketing from EZ-Link. But the most interesting aspect of the trial is the way it cuts out the handset manufacturers, using Gemalto's N-Flex technology to slide between the SIM and the phone and provide an NFC antenna.

NFC mobe-touchpay trial does end run round handset makers • The Register

The Future of Media

Agree or disagree, interesting statistics in here.

Social Networking: Where We Came From

Social Networks: Past, Present & Future - Social networking seems to have exploded, but as with most other applications involving the Internet, there is an experimental, elemental past. And there is a long ways yet to go.

Mobile Device Use in Pictures

Click on the image for a larger view.

Xmarks acquired by LastPass, Goes Freemium

The Xmarks cross-browser bookmark synchronization service nearly had to shut down earlier this year because the company was running out of funding and still hadn't found a sustainable business model.

LastPass, a software company that offers a cross-platform password synchronization tool, has acquired Xmarks and is moving the product to a freemium model.

Xmarks users who are willing to pay $12 a year for the new premium version of the service will get extra features, including access to the new Android and iPhone mobile applications.

Xmarks has more than 4.5 million users syncing more than 1 billion bookmarks across five million computers. LastPass thinks the new "freemium" model will work because it did for LastPass.

Hands-on: Xmarks acquired by LastPass, launches mobile apps

Mobile Video Advertising Will Have its Challenges, But it is Coming

One issue is translating video authored for a bigger and wider PC screen, automatically, even when it might be necessary to remove some of the information.

Google Research Blog: "Pan and Scan" for Mobile Video

"Pan and scan" is a technique long used to fit wider movie images onto an analog NTSC TV screen. Engineers at Google say they now can do the same thing for video to be displayed on a mobile screen, rather than a larger PC screen.

Videos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios, but the device used for playback, may it be your TV, mobile phone, or laptop, only has a fixed resolution and form factor, Google engineers say.

As a result, you cannot watch your favorite old show that came in 4:3 on your new 16:9 HDTV without having black bars on the side, referred to as letterboxing.

Likewise, widescreen movies and user-videos uploaded on YouTube are shot using various cameras with wide-ranging formats, so they do not fit completely on the screen. As an alternative to letterboxing, several devices try to upscale the content uniformly, which either changes the aspect ratio, making everything look stretched out, or simply crop the frame, thereby discarding any content that cannot fit the screen after scaling.

Google Research, together with collaborators from Georgia Tech, says it has developed an algorithm that resizes (or retargets) videos to fit the form factor of a given device without cropping, stretching or letterboxing.

At some point, this is going to be important for providers of videos that will be viewed on mobile devices, and the business ecosystem (advertising, marketing, transactions) that will grow up around mobile video.

Official Google Research Blog: Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video Retargeting

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg

Sprint Nextel Corp. supports a network accord between partner Clearwire Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, said Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Jason Armstrong, who met with Sprint management.

“Sprint indicated they have encouraged a wholesale deal,” Armstrong says. “Sprint would support a T-Mobile equity infusion into Clearwire."

There have been reports that Sprint's board was in disagreement about such a T-Mobile USA investment in Clearwire. On one hand, the deal would bring Clearwire cash it needs to finish construction of its national network. On the other hand, the deal would allow a competitor to proceed rapidly with a 4G service that might be tough to create any other way.

Were it to invest in Clearwire, T-Mobile USA would be able to buy capacity on Clearwire’s fourth-generation network at favored rates, as does Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE at same rates

Verizon Wireless apparently will offer no-contract 4G dongle service at the same rates as the on-contract pricing, which will come as a welcome surprise for some users. The no-contract price is the same as for a contract-based service: $50 for 5 GBytes or $80 for 10 GBytes, plus a $10 per GB overage.

The only difference is that the no-contract price for the modem is $249.99, as opposed to $99.99 on a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate).

The reason for contracts in the first place always has been to offset the subsidies on equipment that mobile service providers have been paying for as marketing cost.

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE options: same rates, pricier modems -- Engadget

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE at same rates

Verizon Wireless apparently will offer no-contract 4G dongle service at the same rates as the on-contract pricing, which will come as a welcome surprise for some users. The no-contract price is the same as for a contract-based service: $50 for 5 GBytes or $80 for 10 GBytes, plus a $10 per GB overage.

The only difference is that the no-contract price for the modem is $249.99, as opposed to $99.99 on a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate).

The reason for contracts in the first place always has been to offset the subsidies on equipment that mobile service providers have been paying for as marketing cost.

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE options: same rates, pricier modems -- Engadget

Google's Chrome 8: What's New

Google Chrome 8, now rolling out to users, apparently features more than 800 bug fixes and stability improvements. Some say those tweaks and other security patches make up the bulk of the progress.

One new feature that's immediately noticeable is the addition of a built-in PDF viewer. According to Chromium Engineering Director Marc Pawliger, the built-in PDF viewer lets the browser 'render [PDF files] as seamlessly as HTML Web pages,' without the need for a standalone Adobe Reader installation.

Since I use Chrome as my primary browser, and since I seem to experience Adobe issues relatively frequently on the three Windows machines I use most often, each running a different operating system, that one new feature might bring some wanted stability to my PDF viewing.

Developers also seem to say Chrome 8 is the first version of the browser to boast full support for Google's upcoming Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store will offer an array of Web-based applications -- both free and paid -- that'll be designed specifically to work with the Chrome browser and the still-under-development Chrome OS.

Google's Chrome 8: What's New, and What's Next - PCWorld

Leadership Matters for Group Coupon Sites

In general, in most businesses, leadership of any category nearly always winds up in a highly-nonlinear distribution where 80 percent or more of the revenue, profit or sales is garnered by just a few providers.

It is not uncommon for the market share gap between providers one and two to be extensive. A rule of thumb is that market share of player one is double that of provider two, for example.

It looks like Groupon already is emerging as the number-one provider in the group coupon or social shopping space.

Hitwise: Groupon Is Getting 79% Of U.S. Group-Buying Visits Vs. 8% For LivingSocial

FCC Chairman's Speech About Internet Freedom