Have you ever considered what it would be like if your cell-phone carrier charged you to receive calls? Judging by the comments posted online in the wake of this recent proposal by the European Union, this would hardly be a popular move. But this formula would actually spur on competition and lead to lower rates.

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Title: Spear Phishing and Whaling Attacks Reach Record Levels
Source: iDefense
Date: June 2008
Abstract: The increasingly sophisticated world of digital crime has taken another new twist, this time in the form of “whaling,” a form of personalized identity theft that targets top-level executives as its victims. In this practice, the potential prey receive email supposedly from official organizations with the intent to obtain their data. The study by iDefense, a division of the company VeriSign, cites the existence of thousands of victims from early 2007 to June 2008, many of whom were executives at important companies, and adding that this new cybercrime offensive is being perpetrated by large organized groups.

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In Spain, 83% of the population has a cell phone, according to the recent study published by Fundación BBVA on mobile telephony in that country. In fact, all of the recent indicators note the rapid spread of mobile telecommunications worldwide and highlight the entry of emerging markets into this process, particularly the regions of Asia-Pacific, Near East and Africa, which according to the report Worldwide Cellular User Forecasts, 2008-2013, put out by Strategy Analytics, will lead to an 80% growth in the number of subscribers between this year and 2013. The consulting firm estimates that at the start of this year, two out of every five people worldwide (i.e., 3.9 billion inhabitants) had cell phones, while predicting that by 2013 this number will shoot up to 5.6 billion, over half the world’s population. In 2013, half of cellular subscribers will be using 3G technology. In the particular case of Europe, and according to a study by consulting firm Informa Telecoms & Media, disseminated by Reuters, out of the over 910 million cellular subscribers registered in Europe as of May of this year, over 100 million were using third-generation models.
This boom creates business opportunities that no supplier wants to miss out on, but the power struggle for this market promises to be a grueling one. Thus far, Nokia has made a move by announcing its intention to acquire full rights to the mobile operating system Symbian, which it will turn into an open-source platform, in an attempt to offset the attractiveness of Google’s counterpart Android, and impede Apple’s new iPhone 3G, which will debut in Spain on July 11 and aims to give impetus to the development of third-party applications. Without losing sight of the major rivals, namely RIM’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform.

Articles in Fundación BBVA, Strategy Analalitics, Reuters and CincoDias

If the use of cell phones is taking off, the growth of the PC market is not far behind.
Gartner estimates that at the start of the year there were already 1 billion personal computers worldwide, a figure that the firm says will double by 2014. Most of these computers will be online, which equates to a general growth for the Internet use, and the resulting benefits for Web-oriented companies. Out of the current 1.4 billion Internet users, 22 million are in Spain and 100 100 million use it in Spanish, which is the third most-used language on the Net.
One of the segments most enthused by these prospects is that of interactive advertising. According to a report by Enders Analysis cited by Europa Press, in the UK this channel in 2008 will surpass the 4.2 billion euro threshold for revenues, marking the first-ever eclipse of the figure registered by British television advertising.
The greatest beneficiary of this trend will be Google, which continues to sharpen its weapons in this area. This time with Ad Planner, a tool that offers segmented information with statistics and demographic data regarding users’ interests and profiles, along the same lines as that done by companies like Nielsen.

Articles in Baquia, Europa Press and La Vanguardia