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Mobile commerce will be huge on Cyber Monday 2013

| November 26, 2013

According to a recent comScore report, online shopping this year will be bright for smartphones and tablets.

comScore has, once again, released its predictions for the holiday shopping season, and for its predictions of 2013, it has pointed out that mobile commerce is going to have a very bright opportunity, particularly on Cyber Monday.

Although there is a shorter season this year, when compared to last year, the decline should be only “slight”.

Although many have wondered if the fact that there is nearly a week – 6 days – less this shopping season from this Thanksgiving to Christmas, when compared to last year, comScore believes that there will be only a “slight decline” in the overall growth rate that will be experienced in a typical year. Moreover, it has predicted that when compared to the powerful sales that are experienced over mobile commerce and online shopping, this decline will even be noticeable.

Once mobile commerce has weighed in, it is likely that the year over year growth will be 14 to 17 percent.

Mobile Commerce - Cyber Monday 2013comScore’s predictions have shown that this will allow mobile commerce to reach its highest percentage ever achieved out of the total online shopping, this year. The figures that they are predicting are that smartphone and tablet based sales will represent 12 to 13 percent of online shopping, and that the spending will near $10 billion for the last quarter of this year.

Mobile commerce has already reached record high percentages of total online spending within the last three quarters of the fiscal year, this year. It is being anticipated that this trend will keep up for the remainder of 2013 and that it will leap beyond last year’s total digital commerce spending, which was 11.3 percent.

According to the report from comScore, “We have seen that in periods of concentrated consumer activity, a greater number of people are likely to engage in emerging behaviors, such as mobile commerce.” Taking into consideration the fact that this short shopping season has six fewer days than it did last year, the analytics firm has predicted that purchasing will be far more concentrated and will therefore expand the need for tools such as smartphone and tablet based shopping.

Mobile security attitudes in the UK remain weak

| November 26, 2013

British consumers carrying smartphones and tablets still do not take adequate precautions to protect themselves.

According to a recent mobile security study that was conducted by Trend Micro, a security firm, many consumers in the United Kingdom who have smartphones and tablets have yet to adopt appropriate precautions in order to guard themselves against the theft of their data.

The survey involved the participation of 2,500 device users throughout the United Kingdom.

The results of this study indicated that 27 percent of the research participants have lost up to three company devices. Another 52 percent regularly carry a device on their person that contains sensitive data from work, which increases the risk that their employers and customers could experience fraud from a mobile security data breach.

This mobile security finding should be taken seriously by businesses in the country.

Mobile Security - UKThe survey showed that 61 percent of the participants who use their smartphones and tablets for work purposes have not even protected those devices with a password. Among all of the participants 20 percent were using their personal smartphones for business reasons, which means that this number of unprotected device users is a considerable one. Among those who have gone to the effort of protecting their devices with a password, 63 percent have used the same one or a similar one across all of their various digital accounts.

Almost one in every three participants said that they use Wi-Fi hotspots on a regular basis. However 56 percent of hotspot users do not check the security of those spaces before they connect. Twenty two percent access their work emails from those locations, while 10 percent access confidential documents in those public connection environments.

This survey indicates that in the United Kingdom, there is a standard of relative carelessness when it comes to their attitude toward mobile security and the link between their behaviors and the safety of corporate data when using their smartphones and tablets for work purposes, said the report. In fact, among the respondents, 44 percent had a greater concern regarding the loss of their own personal content than they had about giving access to sensitive business data to cyber criminals.