News Roundup

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Mobile becomes main banking channel in Brazil, do India’s proposed data protection measures do enough to protect privacy, Jack Ma points to Africa as the next great tech frontier and much more…

The mobile channel has surpassed Internet banking for the first time in Brazil, according to statistics from the Brazilian Central Bank. Some 24,5 billion banking transactions were carried out via smartphones and tablets in 2017, up 46,7 percent when compared to the 16,7 billion transactions in the prior year, according to the statistics on retail and card payments in Brazil.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Number of mobile calls drops for first time in UK , Apple to stop money from affiliate app sales, Nokia to provide T-Mobile with 5G infrastructure, and will Canada become the next country to offer mobile passports? Plus more news from across the ecosystem.

The number of voice calls made on mobile phones in the UK fell for the first time ever in 2017 – despite the fact we seem hooked on our devices. That is according to the latest report from telecoms regulator Ofcom, which charts what it describes as a decade of digital dependence.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Facebook under fresh political pressure as UK watchdog, Zimbabwe’s first election without Mugabe turns into a data privacy minefield, HTC develops ‘blockchain phone’, and much more…

The UK’s privacy watchdog revealed yesterday that it intends to fine Facebook the maximum possible (£500k) under the country’s 1998 data protection regime for breaches related to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Mobile ad blocking becoming a bigger threat, the future of AI and ethics, Instagram launches new mobile video app, Tencent and Alibaba’s mobile payment war.. and much more…

Use of ad-blocking software has largely been a desktop issue, and while still costly, ad blocking has leveled off as publishers have asked or required visitors to disable their ad blockers in order to see content. On mobile, though, mobile ad blocking is creeping up.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world.

This week.. AT&T completes its acquisition of Time Warner, the ‘world’s first cryptocurrency mobile phone network’ goes live, 3 Ways advertisers can use mobile to reach consumers during the World Cup and much more.

AT&T has sealed the deal to buy Time Warner in a major piece of media and technology consolidation. The deal — which is $85.4 billion and a total of $108 billion with debt — was first announced in October 2016 and, having passed a court approval earlier this week, it was completed on Thursday.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Facebook denies mobile data sharing broke privacy pledges, mobile gambling’s influence on mobile banking, Apple introduces iOS 12, automated shops spread in China as mobile payments take off and much more…

Facebook has said it disagrees with claims by the New York Times that it breached privacy pledges made to the public and to US regulators when it shared information with mobile device makers. The paper reported that Facebook shared users’ personal information with at least 60 smartphone firms, allowing them to access users’ friends’ data without obtaining explicit consent.

This week.. questions about Google’s move to mobile-first indexing, Facebook competitor calls out platform in full-page ad over privacy, bringing transparency to location data post-GDPR and much more.

Google’s move to mobile-first indexing is under way, but there’s still a lack of clarity in a number of areas. Remember that with mobile-first, Google’s going to be primarily crawling and indexing the mobile version of your website, and using that to determine rankings. This is an idea that Google first mooted in 2016 but has only recently started cautiously rolling out, with plenty of testing to make sure things run smoothly. Here are some of the issues that people are still asking questions about.

Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. This week.. Instagram quietly launches payments for commerce, Telegram Cancels Public ICO, mobile ad spend in India to rise by 75% in 2018, mobile data usage overtakes Wi-Fi and much more…

Get ready to shop the ‘Gram. Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit card as part of a profile, set up a security pin, then start buying things without ever leaving Instagram. Not having to leave for a separate website and enter payment information any time you want to purchase something could make Instagram a much bigger player in commerce.