Industry Views

Last week’s ransomware attacks were aimed at vulnerabilities typical of big enterprises and government bodies, but the true impact was felt by consumers – cancelled trains in Germany, people forced to pay cash for petrol in China, missed hospital appointments in the UK, the list goes on, with poor user experience and damaging trust the result.

While the WannaCry attack was upon a very specific desktop vulnerability, the possibility of similar attacks on other operating systems, the media coverage and the effect on consumer’s perception of digital safety are lessons to be learnt. We asked what can mobile tech industries can do to better prepare for similar attacks and protect consumers…

Another Mobile World Congress is over. There was more of everything this year. More visitors (108,000 up 7% on 2016), more exhibitors, more keynotes and more announcements made. It can get very noisy.

But in amongst the noise the important technology trends emerged, trends that will shape the mobile ecosystem going forward.

2016 was an eventful year for technology innovation across the board. And whilst new models have come to the fore the global base of mobile users continues to grow, confirming mobile’s central role in how businesses innovate and monetise their services.

Everything has been fair game, from the collection and responsible use of user data through to new ways for consumers to perform everyday tasks like talking to their bank, ordering and buying a coffee or transferring money to a friend.

But how will the mobile ecosystem change in 2017? And what are the areas of the ecosystem that are ripe for disruption or collaboration? We asked MEF members to provide us with their thoughts on the big trends for 2017…

Fuelled by the growth in personal mobile connections, M2M, mobile apps and services data traffic is expected to see an almost ten-fold increase by 2019.

All of that connected activity means that businesses are swimming in mobile user data, a trend that is only set to continue as we move steadily toward a hyperconnected world of ubiquitous computing.

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report, released last week came to some interesting conclusions about the growth of chat apps like WeChat, WhatsApp and Messenger and their evolution from simple text to a tool for vivid self expression, and portal for commerce, mobile payments and brand interaction.

In China for example, 31 per cent of WeChat users use the app’s baked-in wallet making an estimated 50 plus digital cash transactions per month for things like online shopping, in-store payments and P2P transfers.