We are inundated by the latest hype: Everyday, someone is launching a new wearable. The Apple Watch sold out in its initial offering and of course, exceeded all expectations once again. Not to be outdone, Google is upgrading its own OS to create a better smartwatch that will rival the Apple Watch. In the automotive world, we are peppered by news stories about the “connected car” to the “fully autonomous self-driving car.” That notwithstanding, we already enjoy many driving autonomous features such as adaptive cruise control, lane detection, and preventative braking. Already, Tesla is launching the first elements of its much anticipated “autopilot.” Delphi recently completed a cross-country run of its self-driving technology and of course, Google thinks they can have an autonomous driving vehicle ready for the market in 5 years.
Author: William Dudley
April 24th, 2015 ushers in a new era of the Apple Watch. As many others did, I watched with anticipation, the March 9th Spring-forward Apple announcement that included information about the Apple Watch. Apart from the availability and pricing, little new information was provided that we really didn’t already know. As I review a large number of tweets, opinions, and articles, the first results indicate a very mixed set of views (from extremely positive to extremely negative [“the iFlop”]).
Here we go once again: another 2015 prediction article. This is my 8th annual predictions blog posting and I can say it never has been more difficult to prognosticate on where this industry is headed. Mobile in the context of an operating environment has never been more important to consumers and businesses, worldwide. Today, if a business or enterprise does not include mobile engagement as a priority, then I believe they are behind before they even begin.
Over the past couple of years, people have asked me both publicly and privately if I thought SMS was dying or is a non-viable communications channel. My answer has always been emphatically that SMS is and will continue to be a viable choice for text-based communications – both for enterprises and brands as well as person-to-person (P2P).
Unless you’ve been completely sequestered away from technology news as well as mainstream news, you probably have heard of the new Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus as well as Apple’s new Point-of-Sale (PoS) ecosystem called Apple Pay. Apple Pay became available on October 20th, coinciding with the release of iOS 8.1. Apple Pay only works on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It will be compatible with Apple Watch when that rolls out in early 2015
The Apple iPhone 6 event on September 9th 2014 was one of the most anticipated Apple events in quite some time. While Apple fans all relish the new screen sizes and features such as Apple Pay (review my previous blog about a global Apple payment system that I published a few weeks prior to the announcement) and Apple Watch, once again, the mainstream media has all but ignored Apple’s full commitment to LTE and indirectly, LTE roaming.
Apple is now rumored to be holding their next iPhone event on September 9th, 2014 in what is becoming one of the most anticipated events in the mobile industry. While Apple rarely, if ever, foretells what will be coming, it is various players in the mobile industry (myself included) that forever speculate as to what this feature or that will mean when Apple finally announces it. Whether the event is for iPad or iPhone, I would say that these are some of the most watched live-blogs (each of us have our favorites). I guess I am joining this speculation din with this blog posting!
Over the last few weeks, the world remained riveted to the various games of the World Cup 2014. Some were early disappointments such as Spain; however, many were surprised just how far their own country made it into the final tournament. Social media and mobile engagement were also big winners in the 2014 World Cup. These channels are immensely popular today and will continue to grow in influence as they are now part of most people’s daily lives. Both Facebook and Twitter had set usage records during the World Cup final. In fact, the Wall Street Journal article noted that Twitter beat its own record of 580,166 Tweets per minute during Germany’s defeat of Brazil in the semi-final by reaching 618,725 tweets per minute during the Argentina – Germany final.
Over the last 4 to 5 years, the world has witnessed a meteoric rise of a variety of Over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps – both for consumers and enterprises. Today, there are a dizzying variety of texting choices — most of them operating as “islands” (albeit some are exceedingly large – WhatsApp with over 500 million monthly active users [MAUs] is a prime example); however, in some markets such as the United States and Canada, SMS-interoperable OTT messaging solutions have garnered the majority share of OTT messaging apps (we call these SMS-enabled OTT messaging providers: NUVOs – for Network Unaffiliated Virtual Operators).
Since the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, just prior to the 2014 Mobile World Congress, there has been considerable press about Facebook and WhatsApp. In the last few days, the latest headlines have been about how WhatsApp handled a record 64 billion messages in a 24 hour period. That is a fantastic number and it represents magnificent growth. I’m not trying to take away from this brilliant achievement, but I must point out that WhatsApp subscribers didn’t really generate 64 billion messages.