A new year is always a good time for some reflection. Last month MDeC held its final Creative Industry Dialogue for the year. This time around the MDeC people in charge of mobile did not take their usual approach of talks and panel sessions. Instead, they commendably turned the event into a brainstrorming session.

I had the honour of moderating the mobile track. The participants were divided into groups and consulted on what I felt was the perfect topic to round off a year and welcome a brand new year: the problems and challenges faced by the mobile content industry. It was important that this issue be addressed openly because the app industry took off in 2007 and four years later, there haven’t been that many notable local apps. We haven’t yet seen that one app a large number of Malaysians would have in their smartphones.

Last month I was at a press summit that was organised by NetEvents. The topics at the summit were squarely enterprise centric. I had to suffer an immense overdose of topics like datacentres, virtualisation, enterprise cloud solutions and networking but one topic made me attend and that was cyber security.

A large number of security solutions providers were there. Companies like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Sourcefire, Blue Coat and Niometrics. Of course, the speakers who spoke on cyber security issues also focussed on enterprise issues but the background information I gained was invaluable.

In essence, everyone who uses a smart mobile device and his or her employers should take cyber security very seriously.

Firstly, the profile of the attacker has changed. Malware makers are no longer hacker kids out for some mischief and bragging rights. These days, malware threats are more likely to come from organised crime out to make as much money as possible.

Steve Jobs and I go a long way back. Not as in personally knowing each other but rather as in the periods of our lives that have coincided. Many of MW’s readers would have known Steve Jobs from the time when the iPod became a must-have tech gadget. I tracked his career right from the time he began to build computers.

I followed his life when he was a computer whizz kid. I felt sort of sad when he was forced out of Apple. I cheered when he came back because it was so much like a movie with a happy ending. And I looked upon with admiration when he came up with winner after winners, first in computers, then in a music gadget and then, right in the industry I cover, in mobile.

But unlike many of my friends, I never became an Apple fanboy. Till this very day, the only Apple product I have bought is the iPad. Yet, I am a firm believer in Steve’s genius and consider his loss to be irreplaceable. Steve Jobs was unique and I am not sure if we will see one more person with every single one of his stellar qualities so soon.

Why do I consider him a genius and yet not buy his products? It’s a philosophical thing.