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Reported by India Times, in poor countries or development countries, mobile phones has became a tool for users to do banking service.

Mobile money applications are emerging as potent financial tools in rural and remote areas of the globe, allowing people with no bank accounts to get paid, send remittances or settle their bills.

“One billion consumers in the world have a mobile phone but no access to a bank account,” said Gavin Krugel, the director of mobile banking strategy at GSM Association, an industry group of 800 wireless operators.

Mobile banking began to emerge six years ago in the Philippines and South Africa, where 8.5 million and 4.5 million people, respectively, use such services.

Today, 40 million people worldwide use mobile money, and the industry is growing, according to the GSMA.

“Africa and Asia are the most active regions right now,” Krugel said. “We expect Latin America pick up this year.”

There are 18,000 new mobile banking users per day in Uganda, 15,000 in Tanzania and 11,000 in Kenya, he said.

Mobile phones can offer a wide range of banking solutions, from sending transfers to a relative to buying goods in a store or putting money aside for a rainy day — all by dialing a few numbers on one’s handset.

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I would like to wish you a very Happy Chinese New Year

Be back soon ….

The famous mobile operating system (OS) Symbian – today announced it is fully open source and you can start downloading the source code.

Quoted from the news released:-

Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, comments: “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

IDC Analyst John Delaney remarks: “It’s increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing into open source of the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry.”

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site (tiny.symbian.org/open), under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature complete” during Q1 of this year.

I received an email a while ago. The email wanted me to upgrade the Microsoft Outlook or Outlook express. It actually attached an upgrade of the patches as well.

This is the first time that i received such an email.

Below is the email content:-

Brief Description

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.

Instructions

* Install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721). To do this, follow these steps:

1. Run attached file officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe

2. Restart Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

System Requirements

* Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows 98; Windows ME; Windows NT; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP; Windows Vista

* This update applies to the following product: Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

As you can see the patches name is officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe and it has been zip up. Logical thinking tells me that this email is not from Microsoft although the sender name is from Microsoft Support. This is because as you know,  normally any windows updates will be done via downloading from Microsoft auto update utility. Moreover the sender address is not from Microsoft also. Therefore i can tell you that this is some sort of phishing or virus to be spread and install to the email client and exploit it.

I’m wondering why my Eset antivirus is not blocking,delete or quarantine the attachment. Anyway should you come across this email, beware! DO NOT download the zip file and extract and install it. DELETE the email immediately. Or probably search what’s others say.

Updates: Received another same email again this morning and my Eset antivirus has deleted it successfully.

Reported by Portio Research that current SMS  revenues in excess of USD150 billion despite of the economy downturn and set to continue growing to more than USD233 billion by year 2014.

The performance of SMS over the last five years has been staggering and remains so mainly because it is cheap, easy to use, convenient, discreet and universally acceptable to some 4 billion consumers worldwide. During 2009 SMS continued to grow in all markets and the report confidently predicts that it will continue to do so for several more years. In 2009 worldwide SMS traffic topped 5 trillion messages, and that figure is set to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.

Today MMS, often cited as a failure, is a massive revenue-generating segment of the market. Full year revenues for 2009 amount to almost USD 27 billion, an impressive figure, and lest people forget, not far off what SMS was generating a mere 5 years ago. MMS is growing fast in all major regions around the world as affordable camera-equipped handsets flood the market and increasingly become the norm.

So talking about the MMS, do you think is it really a failure? Do you send MMS as often as SMS?