Mobile

The traditional 9-5 working day of driving to an office, sitting in a cubicle for hours and then forgetting all about work at the end of the day is all but extinct.

Thanks to telecommuting and the rise of millennials on the workplace, employees are now able to work from pretty much anywhere at any time of day, with little or no disruption or sacrifice in productivity.

A security researcher at Check Point has discovered a vulnerability in the WhatsApp Web app. The app -- which allows for WhatsApp messages sent to a phone to be viewed on a desktop computer, as well as syncing data -- can be exploited if a malicious user sends a specially-crafted vCard contact to someone.

A problem with WhatsApp's filtering of the contact card means that it could be used to "trick victims into executing arbitrary code on their machines in a new and sophisticated way". What's particularly worrying about this vulnerability is the fact that all an attacker needs is the phone number associated with a WhatsApp account. With an estimated 200 million WhatsApp Web users, there are a lot of potential victims.

BlackBerry has announced its purchase of Good Technology, a mobile security company. The deal was sealed with $425 million (£280 million) heading Good’s way. The Good Dynamics platform provides encryption, advanced data loss prevention and secure communication between applications.

But BlackBerry is already good at that, isn’t it? It is one of the safest, if not the safest smartphone out there, so what good can Good do (pun definitely intended)?

Fujitsu has revealed details of a new wireless receiver capable of data transfer rates of "several tens of Gigabits per second". Operating on the terahertz band, the receiver is over 100 times faster than current devices that use the 0.8-2.0 GHz range.

Described as "the world's first 300 GHz band compact receiver", the receiver is ten times smaller than previous models, opening up the possibility of use in mobile devices. Shrinking the unit has reduced its size to under one cubic centimeter and Fujitsu says that it "enables mobile devices to instantly transfer 4K or 8K HD video".

At an ongoing media event in New Delhi, India, Samsung today launches the Galaxy Note 5, its latest flagship phablet device, in the country. Unlike the Note 4, and several other Galaxy smartphones and phablets, the Note 5 is comparatively well priced. The South Korean technology conglomerate announced that the Note 5 will be available for purchase starting Rs 53,900 (roughly $800), and will go on sale starting September 20.

Unveiled at an event last month, the Galaxy Note 5 is the company's latest flagship phablet device. It sports a 5.7-inch QHD Super-AMOLED display with a pixel density of 515ppi. It is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC with four Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2.1GHz, and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, coupled with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. It comes in two storage variants: 32GB and 64GB, and doesn't support microSD card. On the software side, it runs on Android Lollipop with TouchWiz UI on top of it.

Turning to the internet for medical advice is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it provides access to a wealth of information previously only available to medical students, making it easy to look up symptoms and see what they might mean. On the other, hypochondriacs can very easy self-diagnose every condition under the sun.

But there's no denying that it can certainly be helpful to be able to find out a little more about different conditions from the comfort of your phone or computer. Today Google announces a swathe of updates that it hopes will help people to be better informed in terms of understanding symptoms and treatments, and conveying what they are experiencing to a doctor.

On the same day that Google unveiled its new logo, the company also slipped out some other news that didn't get quite as much attention. Considering the news means that Gmail users are likely to be inundated with more ads than ever before, it's hardly surprising that Google wasn't shouting from the rooftops, but that's what's happening.

Native Gmail ads are now rolling out to AdWords users, giving companies a new way to gain a presence in potential customers' inboxes. This is not spam. This is not a new way to start an email-based ad campaign. It's actual AdWord-triggered ads at the top of inboxes.

Modern organizations collect large amounts of data across multiple platforms, but they can find it hard to extract useful, actionable insights from the raw information.

San Francisco-based Zenput provides real-time data capture and analysis to retail, restaurant and consumer goods companies to help them centralize operations and support more informed decision-making. How much difference can this technology make to businesses? We talked to Zenput CEO Vladik Rikhter to find out.

Apple and Cisco have, through a joint statement, announced a partnership which will see Apple’s apps and devices become more productive in enterprise networks.

The goal of the partnership is to optimize Cisco’s networks for iOS devices and apps and integrate the iPhone with Cisco enterprise environments. That will create a "fast lane" for iOS business users, Apple has said in a press release.

PayPal has long been a quick and easy way to send and receive money online; with the launch of PayPal.Me, things just got even simpler. This is a new platform which provides PayPal customers with their own personalized URL (such as paypal.me/markwilson) as an alternative to sending out invoices. PayPal is pushing this as a way to call in your debts, but it's far more versatile than that.

The next time someone needs to send you money, you can simply direct them to your page -- or you can include the link on social networks, your website, in emails, via SMS, and so on. Any payments that are made in this way are covered by the same PayPal Buyer Protection policies as before. Anyone visiting your PayPal.Me page is able to choose the amount of money they want to send you, but you can also customize the URL you share to make a request for a specific amount.

Since the infamous mobilegeddon -- the latest update from Google that means websites are now penalized for failing to be mobile friendly -- many businesses have been rushing to improve the experience of their mobile website for their users, and avoid being penalized in SERPS (search engine results page).

With a lot of information out there about all of the things you can be doing to make a user’s journey better, what about the things that you really should be avoiding? Below are the top five things NOT to do when it comes to UX on mobile:

There are currently an estimated 1.91 billion smartphone users worldwide, and 82 percent of them use their mobile devices to shop. As consumers are five times more likely to abandon shopping if the site isn’t optimized this means embracing mobile is crucial for businesses.

Online shopping portal DirectBuy has produced an infographic looking at how the world is moving towards a mobile shopping environment.

The LG G4 is making quite a splash and being advertised seemingly everywhere. There's good reason for that as I previously explained in my review. Overall it's a nice phone, but there are a few things you need to know before getting underway with it.

One is that OK Google is not enabled by default, you'll need to do so yourself. It isn't intuitive, either. But the good news is that it isn't hard once you know how to do it. Here are some simple steps to get you going.

Mobile identity specialist TeleSign has announced an agreement with Spanish telecoms giant Telefόnica -- the company behind O2 in the UK and Germany -- to deliver a suite of services to address account security and fraud prevention for enterprises and service providers.

The partnership will use TeleSign's products and infrastructure, along with Telefόnica's consent-based insights, to increase account security, reduce fraud, and improve customer experience for consumers. At the same time it will help to manage costs for service providers across financial services, e-commerce, cloud and social media.

However much on-screen keyboards improve, they're no replacement for a good, old-fashioned keyboard. Traveling with a tablet, it might not be convenient to lug about a full-sized wireless keyboard but LG thinks its Rolly Keyboard could be the answer.

As the name suggests, this is a portable keyboard that 'rolls' up for easier transportation -- well, it rolls up into a square stick rather than a round roll, but you get the idea. Also known as the KBB-700, the Rolly Keyboard features almost full-sized keys, and can be paired with two devices via Bluetooth.