Carol Ko

U.S.-based communications services provider AT&T is building 25,000 more wi-fi hotspots across Europe and China, bringing its global wi-fi footprint to 125,000.

Customers of AT&T's remote access enterprise solution will be able to connect to their corporate networks from more locations across Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Croatia, the Netherlands, the U.K. and China. These locations include a variety of popular coffee shops, bookstores, hotels, airports, restaurants and convention centres.

Activity in mobile payment services (and more broadly mobile money services) is accelerating in many emerging markets, according to market research firm Ovum's new report.

The report titled, 'Mobile Money in Emerging Markets', finds the market is still in its infancy, yet it has the potential to become a mass-market service, penetrating one-third of all mobile users in emerging markets in five years. However, much will hinge on how well the industry addresses various market barriers, and its ability to nurture user demand with clear, simple and attractive propositions.

A mere seven per cent of respondents to a survey on data management believed data loss has a "high" impact on a business.

This is one of the key findings of a survey launched in Hong Kong last week by Kroll Ontrack, a US-based provider of data recovery solutions. The survey was conducted earlier this year by StollzNow Research. It asked IT managers from 945 small, medium and large companies in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia about their views and experiences related to data management.

Worldwide sales of smart phones to end-users reached 38.1 million units in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 3.7 per cent over the same period in 2007, said Gartner. However, sequential growth slowed down, added the US-based research firm.

Global sales of smart phones for the year 2008 reached 139.3 million devices, up 13.9 per cent compared with 2007.

Illustration: Lou BeachConsumers are generally still apprehensive about using their credit cards over the Internet, according to security firm F-Secure.

Finland-based F-Secure's annual 'Online Wellbeing' survey found that people in general feel more secure during online banking transactions than when using a credit card for online purchases. And a miniscule seven per cent of parents feel their children are totally safe on the Internet.

LG Electronics has begun to develop power-saving mobile phones.

Under the agreement, LG Electronics, a South Korea-based consumer electronics company, and Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, a US-based provider of digital wireless communications products, will jointly develop mirasol-enabled handsets.

Artwork: Chip TaylorA total of 6.37 billion text messages were sent through their messaging systems across Asia Pacific over the 2008/2009 Christmas and New Year period.

According to Acision, the communication solutions provider, short message service (SMS) messages formed a large majority of the traffic with 6.36 billion messages, while multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages were recorded at 9.54 million messages.

Starting February, Microsoft Office users in Hong Kong can test their software's authenticity with a new anti-counterfeiting tool.

Despite a slight decline of Hong Kong's software piracy rate from 53 to 51 per cent between 2006 and 2007, the rate remains high compared to other developed economies in the West, which hovers around 30 per cent.

Graphic: Diego AguirreAmerican websites host more malware and computers relay more spam than any other country, the latest security report showed.

As evidence of this, when an American Internet company, accused of collaborating with spammers and hackers, was disconnected from the net in November, the level of spam staggered down 75 percent.

Artwork: Chip Taylor2008 has been a year of growth in malware, infections, botnets and criminal profits. Recently, some security experts called for the punishment of these criminal activities.

Malware tripled in 2008

In its 'End of Year Data Security Wrap-up for 2008', Finland-based security company F-Secure said their detection count tripled in one year, which means that the total amount of malware accumulated over the previous 21 years increased by 200 per cent in the course of just one year.

An online underground economy has recently matured into an efficient, global marketplace to trade stolen goods and offer fraud-related services.

According to Symantec's recently released 'Report on the Underground Economy', the estimated value of goods offered by individual traders within the online underground economy is measured in the millions of dollars.

Graphic: Diego AguirreElectronics manufacturers in the Chinese market consumed more than one-third of semiconductors produced globally for the first time ever, industry-focused advisor PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said.

According to China's Impact on the Semiconductor Industry: 2008 Update, a PwC annual review of the semiconductor industry in China, the nation has in 2007 become the dominant consumer of semiconductors, with the total consumption estimated at US$88 billion in 2007, driven largely by China's growth in electronics manufacturing.