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Category: Mobile

Apple Stock: A New Era of Mobile Saturation

There are many positives to Apple’s story, with a wearables business up over 50%, cloud services up 40%, and Apple News readership at 85 million active monthly users. Apple Music is also now the number one streaming service in the United States over Spotify. Most importantly, Apple has a media announcement planned for March 25th, which will add to the growing services revenue. Investors should exercise caution, however, as the broader mobile market is slowing down and is nearing saturation.

“Algorithms are not biased; data is biased” – MWC 2019

AI may seem like an auxiliary technology to how we live our daily lives today, however, it will soon be the primary driver across the tech industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the world economy will reach an additional 15.7 trillion in value by 2030 due to artificial intelligence. To put this into perspective, the top 5 technology companies today have a combined value of about $4 trillion, which includes Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Over the next decade, AI will drive a market 5x the size of tech’s current global spend. Although this growth is exciting on many levels, the panelists at MWC 2019 voiced concerns about the handling of inherent biases that comes from data, as clearly discrimination by age, race, gender, education or other factors within audience segmentation is counterproductive to the advancement of society that AI promises.

MWC 2019: A Dose of Reality on 5G, Those Foldable Phones and Bitcoin Has a Serious Competitor

The financing firm Greensill puts the total cost for 5G at $2.7 trillion through the end of 2020. The issue is that it’ll take a few years to see any returns, which will put networks in the red until applications catch up. This, of course, is the fine print to 5G that the lights, camera and action of the booths at MWC didn’t portray. In fact, there was a panel where Mike Fries, the CEO of Liberty Global, pointed out that carriers in Europe have not recouped costs on 4G yet. “You’ve had 10 straight years of declining mobile revenues in Europe with the biggest issue being price,’ he said.

Can Programmatic Ads Save Spotify?

Summary: According to Q3 earnings calls, Spotify may seek to broker user data in order to keep average revenue per user afloat. Known as programmatic advertising, this method of monetizing data to supplement music revenue may be Spotify’s only hope to stave off competitors who nip at the heels of the music-streaming app Portions of this article were originally published September 27th, 2018 under 8 Reasons Spotify will be a Sell Recommendation by 2019 at $184 per share. This analysis has been updated to include the recent partnership with Google and programmatic offering Ad Studio. Half Full or Half Empty? -6%…

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly About Google’s $5 Billion Antitrust Fine

To summarize, the $5 Billion Antitrust Fine on Google is due to the following issues: Google has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google’s app store (the Play Store); Google made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-installed the Google Search app on their devices; and Google has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called “Android forks”)  source: European Commission…

Measuring Mobile Ad Performance: Why We Need to Borrow a Metric from TV

This article originally appeared in VentureBeat. By all accounts, mobile advertising is the wave of the future. Mobile ad spend is projected to increase 430 percent between 2013 to 2016, when it’s expected to surpass $100 billion worldwide, according to eMarketer. By 2019, overall ad spend will go on to surge to an estimated $200 billion. This is record-breaking growth, and it’s no wonder we are seeing this level of investment considering we’ve seen mobile usage recently exceed desktop. It’s exciting to be in mobile today. You couldn’t ask for more users, more eyeballs. Yet  there are still a few unanswered issues.…

New Trends in On-the-Go Entertainment for Flights and Cars

Smartphones have popularized the concept of on-the-go entertainment with users now spending over five hours per day on their mobile device. This steady demand is great for businesses as long as this usage has reliable 3G or 4G broadband, or WiFi access. Data efficiency decreases the farther one travels from metropolitan areas, whether that be by plane or automobile, whereas the demand for entertainment is constant. In-flight entertainment systems and broadband are popular with 70 percent of survey respondents citing they would be willing to pay 7 USD for connectivity[1]. Total revenue from these passenger connectivity services will reach $5.4 billion by…

5 Ways Hackers Attack Mobile Devices and Applications

Hackers go about achieving their goals with reverse engineering software to find vulnerabilities they can exploit, data they can extract, or ways to modify the software to do something it was never intended to do. The primary consequences of applications getting hacked include financial loss, destroyed brand reputation, exposure to liability, and regulatory risk. Over 7 billion identities have been stolen in data breaches over the last eight years equal to one data breach for every person on the planet.   Why do Hackers Attack Mobile Devices and Applications? In order to understand threats, we must understand what hackers are trying…

How Mobile Devices and Cloud Computing Changed Security

Prior to the advent of mobile computing, security was limited to corporate IT assets that were often physically secured in facilities owned and managed by the company. According to a recent SANS Institute study, organizations spend as much as 12 percent of their IT budget on security. In a Ponemon Institute study, it was found that organizations have a 27.7 percent probability of having a material data breach in the next 24 months at an average cost of $3.62M. Meanwhile, the world of computing has changed. Security is not just about physically secure data centers and corporate controlled computing assets. Instead,…

Are FinTech Solutions Safe on Mobile?

We live in a digital world where almost everything we touch is being stored on servers, the cloud or in mobile applications. Technologists push for the adoption of digital services and applications while consumers push back for safety and fraud protection. Fintech solutions on mobile are in a predicament; on one-hand these solutions offer the premium convenience of making deposits and transfers on-the-go, and the on the other hand, it digitizes and potentially sells off a person’s most valuable possession: their wallet. Banks and financial institutions have quite a bit to gain – especially on a global level. Although still…

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