StrongMail to offer SMS...

Digital marketing solutions provider StrongMail will offer SMS messaging through a partnership with Velti.

McAfee: Mobile Malware ...

Security and anti-spam firm McAfee today reported that it saw a massive uptick in mobile malware last quarter. Mobile malware has “exploded,” the company said ( PDF ), “with a significant increase on Android devices. In addition, McAfee also found a slight increase in malware targeting the Mac, but the report notes that this trend was not “extreme.” Despite the increase in mobile and Mac malware, as well as password-stealing Trojans, the good news in today’s report is that global spam level dropped quite a bit during the last quarter, though we are still talking about a trillion messages per month. This quarter’s increase in mobile malware is partly due to the fact that McAfee improved its ability to find these threats, but it still represents a massive increase. The company collected about 8,000 mobile malware samples last month. These threats, as usual, mostly target Android. While Google and other major store have made great strides in keeping malware out of their stores, third-party stores and forums remain a problem. Among the areas of mobile malware that saw major increases in threats was mobile backdoor malware and the always popular premium-rate SMS-sending malware. The report also noted that the company found one of the first destructive Android Trojans this quarter. This piece of malware doesn’t damage apps or executables, but instead targets a user’s photos and then adds an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini to each picture. Here are a few additional interesting data points from the report: Q1 2012 had the largest number of PC malware detected per quarter (83 million) McAfee found about 250 new Mac malware samples last quarter and about 150 fake Mac anti-virus samples spam levels dropped to 1 trillion per month the United States represents the primary source of cyber attacks You can find the full report here (PDF).

CallApp Uses Social Dat...

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

Eduardo Saverin Backs M...

Eduardo Saverin may no longer be a U.S. citizen. But that’s not stopping him from investing in American companies. In fact, he just closed a deal. He’s backing Crowdmob , a startup that’s blending app promotion with discounts from local merchants. The startup’s long-term ambition is to play in the mobile wallet space, where phones may eventually become a mainstream way of paying for real-world goods and services. (That is, if they can become easier to use than a credit card or cash.) The company, which already took some earlier seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz, has a couple products up its sleeves. One is something they’re calling ‘Appy Meals,’ which combine a paid app for free with a discount on a real-world good like the Starbucks Frapuccino below. It kind of mimics the way you’d buy a hamburger and a get token toy, except that toy is now a digital one like a game. Crowdmob’s co-founders Damon Grow , Alex Han and Matthew Moore , who is an ex-Googler, say that games are a good way to lure in consumers, who are already comfortable with using their phones to pay for apps or virtual currency.  Games and social networking apps have the highest engagement on iOS and Android , according to research from mobile analytics companies like Flurry. They’ve built several variations on the same idea of mixing real-world commerce with virtual goods. With another product, they take the same “appy meal” mechanic and apply it to in-app purchases instead of paid apps. Gamers can buy virtual currency and gift cards for real-world goods like Starbucks or movie tickets inside an app (see below). Yet another variation on the concept called Loot lets gamers watch video ads in exchange for virtual currency that can be redeemed for gift cards. Loot was built because the team knew that only a small percentage of mobile app users actually pay for things in games. So there had to be a free alternative. “Not everybody is going to pay because many users have limited budgets,” Grow said. “So we knew that we had to disrupt ourselves  by having a feature where consumers didn’t have to pay and that was Loot.” All of this goes toward building a payments network. Whenever a user makes a purchase, they’ll be able to pay with their credit card or PayPal. Then they can redeem the deal with their phone, which will show a barcode, confirmation number or send an SMS (whatever the merchants’ preferences are). They’ll have to create a CrowdMob account, so that’s how the company picks up payments information on consumers to grow out a network for a mobile wallet. Users manage their rewards in this mobile wallet and it’s synchronous across all the user’s CrowdMob accounts, whether they earned a gift card through watching ads or purchased it as part of a virtual happy meal in another game. “We want to win consumer mindshare,” said Moore. “Doling out all of these gift cards will help us get on more phones. When consumers redeem these, we’ll be able to show the merchant that we drove them to the store.” Then there’s an open API lets any partner create tasks for users to earn credits. Merchants and gift card providers can also create their own rewards for users to redeem. Crowdmob earns a cut whenever they drive installs or purchases for a mobile developer or whenever they drive sales for a merchant. The race to build a ‘mobile wallet’ is incredibly complicated right now. Google Wallet’s team fell apart over the last several months as the original technical team that built the product chafed with newer middle management brought over from Paypal. The carriers are collaborating on their own wallet offering called Isis, but when have the carriers ever cooperated on a successful consumer product? Then Visa recently introduced V.me and Mastercard launched its PayPass Wallet Services  in the last month. Saverin shied away from doing an interview for this story, but he did pass us this statement: “I really like the team at CrowdMob and their vision to create a mobile wallet that is embedded in an overall social loyalty platform where virtual and real goods can be exchanged; this platform is an important next step in a fully integrated mobile society.” He did do an interview with The New York Times yesterday where he said his decision to relinquish his U.S. citizenship had nothing to do with the lower tax rates that Singapore has . Saverin has amassed a little bit of a portfolio here in the U.S. with investments in Jumio, ShopSavvy and Qwiki. Since all of these investments have happened in the last year or two, it’s still too early to tell how his deals will pan out. It will be nearly impossible to top the investment that made him a billionaire, but you can never rule anything out in this business..

