Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 24th November

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 More than half of UK consumers have used digital wallets to pay for online goods The Drum More than half of UK consumers (54 per cent) often or always use digital wallets to pay for goods online, research from Skrill has found. The research of 2,000 UK adults found that more than one in ten 18-24 year …

Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 11th August 2014

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 Amazon Launches Local Register, A Square Competitor With Lower Transaction Rates TechCrunch Amazon has launched a Square and PayPal Here competitor called Local Register, which provides users with a free app and a $10 card reader, and charges merchants and anyone selling services who use it just 1.75 percent per swipe on both credit …

Industry Views: Amazon Fire – a shop with a smartphone or a smartphone with a shop?

Last week Amazon launched its first smartphone - the Amazon Fire. What's interesting is how the company has bundled free Amazon Prime as part of the phone package, signalling its intent to take more ownership of the m-commerce and streaming media space by guaranteeing free and speedy fulfillment of mobile purchases, free ebooks and access to a large library of films and TV shows. It's a bold move and shows how, by creating its own mobile ecosystem, customer value can be derived from the mobile service and user experience level rather than differences in the device OS. Here we've asked MEF …

The Next Mobile Frontier: Global Vs Local Brands [Infographic]

Amazon is rumoured to be planning extensions to its existing mobile content offering that could include a music streaming service and even a dedicated Amazon smartphone. However, the global online retailer is losing ground to its 'Big 3’ key competitors Apple, Google and Microsoft in emerging markets, according to research from mobile marketing expert and MEF member Upstream. The latest installment in the ‘The Next Mobile Frontier’ report shows that over half of those surveyed (52%) said that Apple is the brand that they currently spend money or would like to spend more on in the future. …

Has the iPad peaked? Industry Views

Apple’s recently announced Q2 2014 earnings broke all previous company records with growth across all product lines in all markets – all apart from the iPad. The company sold 16.4 million units in the quarter – a 16% drop from 19.5m units in the same quarter 2013. The problem? Customers will balk at paying more for a product that’s not too dissimilar from a cheaper, rival machine, regardless of that product’s reputation. Tesco in the UK for example has just announced that it will soon be releasing its Hudl 2 budget tablet that will come pre-loaded with Tesco apps and services like its …

Distimo report highlights growth of in-app billing

Distimo, the leading mobile app analytics company, has today released its reports examining the movers and shakers for the year in each of the major mobile app stores across several territories. The reports contain a huge amount of data from the whole year covering Apple's App stores for the iPhone and iPad, Android marketplace, BlackBerry's App World, Windows Phone Marketplace, Nokia Ovi Store, and the Amazon Appstore. The key findings from the reports are:1. In all appstores the proportion of free applications surged significantly over the past year. In most appstores the average price of …

Amazon Kindles Fire under tablet market

This week, Amazon unveiled their first foray into the tablet market with their new full colour, 7 inch Kindle Fire. The launch immediately ignited debate as to whether the Fire constituted a credible threat to Apple’s dominance in the market, primarily because of the pocket friendly $199 price tag, a fraction of the iPad’s which starts at an eye-watering-by-comparison $499. And while the debate rages on, the general consensus thus far seems to be; Apple needn't lose too much sleep, but everyone else should sit up and take note. Running a modified Android OS, the Fire will be able to access …