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
Gartner Says by 2016, 25 Percent of the Top 50 Global Banks Will have Launched a Banking App Store for Customers
Gartner
The explosive growth of apps is causing significant challenges for the banking industry, according to Gartner, Inc. Banking CIOs, CMOs and line of business (LOB) heads face two key challenges. The first is that the visibility of customer banking apps in public stores is decreasing due to the total number of apps available; the second is that visibility of apps on bank websites is decreasing as the number of apps a bank deploys increases. Read More…
Mozilla to Bring Low-Cost Firefox Smartphones to India and Indonesia
Mashable
Earlier this year, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we told you about Mozilla’s plans to bring smartphones into even the poorest regions by introducing a $25 dollar device. Now the organization has launched a major new effort in that plan by announcing plans to bring its low-cost smartphone to India in the next few months. “The platform will give us an edge in upgrading buyers from feature phones to smartphones while making it affordable for the mass market,” said Sanjay Kumar Kalirona, of India mobile firm Intex Technologies, in a statement accompanying Mozilla’s announcement. “This will propel our devices to be much more than a way to use the Web, but take the engagement further and develop the Web as a mobile platform.” Read More…
TV’s still the top device for following the World Cup, number two could surprise you
Memeburn
When it comes to following the FIFA World Cup, it stands to reason that the number one device around the globe would be television. After all, the 2010 World Cup had an estimated TV audience of around 3.2-billion. That’s only expected to grow larger this year and few other forms of technology have the reach or appeal of TV when it comes to sporting events. What’s interesting though is that you’re probably carrying the second most popular device for following the tournament in your pocket right now. According to new research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), conducted by On Device Research around half of smartphone owners around the globe plan on following FIFA’s showcase tournament on their smartphones.
Mobile-Enabled Commerce Will Yield The Next $100B Startup
TechCrunch
No one can predict with perfect accuracy what technology trend will birth the next set of billion-dollar, venture-backed companies or “unicorns.” Even more difficult is determining where the next $100B+ “super unicorn” will come from, as history tells us this rare breed of company only emerges once or twice in a decade. Yet given that the last three U.S. super unicorns have all been consumer technology companies (Facebook, Google, and Amazon), and given that venture investment in consumer technology companies is increasingly dominated by mobile-first startups, it is reasonable to expect that smartphones will be the technology that unlocks the next $100B+ outcome. Read More…
Almost a third of Twitch viewers watch game streams from their phones
Polygon
The developers behind popular game streaming service Twitch are turning their focus toward mobile users this year after successfully becoming one of the primary hubs for professional eSports events, VP of marketing and communications Matt DiPietro told Polygon. DiPietro confirmed to us that 30 percent of Twitch viewers are watching streams from their mobile devices and the company aims to reach feature parity across iOS, Android, Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One systems. “eSports is a very big piece of this company and it’s one thing that catapulted video streaming into the place we are now at today,”
One in Five Mobile Apps Is Only Opened Once, Though That’s Actually an Improvement
Re/code
A new study finds that one in five mobile apps are only used once — yet that still may be good news for app makers. That statistic is actually slightly better than four years ago, when a quarter of apps were only run a single time, according to Localytics, which compiled the data. Read More…
Weibo CEO: 70 percent of daily active users are on mobile 
Tech in Asia
Yesterday at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei revealed that 70 percent of the company’s daily active users access its service on a mobile device, reports Mobile World Live. That statistic ought to not come as a shocker when one considers that mobile devices tend to get more attention from their owners than PCs these days. But it’s one worth making mental note of as the company continues to evolve beyond from its legacy as a desktop-first social network. Pundits once accused Facebook, another desktop-first social network, of having a “mobile problem” before it revealed in late 2013 that its mobile ad revenue went from almost zero to US$656 million – about 40 percent of its total revenues – in the course of one year. Read More…
World Cup to drive mobile video usage worldwide
Fierce Mobile
Apple’s iOS 8 Delivers Credit-Card Scanning, Better Mobile Privacy
Mashable
Apple’s reveal of iOS 8 at WWDC last week delivered a number of surprises, but users are still discovering more features, including a new credit-card-scanning option in Safari. The feature enables you to use the iPhone’s camera to scan your credit-card number when prompted by a website during ecommerce transactions. When presented with a credit-card field in the iOS 8 version of Safari, you’ll see a “Scan Credit Card” prompt, a new part of the Passwords and AutoFill option already available in iOS 7, which allows you to store credit-card details for future online purchases. Read More…
Global News Round-up – These articles are not written by MEF and do not represent any views of individuals, members or the organisation.
