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Visa Invests $5 Billion in Stripe, mHealth Market Headed for $33.7 Billion China has more mobile gamers than America has people, Data and VAS become Vivo’s main revenue line and more global news…

Each week the MEF team curates mobile stories from around the world. Essential news you may have missed, the latest market insight & data nuggets, the Global Mobile News Round-up offers an instant international mobile content and commerce snapshot.


 Global News Stories


Visa Invests in Stripe at $5 Billion Valuation and Strikes Commercial Deal, Too

re/code

Credit card companies think they have found an ally in the increasingly competitive world of online payments. Its name is Stripe.

Visa has inked a commercial agreement with the payments startup, and has separately made an investment in the San Francisco-based company that values it at $5 billion. The commercial agreement will see the two companies work closely on initiatives around payments security and new product innovation, while the investment is part of a larger round that also includes new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as existing investors. Re/code first reported in May that Stripe was securing a new investment at a $5 billion valuation.

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mHealth Market Headed for $33.7 Billion

Mhealth Watch

According to Kalorama Information, the global mobile health market will reach $33.7 billion by the end of this year, perpetuating the massive growth of the mHealth market that has been witnessed in recent years.

The healthcare market researcher defines mHealth as the evaluation and delivery of healthcare using mobile and wireless devices.

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mobile-phone-security

With continuing breaches, mHealth should learn from past thefts

Tech Target

Visa is testing a service that will take mobile payments one step further down the road toward reaching scale through connected vehicle commerce.

At the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2015, the financial services company revealed its plans to bring mobile payments into consumer vehicles, a feature that can create an even more seamless purchasing experience for customers. Visa is likely developing the connected car payments to further its place as one of the leading payment services, the more places customers are using their services the better it is for the company.

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apple-pay-8

For US Shoppers, Mobile Payments are Increasingly on Hand

Payment Week

New technology is often, for many, greeted with skepticism. It takes the brave souls known as “early adopters” to step into the gap, try out the latest and greatest, and show the rest of us that a particular new technology isn’t nearly the scary entity it might have been. Mobile payments are no different, but as more payment methods come into the limelight, and more places accept them, the idea of mobile payments is less frightening and more functional. For United States shoppers, meanwhile, mobile payments are being turned to more regularly as a result. A recent study from Synchrony Financial—performed using almost 7,000 Synchrony Bank cardholders and shoppers in the United States as a base—revealed just how quickly United States shoppers were making the move.

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Google’s Android for Work adds Blackphone, all four major US carriers
blackphone1-e1404812236350

The Verge

Google’s mission to make Android the preferred choice for companies everywhere is picking up some fresh momentum today. Today the company announced that its Android for Work program is expanding to include a total of 40 partners. New device manufacturers have signed on, but the bigger news is probably that all four major US carriers have also entered the fold. “AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Rogers, Bell Canada, Telus Mobility and KT are now offering broad support for Android for Work, so people can soon turn to their mobile operators to take advantage of Android for Work’s integrated security, management and productivity solutions,”Google wrote in a blog post. “With its choice, flexibility and security, we believe Android is uniquely equipped to help businesses tap the full power of mobility.”

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China has more mobile gamers than America has people

Tech In Asia

Ever wonder just how widespread mobile gaming is in China? A new “China Video Game Industry Report” has the answer: it’s massive. According to the report, China had 366 million mobile gamers during the first half of 2015. That’s enough to replace the entire population of the USA andCanada, and still have a few million mobile gamers left over.

The report also counted 305 million browser gamers (enough to replace the entire population of Indonesia and Singapore with plenty left over), and 134 million PC gamers (enough to replace the entire population of Japan).

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80 per cent of Marketers Using Location Targeting for Mobile

Mobile Marketing Magazine

Location targeting has become an essential component of mobile marketing campaigns, with 80 per cent of marketers using it to reach specific audiences as part of their brand efforts.

Audience targeting is the most popular form of location targeting, according to research by global location marketplace xAd, followed by proximity targeting, where marketers attempt to reach people close to specific businesses or points of interest.

The report also revealed the importance of mobile in marketing overall, with two-thirds of marketers believing their audience is or soon will be engaged by mobile marketing, and every region expecting mobile ad spend to increase over the next year.

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dataData and VAS become Vivo’s main revenue line

Mobile Time Brazil

In the second quarter of this year for the first time, data and value added services (VAS) have become the main line of Telefonica Vivo revenue.

R $ 2.687 billion in sales, representing an annual growth of 33.5%, this area exceeded access and usage, whose quarterly revenue fell 5.7% in a year, dropping to R $ 2.686 billion. With this result, data and VAS accounted for 46.1% of revenue with mobile services in the quarter, totaling R $ 5.829 billion.

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South Africa’s mobile money adoption rates are about to explode

Memeburn

There’s an understanding by some that mobile money has no place in the developed world and only those countries that are far less advanced can this be of use. South Africa is, evidently so, a developing country as we carry the title of being the most unequal society in the world. The argument is that countries with an efficient and smooth running banking system like card payments and vast ATM spread like South Africa; mobile money will struggle to grow.

This is not true and absolutely reflecting the lack of foresight by those who are pushing this line of thinking. In America which has close to 70-million unbanked and underbanked population, mobile companies like T-Mobile have introduced mobile money services to serve the needs of this community.

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Subway Teams Up With PayPal On Mobile Payments

TechCrunch

Ordering your food or beverages by smartphone and then paying for it via an app is quickly becoming the new normal. Starbucks already allows for this across thousands of its stores in the U.S. Meanwhile, Burger King and Firehouse Subs announced integrations with MasterCard’s MasterPass digital payment solution just this week, and Taco Bell’s own mobile ordering solution is powered by Heartland, the companies also this week stated. Now you can add one more to the mix: Subway and PayPal are working together to turn on PayPal’s OneTouch mobile checkout experience in an updated Subway app that work across the chain’s 27,000 U.S. locations by the end of the year.

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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.

MEF