Why The Internet Doesn’...

American politics used to be fun: frequent political carnivals in the 19th century would mix parties, parades, and political speeches in an endless stream of local civic life. As a result, America had an astonishingly high turnout, between 70-90%, in presidential and local elections. Yet, the Internet has never quite captured the emotional gravity of real-life engagement, and keeps tripping up multi-million dollar campaigns designed to inject life into an otherwise passive electorate. For example, take two technology initiatives that were widely predicted to dramatically increase democratic engagement: Obama’s 2008 campaign and Americans Elect. Despite the hype, Barack Obama’s juggernaut of a online campaign only boosted youth turnout by a meager 2% . Americans Elect, a crowdsourced online platform for a third party presidential candidate, was supposed to be the digital savior of American democracy. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman prophesied , “Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life.” Americans Elect promised to allow citizens to vote directly online for a third party candidate, uncorrupted by corporate donations, and finance the winner’s national campaign. Today, despite massive media attention, the bankroll of a Wall Street billionaire , and the promise of direct democracy, Americans Elect failed to garner its own minimum threshold of 10,000 votes to field a candidate (less than 1% of those who turned out for the Republican primary). The Obama campaign, Americans Elect, and other election startups all promise empowerment. But, if empowerment inspired voting, female and African American suffrage would have sustained high rates after they were given the right to vote. In Switzerland, arguably the most democratic country on earth, citizens vote directly on every major law, upwards of 7 times a year–yet turnout floats around a very low 30% . So, what caused super-high voter turnout over a century ago, if not empowerment? Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, explains, in the deliciously informative Why America Stopped Voting , that democracy used to be a part of everyday American life. Frequent carnivals and parades would accompany political debates, as citizen-revelers would schmooze with local politicians, to discuss issues that they had direct control over. As a result, Americans were not only incredibly engaged, but well-read: a higher proportion of people read Thomas Paine’s political philosophy than watch the Superbowl today. They also patiently listened to presidential debates that last 6 or more hours at a time . Then, technology crashed the party, “By the 1920′s, radio broadcasts had replaced mass meetings and all-day orations,” writes Kornbluh. “As the role of voters became increasingly passive, it is little wonder that their enthusiasm for electoral politics waned.” Attention turned away from local issues, and Americans sat by as government reformers centralized power and held elections less often. Political parties had no incentive to subsidize the good times, given the more efficient ways of mass communication at their disposal. So, with the additional burden of new laws restricting how political parties could directly fund voters (i.e corruption), the big civic party ground to a halt. Ultimately, the motivation to vote has to overcome one very big problem: voting is irrational , since no one person can make a difference. No democracy in history has ever sustained high levels of engagement on the hope that citizens are willing to sacrifice their free time to make a marginal difference. The Gilded Age party machines overcame this dilemma by intermixing politics with fun (albeit in often unethical ways). The need for enjoyment in politics is perfectly illustrated in an unlikely pair: Estonia and  American  Idol . While  Estonia became the first country  to permit the convenience of voting by both cell phone and over the internet, the moderate boost in turnout rates did not even come close  to 19th century America. Yet,  American Idol , which also votes through SMS, is one of the largest democracies on earth  (and, no one is loosing health insurance over the outcome). Though the Internet promises greater democracy, virtual engagement is every bit as disembodied as the couch potatoes of the 20th century who passively engaged politics through TV and radio. Until someone figures out how to create a rocking good time on Facebook, don’t bet money that the Internet is the savior of elections.