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Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. Stories this week include… Adtech joint venture by European telcos DK, Orange, Telefonica, Vodafone not a competition concern, finds EU,  BT boosts UK IoT play with national roaming,  What the Pivot to Privacy has Meant for Mobile and much more…

Adtech joint venture by European telcos DK, Orange, Telefonica, Vodafone not a competition concern, finds EU

TechCrunch

A joint venture (JV) between four big European carriers to build cross-network ad-targeting infrastructure — which they claim will rely on “affirmative” consent to target mobile and/or fixed network subscribers with “personalized” ads across participating brands/publishers’ sites — has been given the green light to proceed by the European Commission’s antitrust division in a decision announced Friday.

The Commission concluded the transaction between the carriers to create a JV would raise no competition concerns.

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BT boosts UK IoT play with national roaming

Mobile World Live

BT launched an IoT SIM service supporting national roaming on rival networks in its home market, citing benefits for companies requiring reliable connectivity in remote areas.

The IoT National Roaming SIMs will primarily connect to its EE network, but will be able to use networks provided by rivals as a back-up, ensuring devices can stay online.

BT highlighted this improved connectivity for enterprises will support industries including transportation and logistics, providing drivers and couriers operating in hard-to-reach locations “with access to important information in real-time”.

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What the Pivot to Privacy has Meant for Mobile

Exchange Wire

If the ad tech industry was to have a word of the year, then it’s fair to say that ‘privacy’ would feature in at least the top ten since 2016 (if not before). GDPR and subsequent privacy-focused legislation have sent all industry participants on quests to find and/or develop new ways to target effectively without falling foul of regulators.

The push to respect people’s privacy is a welcome one from consumers; but how has it impacted the devices that paint the most intimate portraits of our lives? Here, we look into how the pivot to privacy has impacted mobile advertising on the two largest operating systems – Apple’s iOs and Google’s AndroidOS.

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How Mobile Gaming Has Inspired the iGaming Industry to Do Better

Esports News

Video games have seen quite the rise in popularity, especially now that you can play from your smartphones and do so on the go. Whether you are after options such as Roulette77 or playing some cool game such as Mobile Legends or Teamfight Tactics, there is a lot of overlap between different games for mobile these days. Whether you want to play live roulette in Australia or just duke it out in PlayerUnknown’s Mobile, there are options for you all the same.

For example, you might be thinking that casino games on mobile are nothing like the most popular mobile games. Well, some are. It shows how two different gaming industries have influenced each other and are coexisting alongside each other. Here are some ways that mobile gaming has had an impact on the iGaming industry (aka the online gambling industry).

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Mobile Advertising AR Use is Set to Outpace Traditional Advertising Methods. How Are Retailers Making the Most of It?

Market Scale

Pokémon Go, which was all the rage back in 2016, may have simmered down, but the concept behind it—augmented reality (AR)—is heating up and becoming a more accessible tool for industries to deploy in service of the experience economy. This is especially true for retailers and retail marketing strategies. Mobile advertising AR is predicted to surpass smartphone QR use over the next three years, with projections that there will be about 100 million QR code users and about 110 million AR users by 2025, according to Insider Intelligence. A variety of AR trends will be cropping up in mobile marketing this year. Which ones could prove most useful for retailers?

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Microsoft Considers More Limits for Its New A.I. Chatbot

NYT

When Microsoft introduced a new version of its Bing search engine that includes the artificial intelligence of a chatbot last week, company executives knew they were climbing out on a limb.

They expected that some responses from the new chatbot might not be entirely accurate, and had built in measures to protect against users who tried to push it to do strange things or unleash racist or harmful screeds.

But Microsoft was not quite ready for the surprising creepiness experienced by users who tried to engage the chatbot in open-ended and probing personal conversations — even though that issue is well known in the small world of researchers who specialize in artificial intelligence.

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Maryland’s mobile sports betting is gaining traction as gambling industry revenue booms

CBS Baltimore

Commercial casinos in the United States won more than $60 billion from gamblers in 2022, the best year in the industry’s history.

Figures released Wednesday by the American Gaming Association, the gambling industry’s national trade group, show that in-person gambling remains the bread-and-butter of the industry, accounting for more than 80% of its revenue. Online betting provided nearly a fifth of the industry’s revenue.

The figures do not include tribal casinos, which report their revenue separately. But David Forman, a vice president with the association, estimated that tribal casinos could report an additional $41 billion in revenue later this year, putting the total U.S. casino industry over the $100 billion mark. That would put the gambling revenue roughly equal with the amount of money raised from beer sales in the U.S., he said.

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Nokia: Mobile data usage in India tripled over the last five years

Light Reading

NEW DELHI – Nokia today announced in its annual Mobile Broadband Index (MBiT) report that mobile data traffic in India has risen 3.2 times over the last five years. The report also revealed that pan-India mobile data usage per month grew from 4.5 exabytes in 2018 to 14.4 exabytes in 2022.

Nokia’s report includes many key takeaways about the evolution of the Indian mobile market, including data on mobile data consumption and growth, the ongoing transition from 4G to 5G as well as the prospects for enterprise adoption of 5G with private networks.

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Mobile Banking Rises By 230% In January

Economic Confidential

Nigeria’s mobile banking usage surged by 230.72 per cent year-on-year in January 2023 according to data from Nigeria Interbank Settlement System, despite multiple reported failures.

The leap in the use of banking apps and mobile gateways is traceable to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s decision to redesign the naira and the introduction of a new withdrawal limit policy, which made bank customers embrace mobile banking for their transactions.

In January 2023, mobile gateways were used 108.14 million times, a 230.72 per cent increase from the 32.69 million times they were used in the corresponding period last year.

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MEF