New smart devices from Acer
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Acer Computer has launched new mobile devices - including wristwatch that doubles as a smartphone and fitness tracker.
Nitipat Praweenwongwuthi, associate director of marketing at Acer, said that the company saw greater opportunities in the smartphone market where there were several significant surrounding factors, such as consumer and user lifestyle, internet infrastructure and services, and the value of smartphone devices.
Nitipat said that in addition to the overall growth of the smartphone market, mobile-user behaviour had ignited the new wearable-device segment.
“We could see continuing growth of the smartphone market in the last quarter, and globally the market growth has reached 25.3 per cent,” Nitipat said.
“According to Frost and Sullivan, broadband access in Thailand remains as low as 25 per cent, while the mobile phone penetration is at 144 per cent, of which around 34 per cent is via smartphones.”
Platform from GetResponse
GetResponse has officially launched its e-mail marketing platform in Asean. The move is a bid to capture the increasingly savvy use of e-mail marketing in the region. The company plans to extend support for key languages such as Chinese, Bahasa Melayu and Thai.
GetResponse chief executive officer Simon Grabowski said e-mail could be a powerful marketing tool, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses that do not have the same budgets are large enterprises.
But he said it needed to be done right, and that meant getting many separate elements right – from design and device agnosticism to personalisation and language support.
Grabowski said over the past year GetResponse had seen its e-mail-marketing activity in Asean grow 35.8 per cent on the year.
Since support for Chinese, Malay and Thai languages was added earlier this year, the company had seen an increase in new-account registrations of 41.6 per cent – a promising sign for e-mail marketing in the region.
E-mail activity amongst key Asean markets continued to grow, while e-mail-marketing services needed to provide not just superior tools to improve effectiveness but a high level of personalisation and language support to drive conversion and adoption.
Adobe releases report on mobiles
Adobe last week released its 2014 Mobile Benchmark Report that analysed several key factors.
They include the latest mobile trends, including Wi-Fi versus cellular usage, the correlation of screen size and browser market share, the role of social networks across smartphones and tablets as well as content sharing across devices.
Key findings show that the screen size of the next generation iPhone must increase to reverse the decline in mobile-browser market share.
Pinterest has emerged as the most mobile-social network, while mobile-referral visits from Tumblr produce the highest revenue per visit, and the use of iBeacons is becoming mainstream, it was found.
Africa Facebook users hit 100m
As of the second quarter, there were some 100 million people logging onto Facebook every month across the African continent, the US-based social media giant said.
That represented half of the some 200 million people connected to the internet in Africa, it said.
Facebook said more than 80 per cent came to Facebook every month on a mobile device.
In addition to this being a significant milestone for Facebook, it also reflected the fact that people in high-growth countries wanted to be connected to the world around them and that mobile devices were providing unprecedented ways for that to happen.
Facebook said it had developed a number of customised experiences based on local insights for people in high-growth countries, and was continuing to learn, test and optimise these solutions that addressed diverse local needs around the world.
It said India’s “click to missed call” ad solution was announced in July and Facebook had announced bandwidth targeting for advertisers globally.
Particularly in high-growth countries, a mobile phone was often much more than just a way to place calls and send messages – it was a lifeline in terms access to news, banking and employment as well as connecting with advertisers and brands.
