School meals on tap
London office workers are being encouraged
to make a 30p donation to charity when
they pay for their lunch by tapping their
contactless bank card on a payment terminal
specially designed by Earnest Labs, the
innovation arm of marketing agency Earnest.
The Lunchbox initiative is to raise money for
Mary’s Meals, which provides school meals
for more than 1.1 million children in 12 of the
world’s poorest countries. By arranging meals
in school, the charity aims to attract hungry
children to the classroom, where they can
gain an education that will help them escape
poverty. Every 30p donation made through a
Lunchbox terminal is enough for five meals.
Larger screen sizes help double online
sales via smartphone
The percentage of UK online retail sales made through smartphones
and tablets exceeded 50% for the first time in Q4 2015/16.
According to IMRG Capgemini Quarterly Benchmarking, 51% of UK
online retail sales were made via a mobile device in Q4, up from 45% in
Q3 and 40% in the same period the previous year.
Tablets accounted for a third (33%) of total UK online sales in the
period, smartphones for 18% and desktops/laptops for 49%,
Tina Spooner, chief information officer at IMRG, said: “Smartphones
have played an important role in the overall online shopping process for
a long time – often used for research and comparison on the go. But over
the past year they have really started to become a major component of
the checkout process too, and that is what is driving this leap in mobile
penetration. In January, sales via smartphones grew 95.6% year-on-year – over 7 times the rate of
those via tablets.”
She added: “The main reason for this is likely to be related to the design trend for larger
screens, but many mobile retail sites have improved significantly to give a far better experience
and inspire confidence in shoppers. There is also the fact that we increasingly use our
smartphones for managing so much of our lives – it’s only logical that completing purchases on
retail sites gravitates over to these devices as well.”
•
Smart glasses are set to make a comeback
next year, recovering from a brief setback
after Google Glass was withdrawn from sale
in 2015.
In a new study,
Consumer & Enterprise
Smart Glasses: Opportunities & Forecasts 2016-
2020
, Juniper Research forecasts that consumer
smart glasses shipments will increase from less
than a million in 2016 to 12 million in 2020.
Growth will happen as Microsoft’s HoloLens
becomes generally available and glasses from
vendors like ODG, Sony, Meta and (potentially)
Magic Leap move from developer-only devices
to general availability.
Juniper believes the key to growth in the
consumer smart glasses segment lies in home-
based applications rather than the Google Glass
approach of taking smart glasses everywhere. In
this respect, they have more in common with
consumer tablets, which are primarily used
indoors.
Juniper Research points out that while an
appealing consumer smart glasses product
has yet to be launched, the benefits of smart
glasses are already being realised in the
workplace, with vendors like Vuzix, Atheer and
even Google focussing on enterprise use.
Research author James Moar said: “Hands-
free computing and video transmission can be a
huge productivity booster in many workplaces
now, but it’s not a huge draw for consumers.
It will take the development of devices that
give unique vision-based capabilities that
can’t be replicated by a smartphone for a truly
worthwhile consumer use case for smart glasses
to emerge.”
Smart glasses set
to make a comeback
agenda
