Each week the MEF team curates mobile stories from around the world. Essential news, the latest market insight & data nuggets, the Global News Round-up offers an instant international mobile content and commerce snapshot.
Global News Stories
Brits to Spend £38m on Mobile During the World Cup
MMM
£38m will be spent via mobile in the UK during the World Cup if England makes it to the second stage, according to research from VoucherCodes.co.uk. If the team make it to the finals, that number is expected to jump to £79m. The influence of second screening will boost tablet’s share of mCommerce spending to 44.7 per cent, from a baseline of 39.2 per cent, though the majority (55.3 per cent) will still come from smartphones.
iOS Apps Pass Browsers For The First Time As The Most Popular Way To Watch Online TV
TechCrunch
In a report about video data consumption trends released this morning by Adobe, the company noted an interesting statistic about the changing habits of online TV watchers. For the first time, iOS applications have surpassed desktop browsers as the most popular access point for online TV content, with a 43 percent market share versus a 36 percent share, respectively. In addition, Android applications are now the fastest-growing access points, with a 202 percent increase, outpacing both iOS and browsers.
Messaging Apps Are The Growth Story Of The Decade In Mobile [CHART]
Business Insider
The rise of messaging apps is the most explosive tech growth story in recent memory.
Between March 2013 and March 2014, the messaging app market — as represented by the top seven apps — expanded by 148%, adding 900 million users. While photo-sharing and Instagram also saw explosive growth at around the same time, messaging is a much wider and more international category, with many players finding success and ways to monetize their services.
Read More…(report)
Hologram Projectors: Coming Soon to a Smartphone Near You
Mashable
When Coachella’s organizers decided to have a hologram of late rapper Tupac appear onstage during the 2012 dates of the music festival, they used a high-powered projector to create the uncanny “performance.” Now, in 2014, a startup called Ostendo is taking that kind of technology and shrinking it down until it’s small enough to fit inside your iPhone.
Pay by fingerprint? Apple opens up TouchID to third parties
Mobile Money Revolution
There was never going to be an iWallet announcement. And there wasn’t. Still, Apple did give some food for thought to the m-payments community at its 25th annual. It came when the firm confirmed it is opening its TouchID system to third-party developers. The fingerprint authentication system is already used to approve iTunes and App store purchases, but has not been accessible to other apps.
Infographic: Americans Happy to Watch 15-30 Seconds of Ads for Free Mobile Video
Mobile Marketing Magazine
Americans watch an average 33 minutes of video each day, according to a report from Vdopia. This represents a huge opportunity for advertisers, as the report found that 62 per cent of smartphone owners in the US are happy to watch 15-30 seconds of ads in order to stream TV or movies for free – meaning they are more willing to watch ads than desktop (56 per cent) or connected TV (51 per cent) viewers to access video content.
Read More… (infographic)
155 million smartphones to be used for BYOD in 2014: IDC
Times of India
More and more corporates will allow their workforce to bring in personal mobile devices and grant them access to enterprise applications in the coming years to enhance business agility, research firm IDC said, estimating growth in 2014 in what is called the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) market in Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) at 40.4% on year.
In Internet.org Push, Facebook Buys Pryte, A Specialist In Selling Small Mobile Data Parcels
TechCrunch
Facebook these days is focused on adding “the next billion” users to its social network, with a focus on consumers in emerging markets and the mobile devices that many of them will use as their primary route to getting online. Today it made its latest acquisition as part of that strategy: it acquired Pryte, a small company based out of Helsinki, Finland, which has developed technology that lets app makers and carriers sell mobile data in incremental (read: very low-priced) packages based around particular app usage or other parameters.
Global News Round-up – These articles are not written by MEF and do not represent any views of individuals, members or the organisation.
