Mobifun’s Weblog

Selling 100 million mobile devices, an increase of 29 percent over last year, helped more than double Q2 profits for Nokia (Nasdaq: NOK). Net income was $3.85 billion, a gain of 156.7 percent over last year’s $1.5 billion. Net sales increased about 30 percent to $17 billion, compared with $13 billion in Q206. The AP reported that the company beat the markets expectations, sending shares up 8 percent. Other Q2 highlights included:

– Mobile phones: Net sales were flat at $8 billion. The segment’s operating profit grew 28 to $1.7 billion, compared with $1.3 billion

– Multimedia: Net sales gained 38.5 percent to $3.6 billion versus last year’s $2.6 billion.

– Nokia Siemens Networks: Operating profit was negative $1.5 billion, with an operating margin of -36.8 percent. Earnings release (PDF) | Webcast

Updated: News.com on Nokia’s relative success and how it could make more headway in U.S.: “In the U.S., where at least 220 million people subscribe to cell phone service, Nokia only sells a handful of midrange phones through operators..and some of the company’s high-end phones directly through the Nokia site…But that could change. All the hype surrounding Apple’s iPhone could help draw comparisons to Nokia’s high-end phones. And this interest could help lift sales. If Nokia is able to capitalize on a shift in consumer behavior in the U.S., Motorola may have an even harder time catching up to Nokia.”

An electrical problem at a Samsung Electronics Co. factory Friday forced a partial halt in production at the world’s largest memory chip maker, the company said, raising prospects of a global shortage.

According to yahoo A spark in an electrical transformer led to a power failure on six chip-making lines at a plant near Seoul, spokeswoman Lee Soo-jeong said. Five of the lines make memory chips and one makes chips for other functions, he said.

Samsung is the world’s largest producer of memory chips for use in computers, digital music players and other devices.

Analysts said the suspension of Samsung’s chip lines could lead to a severe shortage of NAND flash memory chips, which are able to retain data even when they are unpowered. Samsung’s misfortune could give a boost to its South Korean rival Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Japan’s Toshiba Corp

American love gadgets.According to an online  national surveycondusted by harris Interactive.

85% of US adults currently own a DVD player

80% of US have a mobile phone

68% have adigital camera

30% ownb MP3 Player

Also 1 in 3 have an aptitude towards new technology

Internet telephone services like Skype and Vonage are starting to look less like digital gimmicks and more like the next generation of voice communication. They’re cheaper than traditional phone services and increasingly fast and reliable. But they may also be far more hackable.

In a series of presentations, Security professionals at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas they demonstrated ways in which cybercriminals can eavesdrop on VoIP calls, steal data from Internet telephony devices, intercept credit card numbers from VoIP connections and shut connections down altogether.

Peter Thermos, chief technology officer of Palindrome Technologies, proved the point onstage: He played snippets of conversations recorded by snooping on VoIP calls, exploiting vulnerability in a common element in VoIP communications known as media gateway control protocol.

“Using this weakness in MGCP, you can do anything like reroute or tear down connections,” He said. “But eavesdropping is especially scary.”

Thermos also described an exploitable hole in ZRTP, one species of the VoIP language real-time transfer protocol: ZRTP encrypts all transmitted sounds, but not the numbers translated from tones. That means hackers can listen for credit card information communicated from touchtone phones.

Though the attacks on display were new, VoIP isn’t: Internet telephony has existed since the early ’90s. But Dempster says its increasing adoption hasn’t led to the patching of old bugs. In his presentation, he described how Asterisk, an open-source VoIP application, can be attacked using what he said was an “extremely basic” method known as a buffer overflow. “We point these problems out,” he said, “But the lessons aren’t being taken.”

New mobile devices are also drawing attention to VoIP problems. Krishna Kurapati, founder and chief technology officer of Sipera Systems, demonstrated vulnerabilities of several Wi-Fi devices at Wednesday’s presentations, crashing a Blackberry and a D-Link phone onstage by hacking their wireless Internet connections. He also simulated the theft of private data via VoIP from a laptop.

One of my fears when Google acquired FeedBurner is that the excellent CPMs and advertisers that FB has in their ad network would be replaced by Google’s “we ain’t tellin’” AdSense network. While I still believe that will happen by year’s end, the longer it takes, the more I am happy. Another great part about the HA program is that it should increase FB’s fill rate which was about 35-40%.

Yesterday I wrote about the new FeedBurner self-service advertising option using their headline animator service. I think it’s an excellent mechanism for smaller sites like CN to get visibility on other sites.

So the service is live 24 hours, and already I have four ad insertion orders! Here they are:

• Computer Zen
• DonLoeb - has a great writeup on the FB self-service ads as well
• LucaFiligheddu.com
• FeedBurner Blog

Centernetwork reports One thing I notice is that the CPM is noted but not the total purchase. Would be good for a publisher to know how much the person has purchased. Based on what I can tell, two of them purchased $25, one $50 and one $100 for a total of $200. After FB takes their cut (at least they share it!), I should net $130. Nice. Cable bill paid this month!

I will continue to update as the month progresses. If you are in the FeedBurner Ad Network, report in on how it’s working for you. And if you are an advertiser, let us know how it is working out from your end as well.