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Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 7th July 2014

By July 11, 2014News Roundup

Global_News_MEF 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

Mobile Banking Users To Exceed 1.75bn by 2019

MMM

Mobile banking will reach over 1.75bn users by the end of 2019, representing 32 per cent of the global adult population, according to new predictions.

Research by analyst firm Juniper Research shows that mobile banking has already been utilised by 800 million users, and growth is being driven by exceptional customer demand.

The report notes that mobile banking technology is already available in most regions of the world, and while demand is highest in the US and European regions, there is also significant growth in China, India, Bangladesh and a wealth of emergent markets where traditional physical banks are less reachable and mobile use outstrips desktop use.

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Email drives 27pc of sales on mobile, social just 0.6pc: report

Mobile Commerce Daily

Email marketing is playing a much bigger role in driving sales on mobile phones than social media, according to a new report from Custora.

Per the report, email drove 27 percent of sales on mobile phones compared to only 21 percent on desktop and 23 percent on tablets. At the same time, social media accounted for only 0.6 percent of sales on phones and 0.2 percent on tablets.

“This is a surprising data point considering the challenges of displaying email correctly on mobile devices, and deep-linking into mobile apps,” said Corey Pierson, CEO of Custora.

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Apple adds a step-counter, caffeine tracking to iPhones with iOS 8

Gigaom

Apple’s iOS 8 Health app can track dozens of health stats through other apps and devices, providing a full picture of your well-being. Now, it can track two more things and one of them can be measured by the iPhone itself. AppleInsider installed the latest beta version of iOS 8, which was made available on Monday, and found two new functions for Health. First is a step counter card that works directly with the M7 co-processor inside the iPhone 5s — and presumably the next iPhones as well. Second is a new caffeine intake card. Since the M7 chip can’t track that, you’ll likely have to manually enter your caffeine data or use a third-party app such as Jawbone’s UP Coffee.

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In Five Years, iBeacon/Bluetooth Low Energy Device Market To Reach 60 Million Devices

TechCrunch

We’ve been hearing a lot about iBeacon and Bluetooth Low Energy-powered devices in the retail sector, where stores are beginning to roll out support for beacons in order to better communicate with customers via apps, allowing them to share offers, send alerts, and advertise to consumers. But according to a new report from ABI Research, retail is – surprisingly – not the largest market for this newer technology. In fact, it’s the smallest.

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Smartphones changed the way people shop, but they won’t kill local commerce (study)

VentureBeat

A new study suggests that the explosive adoption of mobile devices will help, not hurt brick and mortar shops – challenging the fear that ecommerce firms like Amazon are a death knell to local commerce. Commissioned by G/O Digital, a marketing firm owned by the Gannett media empire, the study recorded the shopping preferences of 13,000 smartphone and tablet-wielding adults (who use the firm’s Key Ring app) and found that smartphones pose no threat to brick and mortar businesses. Instead, G/O Digital claims, smartphone owners increasingly use their devices to hunt for coupons, and more often than not, these mobile-coupon-hunters choose to buy their discounted products in-store — not online.

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Brits do £1bn worth of mobile/web banking every day

Mobile Money Revolution

The inevitable migration of banking from the high street to the hand is unstoppable, say new stats from the British Banking Association. The BBA’s Way We Bank Now report reckons mobile and internet banking is now being used for transactions worth nearly £1 billion every 24 hours. It also says more than 15,000 people downloading banking apps a day.

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South Africa’s cashless future relies on localisation, not innovation

Memeburn

South Africa’s perceived ‘failure to launch’ in respect to mobile money needs to be put into a global context. In the latest MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index, only four countries – Singapore, Canada, the US and Kenya – score higher than 40 out of a possible 100. The inflection point, according to the report, sits at 60, highlighting the fact that in most cases mobile payments has been a solution looking for a problem.

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Gartner: Device Shipments Break 2.4B Units In 2014, Tablets To Overtake PC Sales In 2015

TechCrunch

The gradual decline of the PC industry, spurred on by the rapid rise of mobile computing, continues apace. Today the analysts at Gartner have published their latest forecasts for global PC, tablet, “ultramobile” and mobile phone shipments: they are set to break 2.4 billion units, and nearly 88 percent of that number will be attributable to mobile phones and tablets — specifically devices built on Google’s Android operating system, which on their own will account for nearly 1.2 billion devices.

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CHART OF THE DAY: iOS Continues To Dominate Android In Web Traffic

Business Insider 

As has been the case for the last few years, Apple’s mobile operating system has remained dominant in the U.S., successfully fending off Android, Windows 8, and others in terms of market share of mobile web traffic.

According to the latest data from Quantcast and Wall Street firm Piper Jaffray — charted for us by Statista — iOS is still responsible for the lion’s share of mobile web traffic, accounting for 60%. Android, meanwhile, has increased its web traffic market share from a year ago from 29% to 33%, but it still has a long way to go before it can catch up to Apple.

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Global News Round-up – These articles are not written by MEF and do not represent any views of individuals, members or the organisation.


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