Tag: mobile app

Mobile payments made Lunar New Year cash gifts fast and easy

| February 27, 2015

The 2015 holiday gifts were exchanged digitally, and quite frequently over smartphones.

The 2015 Lunar New Year used mobile payments more than any previous year, as instant messaging platforms, such as WeChat from Tencent, drew a great deal of attention and made it easier for people to exchange cash gifts.

WeChat and the China Central Television Spring Festival gala were broadcast on Lunar New Year’s Eve.

During the show, mobile payments were featured, as audience members shook their smartphones throughout the broadcast in order to increase their chances of receiving red envelopes that contained cash gifts from WeChat. According to WeChat’s own figures, the show recorded 11 billion smartphone shakes. The high point was at 10:34pm, at which time the company had been recording an average of 810 million shakes every minute. During that time, there were 120 million red envelopes being distributed.

These mobile payments were issued to the people who took part in the WeChat red envelope promotion.

Mobile Payments - Chinese LanternThe service also made it possible for smartphone users to send the smartphone payments to friends and family members who were registered on their contact list through WeChat. According to the company, there were over 1 billion red envelopes that were sent out to recipients on Lunar New Year’s eve. This was about 200 times the number that had been recorded for the same day in 2014.

While many were very happy with the number of exchanges that they received and were shocked at how many different red envelopes were sent in their direction, there were some that voiced concerns over this use of digital payments over mobile. Some observers expressed that they were afraid that younger users of the mobile app might become so taken with the sending and receiving of the red envelopes over the messenger program that they will spend more time paying attention to their devices than they will with their actual families, in person.

This concern was not without foundation, as some people did admit that over the two day Lunar New Year holiday, they barely stopped checking their devices, as it was a lot of fun to be able to send and receive the red envelopes. Most of them were sent in tiny amounts, but people enjoyed the opportunity to receive them, and to send other mobile payments to their friends, family, and coworkers.

Mobile technology will play a central role in digital factories of tomorrow

| February 19, 2015

This will be combined with the use of robotics as well as big data in the future of this industry.

According to the results of recent research that has now been published, 36 percent of companies within the manufacturing industry expect mobile technology and apps to play an important role in improving their financial performance both today and into the future.

Moreover, 47 percent of those companies think that big data analytics will be a defining factor in their future.

Another 49 percent said that they felt that advanced analytics would be an important part of the reduction of the cost of operations and to be able to most efficiently use their assets. This was the result of the SCM World report that was entitled “The Digital Factory: Game-Changing Technologies That Will Transform Manufacturing Industry.” It was a collaborative effort between that organization and MESA International that provided data based on a survey that was conducted to better understand the impact of various types of manufacturing tech, including mobile technology, data, and analysis tools in terms of timeline and investment priority.

Online surveys were completed online in order to express opinions regarding mobile technology, big data, and more.

Mobile Technology - FutureParticipants were MESA International and SCM World corporate members. The respondents were excluded from the analysis when they were collected from the software and professional services sectors.

The participants were made up of 22 percent manufacturing and production, 21 percent IT technology, 14 percent operations and engineering, and 8 percent general management. Geographically, 40 percent of the respondents were from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 38 percent were from North and South America, and 22 percent were from Asia and Australia.

The three most disruptive forms of tech that manufacturers currently see in to the industry were mobile technology and applications (75 percent), big data analytics (68 percent), and advanced robotics (64 percent). SCM World specifically pointed out that mobile tech and apps were seeing notable and growing adoption across the plant floor. It pointed out that this trend was having a considerable impact on the measure, control, and supervision of manufacturing operations.