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Hesham's blogs
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Even the iPhone Falls Victim to Phishing Attacks
Nov 29, 2009
November has been an interesting month for iPhone users with an initial harmless virus appearing near the beginning of the month which morphed into a more malicious one by month's end. The initial 'ikee' virus simply replaced the phone's wallpaper with a photo of the 80's pop singer Rick Astley. Fortunately this virus only affected jailbroken iPhones, who's users did not change the default SSH passwords. This code for this virus was deliberately distributed by its creator as a wake up call to all iPhone users who chose to jailbreak their phones without understanding the ramifications of doing it properly (i.e. making sure you change the default passwords).
Unfortunately the source got into the hands of malicious hackers who morphed it into the iPhone 'Duh' virus. This virus is designed to steal online banking passwords and scrape the user's SMS messages. It is basically a phishing attack whereby it dupes iPhone users visiting their online banking website with a phoney look-alike to steal their passwords. There have been confirmed reports of this happening in the Netherlands with users accessing ING online banking from their phones.
While these viruses have only targeted the small percentage of iPhones that have 
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Canadian Mobile Operators are supporting the Collaborative approach to Mobile Money
Nov 16, 2009
I had the pleasure of participating as both a panelist and moderator at the Mobile Money Canada event last week. It was a fantastic gathering of professionals actively involved in the Mobile Financial Services industry in Canada. I would like to recap some highlights from the session I participated in entitled: "What is the right Mobile Money approach for Canada? Bank Centric, Mobile Operator Centric, or Collaboration?" The other guest panellists included:
Patrick Kelly, SVP Business Development at Monitise Americas
Jason Hurlbut, Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development at CPNI Inc.
Aran Hamilton, Vice President - Strategic Partnerships at EnStream LP
The topic itself was rather controversial and is usually a source of fierce debate in many similar forums globally. However it was surprising to see that in Canada it seems that there is more consensus around a collaborative approach to mobile financial services. This was highlighted by the following key moments in the panel discussion:
- Aran Hamilton assured the audience that all the major Canadian Operators (Bell, Rogers & Telus) were not vying for 'ownership' of the end consumer with regards mobile financial service offerings. Rather the carriers see themselves as being enablers for this service offering and that
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Developed Nation Consumers Are Showing They Will Use Mobile Financial Services
Nov 02, 2009
In the ongoing debate regarding mobile financial services in developed nations there has always been the argument that consumers don't see any value in mobile financial services. This position argues that in developed nations there is such a convenient and reliable financial infrastructure (ATM's, online banking, e-Commerce, credit & debit cards, etc.) that consumers will see very little value-add from being able to conduct banking transactions on their mobile phone. To be honest this is a compelling argument and I also wondered how much value a person would really see in being able to pay utility bills on their mobile phone when they can just as easily do it on their home or office PC. Is the urge, or need, to pay the bill that strong that it must be done on the go?
The absence of any significant behavioural research, along with the slow adoption of mobile banking relative to the developing world, seemed to support this argument. However a recent data release by eBay seems to show that users will use mobile financial service heavily if given the opportunity. EBay reported that users have already spent $400 million on goods through eBay's iPhone application! That is
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Mary Meeker - Mobile Web Will Be 10 Times As Big as the Desktop Internet, and It Will Grow Much Faster.
Oct 26, 2009
Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual slide presentation focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web this year. It is an extremely interesting perspective with tons of data and facts. You can download the presentation here.
I think it is a great read for people interested in mobile financial services due to some of these key points she brought up:
- Companies must need to be on board with the mobile web. There is still time but they need to act soon.
- Location-based services are the “secret sauce” for the success mobile web services.
- The iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing consumer electronics product of all time.
- The adoption of the iPhone and iPod Touch is outstripping the early adoption the desktop Internet. Only 8 quarters after launch, the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than five times as many users as Netscape, and eight times as many as AOL at a comparable points in their histories
- Next Generation Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) are Driving Unprecedented Change in Communications & Commerce.
- Facebook is the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years.
- Mobile Social Networking in Japan is 3 times greater
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Smartphone Mobile Banking Can Thwart Phishing Attacks
Oct 19, 2009
Online phishing has become a very serious problem and the root of the problem is the fact that the majority of computer users are not very technically savvy. Thus they fall easy prey to phishing attacks since they lack the instinct to check things such as a web browser's site address or security certificate. However even technically savvy users are falling victims with attacks such as the online banking re-write attack. In this attack cybercrooks are hiding evidence of a victim's diminishing bank balance by rewriting the online bank statements on the fly within the web browser!
As mobile banking becomes ever more popular it will most definitely be subject to similar attacks. The damage will likely be more severe since the penetration rates of mobile phones are higher than computers, and the average user is less familiar with a phone's extended features to be able to spot a potential attack.
