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Massive geolocation coverage project is underway in Belarus

| December 4, 2015

By the end of the year, the goal is to have 85 percent of the country’s territory accurately covered.

According to a recent press release issued by the State Property Committee of Belarus, up to 85 percent of the territory of that country is going to have been covered by its precise geolocation system by the close of this year.

The press release explained that there will be additional tech put into place to accomplish this goal.

The intention is to add more continuously operating reference stations (CORS) to the country throughout the remainder of the year, for the purpose of increasing the total number to 90. This will make it possible to create geolocation coverage of up to 85 percent of the territory of the country. At the end of last month, the test operation of 17 of the CORS was brought to completion. Now that the testing phase is complete, they will be commissioned by the State Property Committee’s Belaerokosmogeodeziya enterprise.

The goal of this project is to provide accurate geolocation technology for a range of different purposes.

Geolocation Technology - BlearusFor instance, the satellite technology development will provide geodesic measurements as well as navigation in the country and land surveying tools. That said, the primary goal of the location based tech service is to be able to use a global satellite precise positioning system in order to obtain the heights and coordinates of various specific locations to improve the accuracy and ease of land surveying projects.

In this way, it will become more efficient to determine land plot borders in fields, to identify boundary markers and to understand exactly where city limits reach. Moreover, it will also be helpful to local aerial photography centers in the region that require specific coordinates before they obtain the images they require.

The geolocation system that is being established in Belarus will be able to create coordinates with precision to within 1 to 5 centimeters. The design of the system is meant to offer data from the coordinates to a range of different registries, such as those used for forestry management, water management, city planning, territory planning and other forms of environmental survey, in addition to those responsible for precision farming, civil engineering and other operation types.

Retail mobile commerce isn’t good enough for Canadian shoppers

| December 3, 2015

Despite the fact that consumers in Canada want to use their smartphones to buy, it’s not meeting their expectations.

According to the 2015 Holiday Shopping Survey from Accenture, consumers in Canada are actually eager to embrace mobile commerce, but retailers aren’t providing them with the type of experience that meets their expectations.

This means that most Canadian shoppers who would use smartphones are turning to laptops instead.

Canadians aren’t happy with what retailers are offering them by way of mobile commerce, so they are having to fall back on more traditional channels such as laptops and brick and mortars stores throughout the holiday shopping season. This, despite the fact that many shoppers across the country have said that they would be interested in using their devices to buy throughout this most important shopping season of the year. Almost half of the consumers who said they enjoy shopping in-store claimed that they liked it enough to continue their purchasing right through Christmas, itself.

Even though smartphone penetration is high in Canada, only 2 percent of Canadians use mobile commerce for most shopping.

Canada Mobile Commerce - Lack of InterestCanada is one of the countries with the highest amount of smartphone use. Still, only 2 percent of the shoppers in that nation will be using their mobile devices for the majority of their holiday purchasing this year. The mobile apps and smartphone optimized websites are not swaying consumers to use their favorite devices for buying.

Among the leading reasons that shoppers in the country are staying away from m-commerce are that they have security concerns (38 percent), they are frustrated with retailers that haven’t mobile optimized their sites (28 percent) and they simply find it too difficult to be able to locate the products they want on retailer sites and apps (18 percent).

According to the Accenture managing director of retail, Robin Sahota, “The way Canadians think about shopping for the holidays is changing, and retailers must offer a more enhanced mobile browsing and shopping experience to drive sales at the busiest time of year.” Sahota went on to say that consumer demand remains high during the 2015 holiday shopping season and over a third of customers intend to spend more this year than last year; it just won’t necessarily be done over mobile commerce.