Tim Conneally

There is simply no way to avoid mobile tablets in the publishing world.

Magazines like Glamour, GQ, Gourmet Traveller, The New Yorker, People, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, and Wired have all debuted subscription apps for iPad, Newspapers are toying with the subsidized tablet model, new college textbooks are being written specifically for tablets…and good old fashioned "dead tree" books…well, we may still love them, but they're being outsold by e-books.

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Rather than provide security alerts when suspicious messages arrive in employee inboxes, Pennsylvania-based Wombat Security Technologies trains employees by actively trying to phish them.

Tuesday, Wombat announced the second version of its PhishGuru anti-phishing training service now extends to mobile devices including iOS and Android-based devices.

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Several months ago, a mysterious tablet by a mysterious company began showing up in a campaign called "Who is TabCo?" which included fake focus group videos, a video that poked fun at Apple engineer Gray Powell who lost his iPhone 4 prototype at a bar last year, and a sky writer at Apple's WWDC conference. The videos purportedly advertised a new tablet, but said nothing about the device or the company that made it.

As at turns out, "TabCo" is Fusion Garage, the company responsible for the fiasco that began as the CrunchPad and ended as the JooJoo, a tablet which reportedly only 90 people had ordered before it began its end-of-life.

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Three months ago, Microsoft published some statistics pulled from Internet Explorer 9's SmartScreen Filter anti-phishing and anti-malware tool which led the IE9 team to conclude that the browser cuts malware threats by 95%. Today, research firm NSS Labs released a study that backs up Internet Explorer 9's internal statistics, and gives IE9 a block rate of 96.2%, putting it far ahead of Chrome 12, Firefox 4, Safari 5, and Opera 11.

NSS used the same "live testing" methodology it debuted in 2009, and has used for bi-annual tests since that time. In addition to traditional threat detection rates, it uses a metric called "time to defense" which measures the time between when a security vendor first classifies a potential new threat and when protection to that threat is added to consumer products.

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Google CEO Larry Page on Monday outlined the importance Motorola has played in the foundation of Android and its growth across the world, and the role it will play moving forward. This is a repost of content that Page posted both in the official Google Blog and on his Google+ feed, but we all felt it was a very important statement about today's landmark acquisition, and that it should be read in its entirety.

Since its launch in November 2007, Android has not only dramatically increased consumer choice but also improved the entire mobile experience for users. Today, more than 150 million Android devices have been activated worldwide--with over 550,000 devices now lit up every day--through a network of about 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers in 123 countries. Given Android's phenomenal success, we are always looking for new ways to supercharge the Android ecosystem. That is why I am so excited today to announce that we have agreed to acquire Motorola.

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Speech-based computing company Nuance Communications on Monday announced that it acquired Telecom Italia subsidiary Loquendo, a company specializing in text-to-speech (TTS), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and voice biometrics solutions mostly for Romance languages.

Though Nuance already has support for more than 80 languages across its various text-based solutions like FlexT9, this acquisition gives the company broader support for speech-based actions in Latin languages, and its most popular product Dragon Dictation could support even more Romance languages. Currently, the application supports fifteen languages and is available in eighteen countries.

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Google thoroughly rocked the smartphone world on Monday morning by announcing it will be acquiring Android phone maker Motorola Mobility for approximately $12.5 billion. Motorola Mobility has existed as a standalone entity for just 8 months, and has produced some of the most successful Android smartphones such as the first Droid with Verizon Wireless.

Most importantly, though, Motorola Mobility holds one of the most valuable wireless patent portfolios in the business, and this acquisition serves as a follow up to the Nortel Patent auction where Google placed bids, but lost out to a consortium of bidders that included Apple, EMC, Microsoft, Ericsson, Research in Motion, and Sony.

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In video gaming, there have been two separate types of interfaces that have dominated…for mobile gaming, it's been touchscreens, and on consoles it's been 3D motion control.

Following the explosive popularity of Nintendo's Wii, the current generation of consoles all embraced air interfaces where the user becomes the controller. PlayStation Move, and especially the brilliant Microsoft Kinect take free-space motion control to new levels. And following the explosive popularity of video gaming on the iPod touch, iPad, and iPhone, many game companies have shifted to a "mobile first" attitude.

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Google's new social network took a lot of the good stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and Google Wave and mashed it all together to make Google Plus. Today, social games, one of the more lucrative, but possibly more obnoxious facets of Facebook has launched on Google Plus.

With the Circles feature of Google+, the constant stream of game-related feed updates and promotions that has been known to pollute Facebook can at least be corralled into its own little area. Google is hailing this as a major improvement to the social gaming experience.

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Web-based file storage and content sharing service Box.net on Thursday unveiled three new apps for the tablet world: one for Android Honeycomb, one for BlackBerry PlayBook, and one for HTML5-compatible browsers. These new products bring Box to essentially all mobile platforms in some way and round out its app offerings which already included iOS, Android, and WebOS.

Like Amazon has done with its Kindle e-book platform, Box is attempting to attain what it calls "mobile ubiquity," or a meaningful presence on any mobile device that comes along, irrespective of platform.

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It would appear that U.S. companies are ready to abandon WiMAX.

At the end of July, Sprint made the bombshell announcement that it had entered a 15-year partnership with LightSquared to share its network infrastructure with the new network, and that it would essentially be receiving a free LTE network if it agreed to build it on top of its existent towers. Sprint's WiMAX partner Clearwire, has laid out no further plans for its WiMAX expansion, and also has committed to incorporating LTE into its network, and eventually upgrading to LTE-Advanced several years down the road.

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As of today, Amazon's Kindle e-reader is available on all platforms. The retailer on Wednesday launched Kindle Cloud Reader, an HTML5 Web app that gives users browser-based access to their Kindle library and the Kindle store on platforms that have no dedicated Kindle app, such as Linux and ChromeOS.

Similar to the Amazon MP3 Cloud Player, Kindle Cloud Reader gives users the option to read their e-books while connected, or to cache content to their local machine for offline consumption, and the bookstore has been integrated into the web app's experience.

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Over the last couple of years, companies have come to view me as a writer who mostly covers Android. I suppose it's pretty true, but I like to think that I'm not exhibiting any sort of bias toward it, but rather just covering Android stories because there are simply more companies utilizing it than any other mobile OS, and more interesting stories are born from it every week because of this.

At any rate, I get pitched A LOT of Android gear, and trust me on this one, most of it is not worth even talking about, much less using.

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Social network Facebook on Tuesday released a new app for iOS and Android mobile devices called Facebook Messenger. The application is effectively a standalone mobile version of the new Facebook Messages platform which allows users to send messages to individuals or groups of individuals in their phone book or Facebook friends list.

Facebook unveiled Messages in late 2010, billing it as a single, unified inbox that could thread together many disparate methods of communication into a single stream. If two users are conversing over Facebook chat, and one switches over to a mobile device, for example, the conversation would still take place through Messages, except the messages are being sent through SMS instead of a Web interface.

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Apple Inc. managed to shoot right past Exxon Mobil in the stock market to become the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, but the big oil company kept up the fight throughout trading on Tuesday.

As of August 8th, the top ten international companies by market capitalization were Exxon Mobil, Apple Inc, then IBM, Microsoft, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, AT&T, General Electric, and Coca-Cola. But over the course of Monday and Tuessday, Exxon Mobil's shares fell while Apple's rallied, and the number one and number two companies swapped positions.

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