Glancing back, 2010 has seen major upheaval in the mobile industry. Smartphone leaders have lost their footing, while upstarts grab market share. More people rely on the mobile Internet day in and day out to perform computing tasks. That mobile Internet has sped up with the introduction of 4G networks (and will only get faster). And fierce competition for business and consumer customers alike has driven prices downwards. In 2011, many of these trends will continue to shape the path of the mobile industry, but more dramatic changes will unfold. Some technologies will win out over others, while companies may have to surrender to their competitors. As 2011 unfolds, this is what we expect to witness as the months roll by.

Information Week 

A website that helps drivers avoid speeding tickets is warning its 10 million registered users that their email addresses and passwords may be in the hands of hackers who breached the site's security. The advisory was issued on Thursday by Trapster, which boasts more than 10 million users on its front page. The site uses crowd-sourcing techniques to compile locations of police who are using radar to catch speeding drivers. Trapster said the hack amounted to a “single event,” and that the company has since taken steps to “prevent this type of attack from happening again, and continue to implement additional security measures to further protect your data.” Trapster didn't say whether it planned to begin hashing passwords, which is considered a basic security precaution to prevent their disclosure.

The Register 

For years, Techmeme has been considered the tech news website of record. A quick glance at the site, which aggregates tech news headlines from across the web, will tell you the topics that people are discussing, and who is discussing them, at any moment in time. But Techmeme has only scanned blog and news posts. Until now. On Thursday, Techmeme chief Gabe Rivera announced that the site would now be aggregating tweets — the 140-character micro-posts found on Twitter. The move represents another milestone in Twitter’s seemingly inexorable march toward becoming a central news water cooler of the internet era.

Wired 

he PC market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the final quarter of last year was flat, according to research outfit IDC. In a report published this week, it found that big corporate firms were slowly starting to spend on IT and replace old kit, but added that SMEs continued to struggle with very tight budgets in Q4 2010. In the UK during that period sales of business computers fell three per cent. "Corporate demand continued to recover, helping to sustain commercial desktop volumes, but the SMB segment remained affected by economic pressure and uncertainty, forcing companies to prolong life-cycles and delay renewals, impacting portables in particular," said IDC. Meanwhile, the trend for western Europeans snubbing the netbook market continued in the fourth quarter of last year, with sales of that product category down 29 per cent.

Channel Register  

We've seen IBM and ARM team up before, but this week both companies announced a new joint initiative to develop 14nm chip processing technology. That's significantly smaller than the 20nm SoC technology ARM hopes to create in partnership with TSMC, and makes the company's previous work with IBM on 32nm semiconductors look like a cake walk. The potential benefits, though, are faster processors that require less power, and feature lower per unit manufacturing costs Who knows if or when we'll see tangible results from the tag team, but if IBM's Watson can beat Jeopardy champions, further reducing the average size of a feature that can be created on a chip should be elementary, right? 

Engadget 

Eventually your movies will play themselves once and self-destruct and you'll be left with only the analog hole to get your gay pr0ns.  Homomorphic encryption algorithms allow the secret evaluation of arbitrary logical circuits.  In short this means that one can compute a useful function without knowing what either the encrypted inputs or outputs are, but whoever holds the decryption key can recover both.  You can finally send your data off into the cloud and have it processed securely, or you can write the next Morris worm that no one will be able to fully reverse engineer.  Of course, this also means that the next Sony rootkit you install on your computer via your Elton John CD will be invincible to analysis and your debugger will be about as useful as a punch card reader

Kuro 5hin 

A year ago Tim Berners-Lee and I unveiled data.gov.uk – a year on and it provides a single point of access to nearly 6,000 government data sets.Everything from local authorities spending to the whereabouts of the nations bus stops, from energy consumption in ministries to infection rates in hospitals. This idea of making public data available has really caught hold. In this country it not only survived the election – but new commitments to transparency and open data have been made. Other countries, regional authorities and individual cities are all making data available. This newspaper has reported on and participated in this data revolution. Data underlies increasing amounts of journalism. The Guardian has argued that open data can rebalance the relationship between those who govern and the citizen. Grand sounding stuff – but how does it work?

Google reported another very strong quarterly earnings performance Thursday, but the results were overshadowed by the company’s dramatic announcement that CEO Eric Schmidt will become non-executive Chairman and co-founder Larry Page will take over the chief executive officer duties. The Mountain View, California-based company said that net income rose to $2.54 billion, or $7.81 per share, on revenue of $6.37 billion, which exceeded Wall Street expectations. That’s a 29 percent increase from last year’s fourth-quarter net income, which was $1.97 billion, or $6.13 per share.

Wired 

Word on the street this morning was that Google had quietly made number porting available to all its Google Voice users, but the search giant confirmed Thursday that it is only conducting a test of the option with a few users. "We're continually testing new features to enhance the user experience. For a limited amount of time, we're making the Google Voice number porting process available to users," Google said in a statement. "We don't have any additional details to share at this time, but plan to offer this feature to all users in the near future."

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