Will Google Glass Disrupt The Smartphone Wars?

Is the future of mobile becoming a little clearer? Is it in fact settling down into a pattern that will persist over the next few years, one in which Apple and Samsung share the spoils while the rest try, vainly, to wrest from them that elusive commodity called profit? The writing is on the wall in smartphones and with an increasingly stable outlook, Google Glass looks like the only disruption in town. What we are really looking towards is a new way of presenting and absorbing information. Google Glass looks like the nearest we have to a new paradigm, but in fact my guess is it is too static. Information needs to be as pervasive as our lifestyle needs. It won’t be stuck to our heads. But it might be in our ears, on our wrists, on the objects we observe or all three together, and more. 

• Global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent in 2012
• 2012 mobile data traffic was nearly 12 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000
• Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2012
• Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012
• In 2012, a fourth-generation (4G) connection generated 19 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection
• The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate 16 percent of mobile data traffic, down from 52 percent at the beginning of 2010
• Average smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012
• Smartphones represented only 18 percent of total global handsets in use in 2012, but represented 92 percent of total global handset traffic

■ Globally, 33 percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in 2012.
■ Android data use is now higher than iPhone data use.
■ In 2012, the number of mobile-connected tablets increased 2.5-fold to 36 million, and each tablet generated 2.4 times more traffic than the average smartphone.

Google to pay almost $300 million to Mozilla to keep it the default search engine on Firefox

Google and Mozilla have had a good (and sometimes bad) relationship when it comes to business. The two are partners in one context and opponents in another. But still, they both kind of depend on each other to some extent. Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are two of the most used browsers on more than one platform, and they both want to keep it that way. And since Firefox has a very good market share, Google wants its presence on it as the default search engine.

Google’s contract with Mozilla for this expired in November this year and now its time to renew that contract. And for the next year, Google is ready to pay Mozilla almost three times the money it paid last year. In the latest “State of Mozilla” report, it is clearly understandable that Google has contributed 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million in 2010, and that means Mozilla is lot dependent on Google for its own survival, dont you think so?

Now that Google is ready to increase the pay by three times, which comes to almost $300 million, Mozilla will be a bit short to $1 billion in revenue for the next year. That’s a great leap if you ask me. We will still see Google as the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox if this contract is signed, and I have no complaints. And since almost 94-96 percent of Google’s revenue comes from ads, this investment is very important for the company.

The winner, Sergey Glazunov, was the first to submit an entry in Google's Pwnium competition to find security exploits in Chrome.

Less than two weeks after Google launched Pwnium, a competition for hackers to find security exploits in Chrome, the search giant has announced its first winner.

Google's Sundar Pichai announced on his Google+ page yesterday that Chromium contributor Sergey Glazunov submitted the first successful entry to the Pwnium contest, revealing a "Full Chrome Exploit" that bypassed the browser's sandboxing security. The exploit makes it possible for a malicious hacker to do just about anything they want on an infected machine.

In an interview published yesterday by CNET sister site ZDNet, Justin Schuh of the Chrome security team said that Glazunov was able to execute "code with full permission of the logged-on user." Schuh called the feat "impressive," and said that it deserved the $60,000 bounty.

Glazunov is the first person to win cash fromGoogle's Pwnium competition. The company launched the contest in late February with promises of awarding up to $1 million to those who can find security holes in Chrome. The highest $60,000 prize is given only to those who can obtain "Chrome/Windows 7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself." A $40,000 prize will be awarded to individuals who can target Chrome with one of its own bugs, plus others found in the operating system. Google's $20,000 award is given to those who can find issues without using bugs in Chrome.

"We require each set of exploit bugs to be reliable, fully functional end to end, disjoint, of critical impact, present in the latest versions and genuinely '0-day,' i.e. not known to us or previously shared with third parties," Google wrote in its blog announcing the contest. "Contestant's exploits must be submitted to and judged by Google before being submitted anywhere else."

Now that Glazunov's discovery has been verified, Google is "working fast on a fix," Pichai wrote on his Google+ page. The company says that it'll push the fix out in an auto-update.

"This is exciting; we launched Pwnium this year to encourage the security community to submit exploits for us to help make the web safer," Pichai wrote. "We look forward to any additional submissions to make Chrome even stronger for our users."