Life360 has announced that it already has 25 million members and that is rapidly rising.
A geolocation app for smartphones called Life360 has been designed to allow families to be able to monitor the locations of their members, has announced that it predicts that it will have broken the 25 million registered user mark by the end of 2012.
This will mean that the company will become serious competition for the wider known Foursquare.
In fact, Foursqure, though it may be much higher profile, just passed the 25 million user mark in September 2012. That company is also based on a geolocation application. Both of those businesses first opened in 2008, but while Foursquare was able to raise more than $71 million, Life360 was only able to raise $6.85 million.
The Life360 chief exec is now predicting that its geolocation app will surpass the competition.
Chris Hulls, the chief executive of Life360 has announced that he believes that his geolocation app will have passed the audience size of Foursquare within the next couple of months. He has justified his prediction by saying that his company is experiencing a far higher growth rate than the competition. That said, he didn’t share any specific figures regarding the growth rates of either company.
Hulls also declined to reveal how many of his geolocation app’s registered members are actually regular users who are actively using the service. The most specific statement that he would provide was that it was a “pretty high ratio”.
In a phone conversation, Hulls explained that “We’ve really hit an inflection point in the company in terms of the family network going digital. We want to be the company that really owns your family life on the phone.”
The company used a new press release to announce this new membership milestone and, at the same time, launched a new brightly colored website branding style. Furthermore, it also announced that two new features would be added to its geolocation app. These are designed to help tech savvy parents to achieve greater piece of mind. They include “geofencing” through its Places feature, and map view crime data.
Developers find mobile security flaw with Samsung Android devices
Developers associated with XDA Developers, a mobile software development community with over 4 million users worldwide, have found a serious mobile security flaw in recent Samsung mobile devices. One developer, going by the username “Alephzain,” discovered that many Samsung devices that use Google’s Android operating system. The security flaw allowed Alephzain, as well as other developers, to access all of the physical memory contain within a Samsung device. Developers were able to access this memory because of an exploit that provided then with root level permissions.
Flaw could make information vulnerable to theft
Mobile security has been gaining serious attention lately, largely due to the types of information that are stored on mobile devices. A typical smart phone or tablet contains a user’s personal information, such as name, address, and birth date, all of which can be used in identity theft. Mobile devices are quickly becoming mobile payment platforms as well, which means they can store a user’s financial information, such as credit card and bank account numbers. This information is highly valuable to a hacker.
Galaxy S III among most vulnerable devices
According to XDA Developers, the Samsung devices that are most vulnerable are the Galaxy S III, the Galaxy S II, The Galaxy Note II, and Meizu MX. Devices that make use of the Exynos processor are also likely to have some degree of mobile security vulnerabilities. Several developers associated with the community have informed Samsung of the serious security flaw, with one going so far as to hack several mobile devices in order to prove that the flaw exists. There are no known Android malware applications that exploit this particular vulnerability.
Financial information could be at risk
Samsung’s Galaxy S III is one of the most popular smart phones in the world currently, having become a major competitor against the iPhone 5 shortly after its launch. Part of the reason the device is so popular is because of its use of NFC technology for data sharing and mobile commerce. When used to make payments, the device stores a consumer’s financial information. The glaring mobile security flaw that seems to have slipped past Samsung may have put the financial information of millions of Galaxy S III owners at risk.
