Vox Mobile splits their offerings into three broad categories: Mobile Technology Management, Wireless Expense Management, and Professional Services. The first gets, configures, and deploys mobile devices — including, of course, the BlackBerry. The second fine tunes an existing setup, by managing bandwidth and other areas to reduce costs and increase service. Vox states that many businesses are overpaying in this area by as much 30%. Finally, their Professional Services offers to support and implement server platforms, including BES. Kind of a one-stop shop for enterprises. Their offerings at WES should be well worth checking out.
Author Archive for Devin Kent
The folks at Tech2 posted about a white paper published on BlackBerry security, namely what is lawfully interceptible, and how to avoid hacking. Part of the paper is based on a prototype trojan that could be delivered to a BlackBerry on BES and leave the company’s server unguarded. It was developed by an information security company, who released the information to RIM before taking it public. The trojan, called BBProxy, works by allowing a hacker to essentially piggyback on any connections made to BES. Once installed on a BlackBerry, the hacker can connect to it via computer and have complete access to everything the BlackBerry connects to. The article does include some simple steps administrators can take to prevent it from working, but fair warning: it is heavy on IT-speak. Earlier security reports acknowledged the threat of Trojans on BlackBerry, but we’ve yet to see an instance in the wild…
WICKSoft announced yesterday that they now support Novell Teaming + Conferencing in their mobile document access (MDA) software. Teaming + Conferencing is a new enterprise level social networking tool which allows groups of users around the globe to quickly and easily share documents, calendars, files, and discussion forums, and as we all know, enterprise social networking is getting awfully popular. WICKSoft Mobile Documents already gives access to Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, and many other document types.
It was rumored in early February that T-Mobile would be releasing the Wi-Fi equipped, Hotspot@Home compatible 8820 on March 5th. They obviously missed that date, putting an ominous looking TBD as the availability date. Thankfully, Engadget noticed that they’ve apparently settled on a March 24th release.
The team at SearchMobileComputer had a chance to sit down and talk with Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of RIM. Lazaridis talked about the recent outages, pointing out that, while the outages are lamentable, the company still has a 99.85% uptime and is gunning for four straight nines. The company came under a little fire for not getting word out as to the reason for the outage, but he dismissed this by saying that they were vastly more concerned with getting the systems back up ASAP than with reporting the cause. The article goes on to talk about Lazaridis’ thoughts on the iPhone, the advantages of RIM’s business model and their staying power in the industry.
If you missed the video on Viigo, you’ll get another chance to see them in May. They offer a full-featured RSS reader with a ton of pre-compiled feeds. If the defaults aren’t enough, you can select from hundreds of feeds in their database (including your truly), or add your own in a variety of different formats. Best of all, it’s free, so go ahead and give it a shot. If that doesn’t sound enticing enough, it’s a fair bet that we’ll finally be able to learn some details on the mysterious Project Tango at WES. Tango will add a new audio feature, with podcasts being the most likely suspect, but who knows what else the new channel will be used for…
Forms are becoming a bigger and bigger market for BlackBerry, and TrueContext is no slouch in that department. They’ll be showcasing ProntoForms at WES this year. The software allows users to create inspections, timesheets, surveys, and other forms quickly and without the need for programming savvy or special skills. The forms, once completed, can be emailed on-the-fly as PDF documents, or exported as CSV files for quick entry to spreadsheets or databases. They’ll also be announcing some product and customer news, so you can look forward to that in May. If you’re interested, we hosted a Weekly Contest with ProntoForms which showed off some of the things the platform could do, and there’s a free demo, too.
A new post on Engadget suggests that AT&T might be dropping the Pearl 8100 from their stores. It’s rumored that the 8100 will be replaced with the GPS-enabled 8110 sometime in April, which wouldn’t be the first time an old BlackBerry got bumped out by a new one. They’ll also, apparently, be dropping the aging Motorola RAZR V3 from stores, but that hardly comes as a surprise to anyone.
There’s a new music store coming from Puretracks on April 1st. called Puretracks Mobile Edition, which will offer 64kbs AAC music without any DRM whatsoever. The AAC format they’re using gets roughly twice the quality at half the size of MP3, so the music will be approximately the equivalent of a 128kbs MP3. Not enough for audiophiles, perhaps, but probably good enough for the rest of us. There’s no indication of pricing yet, but they did say they’ll be releasing Wi-Fi capability for the service later on.
Small and medium businesses will get the chance to check out out Mobile Edge from iEnterprises at WES. Mobile Edge Express is a new suite of CRM software that can be downloaded, installed, and set up in under 10 minutes, without the need for any IT staff. It works with SugarCRM, IBM Lotus Notes, NetSuite CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, giving you access to account information, sales, and more. It differs from their regular Mobile Edge software in that it’s easier to set up, offers a web-based interface, it’s subscription-based and requires no large upfront expenditure.