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- NEC Medias: Report Says World’s Slimmest Smartphone Is On The Way To The US
- Nokia Shuts Down Developer Forum After Hacker Accesses Member Records
- Quixey Raises $3.8 Million For A Functional Search Engine For Apps
| NEC Medias: Report Says World’s Slimmest Smartphone Is On The Way To The US Posted: 29 Aug 2011 04:28 AM PDT  Back in spring, we’ve spent a few posts covering the Medias N-04C from NEC Casio Mobile , an Android handset the company calls the “world’s slimmest smartphone”. Being just 7.7mm thin, it beats the Galaxy S II, for example, and at 105g, it’s very light, too. Announced by NEC Casio in February this year, the handset was selling well when it hit the Japanese market a few weeks later (to date, 500,000 units have been sold). And according to Japan’s biggest business daily The Nikkei, the company is now ready to bring the Medias to the US, a move somehow announced last year already (NEC Casio Mobile was formed in 2009 after NEC, Casio and Hitachi merged their cell phone operations). Details are scarce at this point, but it looks like Americans will get a modified version of the phone. In Japan itself, NEC Casio followed up with the N-06C [JP] this summer, a model that’s slightly thicker (7.9mm) but water-proof. Japanese model: The Nikkei says in the US, the Medias will likely be available through Verizon (Casio’s partner in the past) and “other carriers”. NEC Casio aims at doubling shipments of cell phones outside Japan to 1.8 million in fiscal 2012. To recap, the Media N-04C offers a 4-inch LCD touchscreen with 480 x 854 resolution, Android 2.3, a 5.1MP CMOS camera, a microSDHC card slot, Wi-Fi, etc. Expect the digital TV tuner, the e-wallet function, and the infrared port to get axed in the US version, however.
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| Nokia Shuts Down Developer Forum After Hacker Accesses Member Records Posted: 29 Aug 2011 12:11 AM PDT  Nokia has temporarily shut down its developer community website as a precaution, after a hacker gained access to a database table containing forum members’ email addresses and other information. The hacker last week exploited a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL Injection attack that in turn enabled him (or her) to deface the forum website. Nokia has now emailed all its developer forum members alerting them to the fact that not only has the website been defaced, but the hacker also gained access to records, which – fortunately for Nokia – did not contain passwords, credit card details or other sensitive information. Nevertheless, Nokia says, roughly 7 percent of accessed records did include birth dates, website URLs and/or usernames for services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, Skype or Yahoo. SQL injection attacks usually occur when user input in the database layer of an application is not filtered for escape characters and is then passed into an SQL statement, or when a user supplied field is not strongly typed or is not checked for type constraints and thereby unexpectedly executed. Nokia says it initially believed only a small number of forum member records had been accessed, but that further investigation has identified that the number is ‘significantly larger’ – Nokia did not disclose exactly how many records were accessed or any other details about the security breach. The company also says it has taken down its developer community website offline as a precautionary measure while a Nokia team conducts further investigations and security assessments. (Thanks for the heads up, Robert) Nokia is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries. They make a wide range...
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| Quixey Raises $3.8 Million For A Functional Search Engine For Apps Posted: 28 Aug 2011 09:49 PM PDT  Quixey, the Palo Alto-based startup that’s building a functional search engine for apps, today announced that it has closed a $3.8 million series A funding round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group, with participation from Webb Investment Network alongside follow-on investment by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The series A round adds to the $400K Quixey raised in April from Innovation Endeavors, bringing total investment to $4.2 million. We’ve all heard (and perhaps even mocked) the quip “there’s an app for that”. It’s actually a wonderful quality of the mobile revolution: There really is an app for just about everything you can think of, from calling a taxi to managing your schedule to scanning for skin cancer or heart murmors. But, it’s also overwhelming, and searching for the app that you want isn’t easy. There’s a lot of noise, and a lot of imperfect approaches to app search. Quixey entered the game with the intention to build a new type of search, molded specifically to the unique characteristics of searching for those ubiquitous but sometimes elusive apps. Their solution, coined “functional search”, which not only scans the major app stores, but crawls blogs, review sites, forums, and social media sites to build a truly comprehensive picture of what an app can do — through reviews, word of mouth, and demos. Quixey's search engine lets the user type in queries like "baseball scores", and get a list of applications that provide just that (which they can then can filter by platform). And the best part is that the search engine suppors Windows and Mac apps, iGoogle, extensions, and more. It’s not just iOS and Android. Though Quixey would seem to be competing with the likes of Chomp and others, the startup also has the added value proposition of being able to power search for other app stores, search engines, and websites — just like Google — to help disseminate its search engine on third party sites across the Web. Not so surprising, then, that Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors is investing in a great app search tool. Bringing in outside info and data from blogs, review sites, and beyond, really adds an extra layer of depth to app search (especially in being platform agnostic), just as powering search across websites gives Quixey the opportunity to scale and become mixed in with the very sites it crawls. The startup will be using its new investment to continue securing partnerships with app stores and other big third party app resources, and according to the Quixey team, there are more than 25 potential partnerships in the pipeline. The more partners, the more effective the search engine becomes. It’s an interesting new approach, this “functional search”, and from my experience thus far, works as advertised. Chime in to let us know what you think. More on Quixey here. Quixey is a functional search engine for apps. You use apps in your everyday life. You use apps in your phone, in your browser, in your social network and in...
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