Category: Featured News

Many consumers may use their mobile devices to shop during the holidays

The holiday season is rapidly approaching and this may represent a major opportunity involved in the mobile commerce space. Touch of Modern, an e-commerce company that specializes in exposing men to products and bands that they may be interested in, reports that the 2014 holiday season was particularly significant in terms of growth. The upcoming holiday season may provide the mobile commerce space with significant momentum that will encourage more retailers to become mobile-centric.

Touch of Modern is seeing major growth through the holiday season

Touch of Modern raised some $14 million in Series B funding last year. During that same year, the company’s revenue grew by 400%, with mobile commerce representing a significant portion of this growth. More consumers are accessing e-commerce sites through their mobile devices. These consumers note that using their mobile devices has made it easier for them to shop for and purchase products. Mobile shopping is particularly popular among consumers with long commutes, as they are able to do their shopping while traveling and have products delivered to their homes.

IBM shows that mobile traffic is growing aggressively, largely due to the holiday shopping season

A report from IBM has shown that mobile commerce saw explosive growth in 2014, largely thanks to holiday shopping. On Thanksgiving Day, mobile traffic accounted for some 52.1% of all online traffic. This was the first time that mobile devices accounted for more traffic than their PC counterparts. Consumers also spent more money through their mobile devices during the 2014 holiday season than they had done in 2013.

Retailers may have major opportunities in the mobile commerce field

Mobile commerce may see a greater increase this year than it saw in 2014. More retailers have begun to embrace the mobile space, hoping to engage consumers that favor shopping with their smartphones and tablets. Retailers have significant opportunities that they can take advantage of this year, but they will have to provide consumers with an enjoyable and convenient mobile shopping experience in order to do so.

In this way, it has allowed HTTPS-enabled Google domains to be impersonated by the wrong parties.

It has now been revealed that Symantec has fired several of its staff members after it was discovered that they had issued unauthorized Google certificates that allows potential attackers to be able to impersonate legitimate pages that have been protected by HTTPS.

The Symantec digital security company posted the news of the unauthorized certificate issuing in a recent blog post.

According to the company, “We learned on Wednesday that a small number of test certificates were inappropriately issued internally this week for three domains during product testing.” It also explained that all of the test Google certificates and the keys had always remained within the company’s control, and when the issue was identified, they were immediately revoked. “There was no direct impact to any of the domains and never any danger to the Internet.”

That said, they did terminate the employment of the people who misused the Google certificates in question.

The issue, itself, was identified by employees at Google, who had been monitoring an open framework called Certificate Transparency, which is a project that the company operates in order to be able to repair SSL certificate system structural flaws. Clearly, the system proved its worth in a new way in this specific situation, as Google was able to spot the unauthorized activity with regards to the certificates, nearly immediately.

Google then proceeded to communicate the issue to Symantec, and the two companies worked together to make certain that the pre-certificate remained active and valid for only a single day at the start of 2015. The certificate has since been blocked by way of an update to the revocation metadata through Chrome. Moreover, there isn’t any reason to believe that there was any risk to the security and privacy of Symantec’s website or product users at any point, as a result of this error.

Those responsible for the issue with the Google certificate are no longer employed with Symantec. That said, the company has now employed Dan Rogers as its new chief marketing officer. Rogers is the former CMO of Salesforce EMEA.