Whisper helped protestors organise during the Arab Spring

Social site Twitter has acquired a small mobile security firm specialising in secure tools for Android. The purchase seems a strange fit but it has been suggested that the talent that comes with the company is what Twitter is really after.

Whisper Systems was founded by a highly regarded security expert known as Moxie Marlinspike. The company became somewhat famous during the Arab Spring, when Whisper released an encrypted voce communications system called RedPhone specifically to aid those involved in the Egyptian revolution. Marlinspike understood that tool actually had global implications.

Much to the disappointment of protestors worldwide, post acquisition, Whisper’s tools have all been taken offline, during a “transition period”.

Twitter is expected to use Marlinspike’s expertise in the SSL arena to help it secure its own services and implement SSL effectively to ward off the occasional security and privacy scares Twitter is responsible for.

The number of mobile messages sent in 2011 will increase by 12.5 per cent on 2010

The number of mobile text, picture and video messages sent worldwide will surpass 7.5 trillion in 2011, according to research firm Ovum, marking a 12.5 per cent increase on the 6.7 trillion sent last year.

Ovum also forecasts that the SMS-based messaging market will generate revenues of $153bn over the year, eight per cent more than it generated in 2010.

However, according to Ovum analyst Neha Dharia, while the mobile messaging market will continue to grow over the next four years, it is fast approaching an inflection point in the face of competition from IP-based messaging tools.

“Consumers will increasingly choose to send messages via the growing list of internet-based messaging services that have entered the market, rather than the traditional text message,” she said.

“The trend is intensifying due to the growing presence of smartphones, low-cost data plans, and the prevalence of third-party messaging service providers on the mobile phone. To continue to drive revenues from messaging, mobile operators will need to be innovative in their approach to both the services they offer and their business models.”

The research firm stated that device vendors in particular have been successful with messaging services to rival SMS, with RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger, Apple’s iMessage and Nokia’s Ovi Messaging tools that have all proved popular amongst consumers and are capturing a share of mobile operators’ SMS revenues.

Dharia also stated that social messaging is growing in importance, as social networking sites are providing new ways for users to communicate with their mobile phone and transforming the content of the message.

Facebook has championed its messaging service, which allows users to share photographs and other media, while Twitter has triggered discussions over hot topics and current affairs, and claims that 40 per cent of tweets come from mobile devices.

According to the report, mobile operators should expand their messaging portfolio and add their own internet-based messaging option to claw back lost market share, while ensuring that they do not to replicate exactly those already in the market place.

Analytics equals accountability in social media

Startup social network analytics engine Backtype has been acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed sum, giving users of the micro blogging platform greater insight and accountability of their social initiatives.

The move should go down well with brands and companies seeking to better understand the impact of their social networking activities. As the company says: “Our vision at BackType has always been to help our customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. We also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.”

Twitter will bring the Backtype crew into the fold and integrate the technology with its own product. The newly acquired firm will discontinue the BackType product and API services.

Last week, telecoms.com attended the Google Think Mobile conference in London, where accountability of social media was high on the agenda. Hugh Fletcher, national digital manager for Audi UK, discussed his firm’s foray into digital media from strong advertising roots in traditional media, TV, outdoor and POS. His online marketing adviser, Nick Hynes, CEO of Somo, said that there is “lots of opportunity to run into danger if you do not work through your strategy before running out with a mobile offering. It is of the utmost importance to track and measure the results of your performance,” he said.

Is Twitter struggling to control its ecosystem?

Social networking heavyweight Twitter has confirmed its acquisition of TweetDeck, a dashboard application for monitoring tweets and topics on the site.

The price paid for the application was $40m plus, according to Ovum, and Twitter said it will continue to invest in the tool, which it is pitching as a way for brands, publishers, marketers and others with a platform to track real-time conversations.

According to Ovum analyst Eden Zoller, the deal, announced Thursday, is a defensive move by Twitter and highlights a number of concerns about Twitter’s strategy.

“The acquisition of TweetDeck is part of an ongoing move by Twitter to gain more control over its ecosystem, where growth and innovation are increasingly driven by third parties. At Twitter’s developer conference last year it announced that 75 per cent of Twitter traffic is driven by third party applications and partners, TweetDeck included,” Zoller said.

The concern for Twitter in this scenario is that the applications driving growth are largely outside of its control in terms of direct monetization. According to Zoller, it is also discouraging developers from producing new Twitter clients, ostensibly to ensure a consistent user experience — although the unspoken message is that Twitter does not want developers to compete against it.

Twitter has been hitting the headlines this week for other reasons too. The firm has said that it may be forced to hand over information for thousands of users invovled in the superinjunction scandal, where the Twitter website was used to breach privacy injunctions in place for a number of celebrities including premiership footballer Ryan Giggs.

