I do a lot of consulting in the financial services space and I had occasion last week to listen to a number of firms talk about fraud and fraud detection at a mini-conference. Then today I spotted a Wired blog entry talking about a fairly major ATM fraud action against Citibank where some hackers apparently got a hold of compromised ATM pins and went on a cash withdrawal spree.

Now that the new iPhone has GPS (not that many other phones haven’t had this service for awhile but I pay attention to the features of the one in my pocket), I was thinking that location aware mobile phones might offer a rather unique mechanism for banks and credit card companies to reduce fraud. Since your phone knows where you are, it would be able to tell your financial institution’s computers your location every say, 15 minutes, and they could use that information to figure out whether the credit card charge or ATM withdrawal that just occurred (or is in progress) is within a reasonable distance from where you happen to be. If not, treat it as likely fraud.

Now this opens up some interesting privacy issues but our banks know so much about us already, for your average law abiding citizen is their location history more important than protecting themselves against fraud? Even better if the bank’s systems only recorded your location just before and after a transaction and discarded everything else.

Alternatively, your bank’s computers could tell your phone in real time whenever a transaction occurred on your account and the GPS coordinates where it happened. Then you could quickly check to make sure it was where you (or your spouse) happened to be.

Lots of things would need to be figured out to make this work but those that protect our money should likely be able to confirm that it is in fact being spent by us and not someone else. Especially since they seem to have trouble protecting themselves from hackers sometimes.

Between my own local contact book in Entourage, LinkedIn, Facebook, my iPhone and three or four different email accounts that I use, I am guaranteed to never have the latest contact information for anyone in the place I need it.

Which is why I’m so looking forward to seeing Soocial get out of closed Beta. If it works, it will keep everything in sync. They even support Mac…you gotta love it.

Please send me an invite…pretty please?!?

After much hype, we’re finally starting to see the first testing of location based ads in the “real world”. I remember talk of location-sensitive ads as far back as 1999.. it’s an industry cliche by now - you’ll be walking by a Starbucks and it’ll zap a coupon for 20% off a latte directly to your phone. I can hardly wait.

Until the industry comes up with more compelling user scenarios, nobody’s going to opt into any such program, and privacy fanatics will slow down any plans to make location-based marketing the default. Forget about push advertising, sending me text messages will drive me crazy. The key to making location-based mobile ads work will be in their integration with mobile users’ behavior.

 Can you imagine if Google Maps did this?

One big question is what will be the relative importance of media consumption vs search. Right now I often use my iPhone to get directions, find restaurants, or even just google something to settle a debate. Getting media over the air is still too slow for anything but text (news, RSS feeds), so it’s hard to tell whether media will play as large a role on mobiles as it does in regular web use.If search-oriented usage ends up being dominant, we might end up with more of a Google-style model, though I’m not sure pay-per-click will work as well on mobile devices. If mobile TV takes off on the other hand, the current local-TV ad model would work nicely with GPS-enabled targeting, with interstitial ads selected based on the user’s location. The ideal is for the user to not even know (or at least not be reminded) they’re being targeted - because at the end of the day, they don’t really care.

Yesterday the security software firm Astaro issued a press release announcing that their VPN solution will now support the iPhone. It doesn’t look like they had to do too much to their product (if anything) to enable this support, so I suspect other VPN providers (or at least those who support the two protocols that the iPhone does - L2TP and PPTP) will soon folow.

This should help reduce one of the most significant barriers to widespread corporate adoption of the iPhone. When it first launched, it was widely criticized for lacking many of the security features that made the Blackberry such a hit with corporations. While Apple’s stated strategy was to focus on the consumer market first, many professionals use their phones for both business and personal email and data access. Until the iPhone is supported by their employer, it’s inconvenient or impossible for them to have one.

This development also opens up possibilities beyond email. Since the iPhone has a real browser, corporate users will now be able to access company intranets, wikis, and any other web-enabled internal applications. Creating iPhone-friendly versions of the user interfaces will take some work, but consumer-facing sites like Facebook and Google have already shown us great examples of how it can be done. It’s not hard to envision companies fully embracing the iPhone as a mobile platform and using it to fully empower their mobile workers the same way laptops did in the late ’90s.

Continuing my post from a few days ago, Google has released (albeit quietly) an iPhone interface in a similar vein to the one that has available on Facebook for several months and recently launched by Amazon. It is a bit thin but does allow you to access all the normal search capability as well as Gmail and your Google Calendar.

More evidence that convergence is finally happening in the mobile browser space. Not because the networks are allowing phone manufacturers to standardize on a browser (perish the thought) but rather that content sources are rallying around the screen resolution provided by the iPhone and the full functionality provided by Safari (ok, Flash would be nice but you get my point.

For an interesting list of iPhone competitors (both concept and real), check out the list over at MobileWack. While some are out a bit out there (and a few are pretty cool looking), it does prove the point that the screen size everyone should be targeting with their mobile versions is, not surprisingly, about the size of human hand. Add to that the physical limitations of the human eye to pick out detail (i.e. resolution) and we’ve pretty much got our standard. No industry standards group required.