Mobile payments generally involve three participants: the mobile device, the merchant, and a financial service provider or trusted third party. That trusted third party, or TTP, is an established, reputable fiduciary entity accepted by all parties to an agreement, deal, or transaction. A TTP authenticates and authorizes users in order to secure a payment transaction,…
There are a number of mobile operating systems, but five major players have floated to the top, dominating a major chunk of the market. It used to be that people chose their phone only by their carrier and what brands they offered. Today many choose their phone based on the manufacturer and its operating systems…
NECN reports “a husband and wife from North Carolina are in court in Massachusetts charged with scamming their way into homes. Police say the couple stole from a house by posing as electrical inspectors. The 75-year-old homeowner says he and his wife were distracted by a woman while man ransacked their home. It turned out…
Unfortunately the media is reporting lots and lots of scams directed towards the elder population. We’ve discussed these scams at length in these posts, and we are going to again today. As long as there are victims, we need to be reminded of how to protect those who need protecting. Real time – real life…
This is just the greatest story about social media used for doing good EVER. A University of Georgia student was in bed when masked men invaded his home and tied up his 17-year-old sister and his grandmother. The student wakes up and probably heard yelling and realized what was happening; apparently he didn’t have his…
More consumers than ever before are buying smartphones. A smartphone is an Internet-enabled mobile phone with the ability to purchase and run applications. Smartphones are generally equipped with voice, data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS functions. Operating systems include Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and Windows’ Mobile 7. Most function on a 3G wireless connection and can…
The Wall Street Journal reports that digital items within games and social networks accounted for $2.2 billion in sales in 2009, and are expected to account for $6 billion in sales by 2013. Billions more are spent on music and other downloadable digital media. “Digital goods” are any products that are stored, delivered, and consumed…
Epsilon is a marketing company that has millions of emails on file of consumers who have made purchases or are affiliated with various banks, retailers, hotels etc. Epsilon sends over 40 billion emails out a year and was recently breached in a hack attack. Consumers are now receiving breach notifications from the likes of financial…
A recent study of more than 150 organizations conducted by Aberdeen Group(1) found that the average total cost to remediate a single application security incident is approximately $300,000. As security incidents can happen at any point in the application life cycle, modernization initiatives can prove especially costly if they are not proactively secured from development…
Twitter’s numbers are astounding. In the physical world, when communities become larger and more densely populated, crime rises. The same applies to online communities. CNET broke down Twitter’s recent blog post, which celebrates their significant numbers: “It took three years, two months, and one day for Twitter to hit 1 billion tweets; now, a billion tweets are posted…