The LTE World Summit 2011 generated a fair amount of buzz on Twitter

The seventh annual LTE World Summit 2011 took place at the RAI, Amsterdam on the 17-18th May 2011. The event proved a great success, attracting over 1,750 attendees, with speakers representing more than 160 operators from more than 110 different countries. Like LTE itself, it was a truly global event.

Naturally Twitter proved a popular way of responding to the speakers at the event, and below we have collected some selected highlights of the #ltews hash tag.

@Gabeuk reflected many people’s feelings about the conference when he wrote, “Big thanks to @LTEWorldSeries for the event in Amsterdam this week. Moderators did a great job. Some really good speakers.”

Back at the start on the first day @dmavrakis noted that, “T-Mobile, TeliaSonera and Orange teaming up to drive device evolution for LTE at 1800MHz in Europe”, to which he later added, “I wonder if progress on LTE1800 in Europe will be slowed by legal challenges in the same way UMTS900 was hampered in [the] past five years”.

Meanwhile @disruptivedean observed that, “Seems like consensus LTE1800 is critical for success. 2600 not viable for wide usage, DigDiv not enough capacity. regulator headache.”

Signalling challenges were another big theme from the stage. @disruptivedean was concerned at the operators for not taking into account the bursty nature of data demands from smartphone apps commenting, “So, who has been fired at operators, vendors or standards bodies for completely missing impact of app signalling when LTE was designed?”

Meanwhile @twehmeier commented, ”Funny how the operators talk up the signalling challenge, whilst the vendors seem to think there are *quick* fixes. Quick=pricey?”

@TMGB vented frustration over the issue tweeting, “I’ve been banging on about signalling aware apps and cross-app update correlation for months. Who do you think should spend big?”

At the first day keynote Huawei’s Weimin Ying, president of the LTE Business Group took to the stage and @dmavrakis reported his words saying, “Huawei believes Pocket WiFi will be a killer application for LTE.”

When Seizo Onoe, managing director of R&D strategy at Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, came on stage @oholin said that, “Docomo says spectrum needs to be used more efficiently and shared between technologies. I am a fan of efficiency”. @disruptivedean added, “DoCoMo pitching LTE2100 shared with HSPA2100. Recommends all phones support LTE2100. Use my band & give me scale economies please!”

@dmavrakis explained NTT Docomo’s postion stating. “Deploying LTE at 2.1GHz makes sense in Japan, where indoor systems (DAS, tuned for 2.1GHz) are heavily deployed in urban areas”.

@kingcharles1666 then referenced Seizo Onoe bold statement, “Top tip from NTT: stop evolution of old technology. They will shut off 2G soon!”

Sweden’s TeliaSonera was the first network in the world to deploy LTE commercially and when its vice president of system development Tommy Ljunggren came on stage @oholin tweeted, “TeliaSonera: trust this technology”, and @dmavrakis wrote, “TeliaSonera reiterates same message as last year on LTE: Mobile operators should stop trialing and start deploying.”

@disruptivedean was scathing of one of the ideas floated during a panel discussion, “Stupidest idea of the day at #LTEWS ‘email & social network only’ data plan. Cue Facebook putting VPN, video & web proxy in next app update”.

Sprint also came under some flak for its presentation with @twehmeier stating, “Love the fact that Sprint have done a whole presentation on what they’ve done with “4G” WiMax so far without mentioning WiMax once!”.

@twehmeier also seemed somewhat concerned that the discussions around spectrum were rehashing ground covered last year. “So much spectrum chat. LTE WS 2010 just called—it wants its PPT decks back. Or, spectrum issues got much worse in last 12 months.”

Martin Harriman from LightSquared was certainly a hit with @dukeq8 who wrote, “What an excellent speech! Wholesale market for LTE is a shift in the industry!”

Telecoms.com was also there to hear Harriman explain LightSquared’s hope that people would use its satellite coverage as a last resort saying, “We’ve likened satellite coverage to gym membership. We want everyone to have it, be we don’t want people to go!”

Sisvel’s founder Roberto Dini took to the stage to explain the complexities of patent pools, generating this from @dukeq8, “I’m confused now that I choose the wrong industry! I should be a lawyer!”

@AjitJaokar reported on Christian Daigneault, CTO of CSL, Hong Kong’s comment, ““When is the last time you saw a 15 year old talk on a cellphone? It’s always some kind of messaging (not necessarily sms)”

To sign off we’ll go to the official #LTEWS account, who wrote, “#LTEWS would like to thank everyone who attended the event this week, thank you for making it such a fantastic success! See you next year!”

