Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 25th May

Android Pay unveiled plus all the news from Google I/O, Swatch to Launch Smartwatch with payments, 5 things we got totally wrong about FinTech, OTT threat to India voice revenues and more... 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 Android Pay is all about tokenisation, (mostly) replaces Google Wallet arstechnica On Thursday, Google officially …

Global Mobile News Round-up

Apple music streaming service launch, Spotify & Starbucks team up and mobile ad-blocking woes - plus all the weekly mobile news from around the world... 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 Apple is planning a major international launch for its new music streaming service Business Insider Apple is planning an early launch in Russia for …

Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 27th April

12 ways mobile money can go further, Mobile ads in Mexico and on Spotify, the Apple Watch Verdict, end of the road for Secret, Google's mobile friendly algorithm and more... 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 12 ways mobile money can go further Guardian Establish trust: M-Pesa won the trust of the people when they came to Kenya as a brand …

Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 13th April

EU and Google antitrust, China leads on iOS downloads, 6% in the US plan to buy an Apple Watch and more... 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 EU Accuses Google Of Antitrust Violations; Starts Android Probe Bloomberg The European Union escalated its four-year-old probe into Google Inc., accusing the Internet giant of abusing its dominance of …

How can brands take advantage of the Apple Watch? its time to get even closer to customers

Less than six years ago mobile apps were in their infancy and many industry observers wondered whether they’d really catch on. Fast-forward to today and 87% of the time consumers spend using mobile devices is inside apps.  Its how we interact with those apps and on which non-smartphone devices that are the new battleground for device manufacturers.  This week's announcement on the commercial launch date and price points of Apple Watch finally revealed what Tim Cook has been hiding up his sleeve, adding significant firepower to the Apple armoury. Here Brett Caine, CEO, Urban Airship …

‘Wearables’ Need To Be ‘Invisibles’ – Divorcing Tech From Fashion

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is featuring a lot of "wearables" reports Techcrunch (which all seem to be smart watches).  Here, former Financial Times journalist and publisher of influential technology blog, Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski gives us his take on the direction of this nascent market. (This article first appeared on Silicon Valley Watcher and is published here with Tom's permission) All the fuss over Apple Watch will certainly help sell a lot of watches - regular and smart. I recently started wearing a normal watch. I like the watch, not because I can look …

Industry Views: Is even digital music ownership a thing of the past?

A recent report that surfaced in the Wall Street Journal indicates that Apple’s iTunes (the world’s largest record shop) is encountering a downturn in music & entertainment sales with a 13 – 14% decline from the start of this year. The irony is that this is probably because of a problem that Apple is in part responsible for creating: the ubiquity of smartphones and apps that let us stream music anywhere we are, from an almost limitless music library. In short we are moving away from digital forms of music and entertainment ownership, and replacing it with the subscription model. We …

Apple’s focus on security could be the holy grail of NFC

MEF members and industry experts have all weighed in on the potential of Apple's new payment system, unveiled last month in San Francisco, and most agree that the platform with some of the biggest names in finance behind it, could be a game changer. Here, MEF Chairman Andrew Bud expands on his initial reaction, and explains what makes Apple Pay different and how the company is meeting issues around privacy and security that have curtailed NFC uptake so far. The announcement at Apple’s big event that it is launching an iPhone that is NFC enabled and Apple Pay as its go-to-market payment …

Can the Apple Watch wind up the wearables market?

The Apple Watch  marks the first new product from Apple under CEO Tim Cook and as Apple's track record for re-energising established markets shows, could be the product to make wearable technology commonplace. Below, MEF Chairman Andrew Bud discusses the implications it may pose for the industry, and the hurdles Apple will need to overcome to succeed. Apple’s eagerly anticipated entry in to the wearable technology market has come in the form of its Apple Watch which combines various classic mobile functions like music and messaging with health and fitness monitoring.  It tracks the …

Industry Views: Can Apple Pay finally make mobile payments mainstream?

The announcement that the new iPhones and Apple Watch feature the NFC powered Apple Pay under the hood has been in the making for some time. With some heavy-hitting partnerships revealed, this of course gets Apple in to the mobile payments space in a big way, both in store and online. Apple Pay sits neatly alongside the Passbook which groups loyalty cards with coupons and other retail items in a digital wallet. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how Apple is working hard to differentiate itself from other payment services around consumer privacy. Unlike Google Wallet for example, …