Ross O. Storey

With Apple's launch of the second version of its iPad, research house Ovum predicts that it will take until 2015 for devices running Google's Android platform to catch up.

Ovum principal analyst Adam Leach said that in such a fast-moving market, Apple was forced to release a new version of its iPad hardware to stay ahead.

Internet security specialist BitDefender has warned about the dangers of a new spying Trojan it describes as "a serious enemy" that can be used as a corporate spying tool.

In a statement, BitDefender says that Trojan.Spy.YEK sniffs for critical data and archives that may hold private information and sends them back to the attacker.

Traditional security technologies are losing the battle against the black hats and malicious code writers, according to digital security specialists Symantec.

In a mid-year review of their technology security risks and predictions made early in 2010, Symantec has warned that there are simply too many new cyber threats out there for traditional automated systems to catch.

In the past 12 months, Asia has seen a massive increase in Apple iPhone users, the strongest take-up of Apple devices in the world.

This is according to the latest April 2010 Metrics Report by mobile advertising network AdMob.

Three quarters of Asia Pacific enterprises -- and two thirds of businesses in Singapore - have experienced cyberattacks in the past 12 months, according to new global research.

The 2010 Symantec State of Enterprise Security Study, released last week, found that 38 per cent of Asia Pacific enterprises, and 67 per cent in Singapore, rank cyberrisk as their top concern, more than natural disasters, terrorism, and traditional crime combined.

Microsoft has moved to reassure users and the corporate world that everything possible is being done to address concerns about an Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerability, after the attacks on Google and other companies in China.

Microsoft Singapore's office said much work is being done to "provide accurate information, advice and the next steps on the recent series of stories and chatter on (the) IE vulnerability".

The new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system due for launch in October, will likely change the personal computer industry forever, according to research house Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan APAC VP IT Practice, Martin Gilliland, said that Windows 7 represents a "user-driven upgrade that breaks the link between PC OS and PC Hardware upgrade cycles for the first time in the history of the PC."

While the application and threat landscape has been evolving, firewalls have changed very little over the last 15 years, according to enterprise network firm Palo Alto Networks.

The firm, soon to launch a new product in Singapore, has warned that supplementing firewalls with proxies, prevention systems, URL filtering and other costly and complex devices is "ineffective in today's application and threat landscape".

Nearly two-thirds of the world's mobile traffic will be video by 2013, according to the latest visual networking index forecast by international networking giant Cisco.

The Asia-Pacific region is expected to account for one-third of all mobile data traffic within the next four years and will have the strongest annual mobile growth of 146 per cent, second only to Latin America at 166 per cent. Europeans will consume more video than Americans, the report predicts.

The number of its users is growing by the population of Singapore (more than four million) every 12 days and nearly a third of its registered subscribers now use it for business purposes.

As if to celebrate its fifth birthday, IP telephony service provider Skype recently achieved a milestone of 15 million concurrent users, meaning there are now 405 million skype users across the planet. This figure, they say, is growing by 380,000 every day.

Microsoft Asia Pacific has responded to researchers' claims that enterprise chief information officers "have not warmed to the Vista operating system over the past year."

The northern hemisphere researchers said that the CIOs they recently surveyed voted 11 to one against plans to implement Vista. The researchers concluded that "CIOs and other heads of IT still believe there is little business value in migrating from XP to Vista, especially in the current economic climate."

Asia will be home to more than half of the world's mobile connections by 2011, according to research house Ovum.

Last year (2007), Asia accounted for 42 percent of global mobile connections.