POSTED BY Morgane Kimmich
While health has always been intrinsically linked to technology, the influence of health wearables in the healthcare sector is growing exponentially. Trends are ranging from glucose monitoring, to speech therapy, seizure detection, posture aid and sleep monitoring, with heart monitoring being smartwatches’ most established health feature yet.
Our latest survey ‘Consumer Attitudes to Mobile Banking & Contactless Payments: US’ provides unique insights into consumer usage and attitudes, together with indications for the future adoption of services.
A new report published by Juniper Research on autonomous vehicles this week - Autonomous Vehicles: Adoption, Regulation & Business Models 2015-2025 - found that autonomous vehicles are likely to hit the road by 2019, with consumer adoption set to take off in 2021. The market has witnessed significant developments over the past 12-24 months with stakeholders now conducting live trials.
Earlier today, a German blogger named Carsten Knobloch discovered a game changer on his desktop, and unsurprisingly he was keen to flag it to the rest of the world. And thus the news of the game changer began to spread: Apple had gone for carrier billing.
Nearly 12 months after Apple entered the US contactless payments market with Apple Pay, Samsung has followed suite with the launch of Samsung Pay. The vendor is clearly hoping that its MST/NFC-based combination offering will appeal to a US market that is only now implementing EMV and moving from swiping the card to CHIP & PIN at the point of sale, and where terminals are only gradually deploying or activating contactless payment.
With the introduction of TV streaming devices, such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV, which were initially designed to provide consumers with TV streaming applications, we have seen the integration of app stores which have allowed users to access other services. For example, games and lifestyle applications are now accessible from the majority of TV streaming boxes. This evolution has led to such devices being added to the segment of products termed ‘microconsoles’, generally a classification given to describe low cost (sub $200), Android-based devices which play games downloaded from an app store, such as Google Play.
NFC payments in the UK have received a long-awaited fillip in the form of the launch of Apple Pay. The July 14 launch, coming some 8 months after the service made its US debut, had a few predictable hiccups – there was considerable confusion about which cards and banks were accepting the service, and which retailers – but it is likely that the scale of UK activity should exceed that in the US, at least in the short term.
POSTED BY Steffen Sorrell
6 days before launch, the anticipation for Apple Music’s launch has reached fever point amongst the tech media, with some publications pitching the smartphone behemoth as a modern-day Goliath versus Spotify’s David.
Such dramatic headlines undoubtedly draw the readers in, but in reality, when one looks at the state of the streaming music market today, things are perhaps a little different.
As the quarterly financial results from technology companies roll in, we are presented with two similar but contrasting visions of the devices market. One is of an expanding market, of an underdog recovering its strength, while the other is of record-breaking sales and exceeded expectations in some places, while trying to ignore its decline in others.