The mobile industry is undergoing a massive evolution, filled with growing pains and innovation.  This past week or so, we’ve seen the industry at its best, providing access to victims of the Japan earthquake, and its worst, providing channels of communication for global viruses to take effect.Figures show that after the most recent Japan earthquake, there was a sudden increase in mobile phone internet usage in the Japanese archipelago, the country with the highest number of mobile media users, over three-quarters of mobile owners using mobile media.

What draws attention is that these high rates of mobile phone internet traffic were during periods of severe communication lines interruptions caused by the earthquake.

In the past few days,  a lot happened in the mobile industry, and the main theme of discussion revolved around security at various levels. Mobile payments is a trend that is starting to gain traction, and that needs ongoing development and improvement in order to pass the test of regulations. VeriFone got into an argument with Square over having or not hardware encryption in order to avoid data theft from consumer payment cards, though it will draw a price increase of the device. Momentarily there’s no possibility to make both ends meet.

“Using an encrypting reader is not as simple as plugging it in. Very few POS processing systems can handle encrypted data. The vast majority of card data is processed as clear text ASCII. That includes the data read by most VeriFone terminals,” said Tom Siegler, VP of Strategic Market Development at UIC USA, another vendor in the payment space. “

It is natural to have a competitive edge, and credit card and mobile companies are striving to enter the game as mobile payments are expected to exceed $375 million by 2015. For this reason, Zong is moving its mobile payment platform for the purchase of virtual goods to a series of environments, such as Flash, Unity, Interactive TV and mobile web. Zong has also expanded an in-app payment system to be used on Honeycomb-running tablets, rising the competitiveness levels among mobile payment players. Another practical solution is EBay’s introduction of QR codes that will certainly generate more direct consumer leads in comparison to NFC’s swipes and payments, serving a different purpose, with a potential Google’s quite interested in.

Companies are striving to find solutions that both increase customer loyalty, protect customer data, are accurate and under strict regulations, but there are also examples of irresponsiveness. Violations are yet permitted by big companies. As of now, Google has not taken any strict stand against piracy and at the moment the Marketplace offers genuine and pirated apps as well, damaging the image of the company that does nothing to prevent copyright infringement. According to in-depth research, the infected third-party apps originate from China.

One last important thing to mention in the mobile industry is the social trend that is taking over mobile gaming at the moment. The new HeyZap app for Android allows gamers to check-in to mobile games, offering a similar service to Foursquare’s. The iPhone version will be released as well in the nearest future and the new flavor brought by this app is that it introduces player to new games. HeyZap earns money on each game sign-up it brings a developer on the web.