The good news is that the emergence of the native application and AppStore model being used by most smart phone manufacturers may inadvertently provide protection against such attacks in mobile banking. If mobile banking functionality is ONLY delivered through a dedicated phone application (downloaded
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Adobe Flash for Rich Mobile Financial Applications
Oct 05, 2009
Over the past few months I have been focusing my blog on providing some insight into the challenges of developing mobile financial applications for smart phones and some of the ways development teams can tackle them. One of the strategies I suggested was to use a technology platform that offered a convergence among the smart phone platforms, such as WebKit. In this light, Adobe has made two major announcements today that will make life much easier for vendors developing media rich applications for smart phones. The first is the release of Flash Player 10.1 which will bring Flash applications to Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS, Google® Android™, Symbian® OS with Blackberry® to follow shortly. The second announcement is that Flash Professional CS5 will allow developers to compile their Flash applications into native iPhone code and package into an iPhone application! In other words, as of today Flash has become a platform to develop one codebase to deploy across multiple smart phone platforms. The added bonus is that Adobe has added full support for native device capabilities including support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation. It is also interesting to note
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Develop Incrementally for MFS Solutions
Sep 30, 2009
A while back I came across a very interesting blog entry by Olga Morawczynski titled " What you don’t know about M-PESA". It gave some interesting insight into the behind the scenes effort it took to bring the successful M-PESA product to launch. M-PESA is definitely the most successful MMT application to date, and is consistently used as an example and standard for all other global mobile money transfer deployments. However there tends to be a misconception that M-PESA was a preconceived idea that had clearly defined business processes and functional requirements and thus was executed in one shot by simply applying the normal development and testing process for any software initiative.
Olga's blog dispels this myth, and shows how M-PESA underwent many iterations of the concept, business process flows and software application. As she highlights: "Furthermore, the design of the application interface and entire system underwent several iterations. It began as a tool for the repayment of MFI loans. It was launched as a P2P transfer service. Such changes were made because the pilot team did their research, and closely monitored usage patterns. Their findings in the field were then fed back into the design of the
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.NET and Java for the iPhone!
Sep 22, 2009
A common theme in my blog posts is the challenges that face developers, and businesses, who develop applications for smart phones. I've already discussed the issues around multiple platform support as well as how to get adequate ROI with the current Application Store model that has been adopted by all the major smart phone manufacturers. Today I'll address another challenge, and that is of acquiring the necessary development skills in your team in order to tackle smart phone development. This goes hand in hand with the challenge of supporting multiple hardware platforms because each hardware platform requires a different set of programming skills: iPhone is Objective C, Android and BlackBerry are Java, Windows Mobile is C/C++/C# and Symbian is C++.
Even in the current economic climate, there is still a war for highly skilled talent making the recruitment and retention of a development team to support all these mobile platforms extremely costly. What are the alternatives? In my earlier posts I advocated narrowing down your target platform based on you target consumer, so if this is possible then you would only need to acquire skills for one or two platforms. However if this cannot be done then another alternative
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Is WebKit the solution for BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Pre and Symbian convergence?
Sep 14, 2009
In my recent blogs I have been discussing the challenges that developers face building cross-platform applications for Smartphones. The biggest of these is the huge divergence among Smartphone manufacturers which makes cross-platform development almost impossible. As a result, developers resort to creating different code streams for each smart phone platform and continuously port features between them.
I was recently discussing this topic with a colleague when he made the following poignant observation: "While all these Smartphones are diverging on their OS and hardware platforms, they are all converging on the Web Browser rendering engine - WebKit". This statement is so true considering how the iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS, and Symbian have all adopted WebKit as the core rendering engine in their embedded browsers. It also seems that BlackBerrys will also come into the fold after RIM's recent acquisition of TorchMobile. The industry consensus is that this acquisition was mainly to acquire the TorchMobile web browser and port it to the BlackBerry. With this browser convergence, developers should be able to create a single code stream for a web based application (that uses standards based technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript & SVG) and have it
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Mobile Financial Services: Who Provides the Customer Support?
Aug 31, 2009
Recently a friend of mine fell victim to the Facebook 419 scam where his account was taken over and used to send requests for money under the guise that he was stranded in a foreign country. The most frustrating thing for him was the customer service experience being handed off from provider to provider trying to get this issue resolved. Facebook was very slow to respond. The criminals switched the email address on his Facebook account, and the email provider was also slow to respond to the fraud reports. Unfortunately, some of his friends fell victim to the scam and sent money with the criminals receiving the funds posing as my friend, and there was not much recourse that could be taken with the money transfer service provider.
What this highlighted to me was the fact that when consumer services are made up of various providers it can be very challenging to offer a proper level of customer support. This is especially critical when the offered product appears as one end-to-end service to the consumer and the consumer is really unaware of all the parties behind the scene that are needed to make the service available. When you look
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