Orange Shots powered by Blyk Media will be commercially available from 1st February with full service via Unanimis in the UK, for brands who would like to communicate with 100,000 customers through an interactive SMS/MMs mobile advertising service. It also provides services of consulting, creative support, reporting and analysis tools for brands. Orange says that new profiles and customer sections will quickly follow.

Orange Shots will facilitate the brands to make highly demanding advertising campaigns by keeping customers interests and preferences in mind. Orange Shots will allow these companies to benefit from customers through real time conversation, highly targeted audience base, build strong relationship, high response rates, strong returns on investment and great viral potential. In a result customer will also get back the various benefits including exclusive news and gossip, amusing and entertaining content, film and games previews, and up to date sports information.

The customer and brand satisfaction is important for Orange as it provide the opportunity to opt out at any stage and maintain the privacy of customer’s data. By working with Blyk, Orange is able to offer consumers propositions unseen before in the UK market place. “Orange Shots will transform mobile advertising as we know it,” says Marc Overton, VP of Wholesale, Business Development and Partnerships for Orange UK. It’s a win-win for brands, as well as our customers, with advertisers continually seeking new and innovative ways to engage with consumers, and our customers getting rewarded with access to exclusive, interactive content and offers, knowing that they’re tailored specifically to them and their interests.”

Brands will be able to use Orange Shots to interact with selected audience from Orange’s Monkey tariff, the only Pay As You Go package for the UK market that offers free music and texts to customers.

This attack is quite effective when some victim is asleep and that’s why it has been named as “Midnight Raid Attack.”

Dan Dearing, Trust Digital marketing vice president, says: “This text message starts up a web browser that leads your phone to an infected Website where an executable file is downloaded on your phone to steal off data from it.”

How does it work, it has been demonstrated in a YouTube video.

Similarly, in another kind of attack, your cell phone can be hijacked by sending a control message on the GSM network. This attack has also been explained in another video on YouTube.

Dearing says that these kinds of attacks are proof-of-concepts right now, but if someone has toolkits and required skills, they can be launched easily. Trust Digital has also announced software dubbed EMM 8.0 that will be quite helpful for organizations to protect their employees’ cell phones against such attacks.

“It’s utterly a serious threat, and we will have to face such sorts of attacks in near future,” says Philippe Winthrop, a director in the global wireless practice at Strategy Analytics.

This web-based Gmail version was showed off by Google last week and it also announced that it would be available on their Mobile blog. Joanne McKinley, a mobile engineer at Google says: “You would definitely find it a lot faster to perform various actions like searching, navigating and opening emails.

It will also allow you to open recent messages and compose when there is drop in data network.”

The given new features are quite interesting and it is, indeed, a big step, as Google has quite significantly demonstrated the power of mobile web browser that are being used not only to surf web pages, but also running other web-based applications. One needs not to download this Gmail application via Apple’s App Store or Android market, as it begins to work just after pointing the browser to gmail.com.

Improved Gmail version for iPhone and Android

It is quite significant for Google as Android and iPhone can be supported with one Website that may also support Palm Pre in the coming days. The company wouldn’t need to develop different applications for different devices; it has been already featured in BlackBerry as well as Android and now in the iPhone.

Android and iPhone users will definitely find the new version a lot more detailed than the forerunners. Here is a list of new features that one can find in the new version.

1. It will allow users to select multiple messages and then mark them spam, read or unread as well as archive or delete them.
2. It has a floaty bar that appears to travel with the page while scrolling through some message.
3. It will also allow you to have easier retrieval of older messages that can be done with a given search button.
4. The thing that sets this application apart is the offline access that stores mail messages on the handset with still settling-down HTML5.

Related Links:

• A new mobile Gmail experience for iPhone and Android

Your mobile text messages are no more safe

Mobile phone are becoming more like tiny computers with every passing day and some researchers says that the time is near when hackers will get their dirty paws all your messaging and other private stuff.
Georgia Institute of Technology’s researchers say the mobile phones might be turned into ‘botnets’ and would be used to topple important websites or organizations. The handsets may easily infect because of the budding nature of mobile internet.

Cell phone botnets can be used in a variety of ways to PCs, for example, you can call premium rate numbers without being noticed by the owner or buy ringtones automatically from some websites.

Botnet expert Joe Stewart, who is director of Malware Research at SecureWorks, says: “The question rises can they do it in an effective manner and make a lot of money without any risk.”“And if they succeed doing it, they will surely do it.”

Many companies including Symantec have begun developing software to fight with viruses and botnets on handsets, but the problem they are facing is that these programmes are needed to run constantly that is not good for battery life. So, let’s watch and wait who succeeds first hackers or anti-hackers?