As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.
Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.
This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.
This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.
Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.
According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”
The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.
In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.
New report highlights the growth of mobile commerce across 13 countries
MEF, a global trade association focused on the mobile space, has release the first report in its Global Consumer Insights Series on Mobile Money. The report highlights the growing popularity of mobile payments across 13 countries. Mobile commerce has been making strong growth in many of the world’s most prominent markets. Much of this growth is being driven by the growing number of people that have smartphones and tablets and how much they are beginning to use these devices in their daily lives.
Report shows 15% of device users have made a mobile purchase in 2013
According to the report, some 15% of device users throughout 2013 made some form of mobile payment from their smartphones or tablets. The majority of these people made a purchase using some kind of mobile wallet application. These applications primarily leverage NFC technology, which allows digital information to be transmitted over short distances. Mobile wallets that do not make use of NFC technology are becoming more popular, however, as NFC-enabled mobile devices are still somewhat rare.
Mobile money users are becoming more important to businesses around the world
The report shows that mobile money users tend to spend more on individual purchases than others. The report notes that mobile money users are 10% less likely to make low-value payments and 14% more likely to make mid-value payments. These particular consumers are becoming an important demographic for businesses that wish to engage the mobile audience, especially because these consumers are more likely to participate in mobile-centric initiatives, particularly those that leverage some kind of engagement technology, such as QR codes.
Mobile-only culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries
MEF’s report suggests that a “mobile-only” culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries. This involves people becoming more dependent on their mobile devices and making use of services that are only available through mobile platforms. Mobile banking, for instance, is becoming quite popular and a growing number of consumers are beginning to manage their finances solely through these mobile platforms. Mobile banking is expected to become much more popular than it already is as more financial institutions begin targeting mobile consumers.
