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
Nearly Half of All Display Ad Views from Mobile by 2019, says Forrester
Mobile Marketing Magazine
48 per cent of online display ads will be viewed on smartphones and tablets by 2019, according to Forrester predictions. That’s a major increase from today’s figure of 19 per cent, and the growth isn’t just driven by device adoption. Forrester points towards Ofcom figures showing that smartphone users in the UK spent 12 per cent more time on their devices in 2013 than in 2012.
High Consumer Preference to Use Mobile Phones for Health
mhealthwatch.com
There is a high rate of acceptability to health information received through mobile phones in the rural India, according to a new study published in PLOS One. This exploratory study was conducted in a village outside of Bangalore from March 2009 to 2010. Almost all of the respondents, 484/488 (99%), were open to receiving health information on mobile phones. Their preferred topics for health information included “healthy living, nutrition, maternal and child health, vaccination, self-care in chronic illnesses and information on infectious disease epidemics”.
Brazil Court Issues Injunction Against Secret And Calls For App To Be Remotely Wiped
TechCrunch
A court in Brazil has ruled (via UOL) that Apple and Google must remove Secret, the anonymous social networking app, from their mobile software stores – and also from user devices where it’s already installed. The court has issued a preliminary injunction in the case, pending the results of a final ruling, as a result of a complaints by users harmed by rumors spread via the app, who said that the app was used to share an “intimate photo” of him, which included personal identifying information including his full name and telephone number.
Marketer Confidence Flies High But Mobile Enthusiasm Drops
Mobile Marketing Magazine
A new report shows that confidence amongst global marketing leaders is high, with 81 per cent believing they can drive top-line growth and improvew their market share in 2014. But while 54 per cent expect to increase their general budgets, only 48 per cent will be increasing mobile spending, a considerable slump from last year.
PayPal bonds further with Braintree, putting one-touch payments in mobile apps
gigaom
Last year, Braintree began offering a new one-touch payment service to mobile app developers that let their customers check out and pay for goods or services using identity and financial credentials already stored in its Venmo wallet. The problem was Venmo is hardly a well-known consumer app, used mainly by a younger set for transfer funds between peers.
Verizon wants a global, carrier-friendly Android app store (update: not now)
Engadget
You may think that the Play Store is a fine place to get Android apps, but Verizon apparently isn’t very happy with Google’s dominance — it wants carriers to have some control. Sources for The Information claim that Verizon is in early talks with both other providers and hardware makers to create a global Android store that lets developers make full use of the “specific features” of a given network. Developers would be encouraged to hop aboard by getting the freedom to advertise, and there would be dynamic app recommendations that not only suggest downloads based on where you are (like iOS), but also the time of day and friend activity. Think of it as an adaptive interface for apps you don’t own yet.
One in three smartphone owners uninterested in apps
Telegraph
Smartphone owners’ appetite for new apps is waning, with the average number of apps downloaded per user per month declining considerably over the past year. Almost one in three (31 per cent) of smartphone users in the UK do not download any apps on their device in a typical month, according to a report by Deloitte – a steep increase from less than one in five in 2013. Of those that do, the average number of apps downloaded per month has fallen from 2.32 to 1.82.
11 facts about the mobile entertainment market that’ll surprise you
Mobile Entertainment
Who could resist consuming as much entertainment as humanly possible when a whole media library is in our pocket? 22.8 million people in the UK certainly couldn’t. This is something that keeps being revisited – the number of people who use their smartphone as one of their main sources of entertainment – but that’s because the number of people who do so keeps growing. Who would have thought that – in some cases – we would eventually prefer watching content on our smaller screened smartphone than on a TV. Pfft – TV? What is this, the dark ages?? The mobile video ad company, Vdopia, has pieced together the Mobile Entertainment Report 2014.
Global News Round-up – These articles are not written by MEF and do not represent any views of individuals, members or the organisation.