Twitter and DoCoMo are to launch location-based services in Japan

NTT DoCoMo has announced a deal with Twitter that will see the pair working on the development of location-based and other mobile services. According to DoCoMo, one of the envisioned services will “bring richer search results” to users through the use of Real-Time Tweets; other content from the microblogging site will be incorporated into search results on the telco’s “i-mode” portal for feature phones. Smartphone users will access similar services on the “docomo market” portal.

DoCoMo also announced plans to update its existing “touch and follow” application that allows NFC-capable phone users to exchange Twitter following permissions by placing their handsets together. DoCoMo says it expects to launch the service for feature phone users this summer. Smartphone users will be able to use it later this year.

In addition to the announcement from DoCoMo, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper is reporting that the two firms will combine anonymised keywords in Tweets to offer a new kind of real-time, location-based information service to users. Data will also be offered for sale to marketing companies.

NTT DoCoMo has a customer base of 58 million, making it Japan’s biggest mobile service provider. The move from Twitter to officially licence its content in such a big market could work well as part of its strategy to try to monetise the service in a country with more than 17 million Twitter users. According to research company Semiocast, Japanese is the second-most popular language used in the service, after English.

Square has won funding from Visa

Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey’s latest venture, Square – a credit card reader add on for smartphones – has won funding from an unlikely partner –Visa.

Although both firms operate in the same market and do card processing, they have said that their visions are in alignment. Financial terms of the investment were not revealed but a Visa executive will sit on Square’s advisory board as part of the deal.

Last month, Dorsey returned to Twitter as product lead and executive chairman. He quit the CEO position in October 2008 to be replaced by cofounder Evan Williams, before going on to found Square. Now he splits his time between the two.

Earlier this week Visa Europe issued a set of mobile acceptance security best practices for software and hardware providers, retailers and their acquirers. These best practices form part of Visa Europe’s ongoing strategy to advance security measures to help protect cardholder and account data when using mobile devices to facilitate the acceptance of card payments.

“Mobile technology is enabling a growing number of small and medium-sized retailers to accept payments using mobile devices. As retailers harness the power of mobile technology to accept payments and grow their businesses, the industry must also build in adequate controls and security measures to maintain stakeholder trust in electronic payments,” the firm said.

Get more related content in the Billing Zone

Yahoo! has acquired TV tagging start up IntoNow

Yahoo has acquired TV tagging start-up IntoNow in a deal reported to be worth between $20-30m. The purchase is expected to bolster the firm’s video and social content offerings. IntoNow, which only launched at the end of January this year, has developed a free iPhone application that allows users to share instantly the programmes they are watching with Facebook and Twitter friends as well as iTunes and Netflix. The expectation is that an Android version of the application will now be developed.

Yahoo has been struggling to compete with rival Google in the search stakes in recent years, sparking a move towards digital media offerings, such as Yahoo! Connected TV, which allows users to link to online content from their television set. The IntoNow addition will see users checking-in online as they watch TV while the software indexes related content going back five years. This last feature is enabled by IntoNow’s SoundPrint platform, which is capable of automatically identifying live or previously aired US television content.

According to a press release issued by the company, IntoNow is able to “identify content down to the airing, episode and time within the programme as well as provide programme information and links associated with it, all within a matter of seconds.” Yahoo product management and marketing vice president Bill Shaughnessy said that the acquisition would enable the company to bolster its “social engagement across the Yahoo network and on all screens.”

Twitter is now signing up 500,000 new users every day

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of micro social network Twitter, is returning to the company as product lead and executive chairman. Dorsey quit the CEO position in October 2008 to be replaced by cofounder Evan Williams. Some say Dorsey left because Twitter was struggling to meet demand and others because it wasn’t making money. Either way, Williams was replaced in October 2010 by Dick Costolo, who was charged with making the company generate some cash.

Now Williams will be replaced again, stepping back from Twitter on a day to day basis. Dorsey will fill his shoes as lead product manager but will also work on his venture as CEO of Square, which develops a credit card reader the size of a key fob that plugs into the headphone socket of a smartphone, turning the device into an electronic point of sale.

Earlier this month, Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday, now signing up 500,000 new users every day.

PathFinder will be used to ensure subscribers can reliably access their twitter stream

Popular social network provider Twitter continues to make inroads in the mobile space, winning support from the GSMA and mobile services firm Neustar, in a deal that will give twitter subscribers a level of redundancy in their service.

The GSMA’s PathFinder service, a number translation service that launched in 2009, will be used to ensure subscribers can reliably access their twitter stream in real time, even when they change mobile operators.

Twitter said that connecting subscribers seamlessly and reliably to their individual twitter account becomes more complex as users switch operators and geographic regions. PathFinder, which is managed by Neustar, acts as a global registry of IP addresses and phone numbers, giving service providers the means to reach all their users irrespective of their choice of network or technology.