Pebble encourages smartstrap development with US $1 Million funding for successful concepts

Pebble is putting their money into encouraging smartstrap development for their upcoming Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel wearables. The smartstrap allows for expanded functionality on Pebbles by making the strap a peripheral. Various concepts have been revealed including one that enables direct connection to an LTE signal. Another concept will add GPS, NFC, OLED displays and varied other components to the Pebble Time.

Pebble pledged 1 million US dollars to encourage development and commercialization of othe smartstrap projects. Interested inventors can get a team together, build a prototype and place their project on a crowfunding platform and Pebble will offer the necessary support to make sure the projects see the light of day. I'm curious to see how far the smartstrap development can go and how much it can add to the Pebble Time.

Amazon.ca Appstore offering up to $115 in top paid apps for free

The Amazon Appstore is celebrating its birthday this week and to honour this special occasion, starting today until Saturday, March 21, the Amazon.ca Appstore is offering a free app bundle, with up to $115 in top paid apps – completely free! 

Customers will be able to download apps such as the critically acclaimed thriller Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 – currently one of the Top Paid Apps globally. To access and download the full list of apps, customers can visit the Amazon.ca Appstore here.

IBM: 40 per cent of app developers for large companies not investing in security

“Building security into mobile apps is not top of mind for companies, giving hackers the opportunity to easily reverse engineer apps, jailbreak mobile devices and tap into confidential data,” said Caleb Barlow, Vice President of Mobile Management and Security at IBM.

IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute today announced research unveiling an alarming state of mobile insecurity. The findings show nearly 40 percent of large companies, including many in the Fortune 500, aren’t taking the right precautions to secure the mobile apps they build for customers. The study also found organizations are poorly protecting their corporate and BYOD mobile devices against cyber-attacks – opening the door for hackers to easily access user, corporate and customer data.

The number of mobile cyber-security attacks is continuing to grow. At any given time, malicious code is infecting more than 11.6 million mobile devices.

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Samsung may soon give budget phones a 128GB storage upgrade

Just because you don’t have a flagship smartphone, doesn’t mean you can’t have more storage. At least, that’s the hope of Samsung. They’re introducing a new 3-bits-per-cell flash memory chip that can give 128GB storage to mid- and even entry-level devices.  It makes use of the existing eMMC tech found in most phones. It’ll offer a respectable 260MB per second read speed. There isn’t any word yet though when this will come out but it makes us look forward to future budget devices that can handle that much storage.

Source: Samsung | Via: Engadget