Author: Dan Gendro

Masaya Ueno, the director of Rakuten Asia has released a promising prediction for 2015 trends.

Rakuten, the massive e-commerce giant from Japan, has now released an official statement that has revealed that it has brought in $1.1 billion worth of revenue in Singapore via mobile commerce channels.

The company therefore feels that the Singapore market is a tremendously promising one for next year.

The director of Rakuten Asia, Masaya Ueno, who is also the company’s Country Manager for Singapore and the Head of the Business Development Division, explained that the country’s tremendous 80 percent adoption rate of smartphones has made it ready for a great deal more growth in mobile commerce. Smartphone shopping is already quite common in the country but the company feels that there remains a great deal more room for growth to continue throughout 2015.

The larger smartphones, nicknamed “phablets” are being called a driving force behind this mobile commerce trend.

According to Masaya Ueno, “Apple’s entry into the Phablet market with the iPhone 6 Plus and the launch of other phablets flagships like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will help to drive the adoption of mobile shopping is Singapore as well.”

At the same time, Rakuten’s forecast also explained that the focus on ‘mobile-first’ is also spreading throughout the Asian Pacific region, where many consumers use their smartphones as their exclusive method of accessing the internet. The prediction underscored the fact that this will be an important m-commerce factor in 2015, as it shows that the trend in mobile shopping will not be exclusive to Singapore, but will also have considerable potential in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Rakuten explained that this mobile technology trend should be telling retailers that they simply cannot think that they can continue to ignore this fast moving segment of m-commerce, as consumers throughout that region turn away from their desktops in favor of their smaller screen handsets.

The Rakuten prediction is that far more retailers will rapidly begin an investment into mobile commerce in both the marketing and retail efforts, and that this will be easily seen in all of 2015.

The company has filed a patent that suggests that an official smartphone Game Boy emulator could be on the way.

Nintendo has filed a patent that has now been published which could suggest that the company is looking to greatly enhance its position in mobile gaming by bringing some of its Game Boy titles to smartphones and tablets by way of emulation tech.

The idea of emulators isn’t anything new, but this move by Nintendo is something new on official channels.

This type of mobile gaming emulator is something that can help to make it possible for all of the Game Boy favorites to become playable on smartphones and tablets. There are a number of emulators that already exist online that function by mimicking old types of game consoles to allow gamers to be able to play all of their old beloved games that have been converted into ROM files for PCs and Macs. Nintendo may now be doing the same thing and it could be possible for it to accomplish this goal without having to do a massive amount of rewriting to get there.

Emulators for mobile gaming on a low capability target platform duplicate the experience of a handheld video game device.

This would use a number of different optimizations and features to be able to take the old games and boost the graphics quality and sound so that the mobile game version will be a near duplication of what the game had been when played on its native platform. There have been a number of successful emulators and platforms online, but Nintendo would be able to provide an official and legal experience that has not been available for Game Boy games in the past.

Among the examples of what is accomplished through emulators include using bit BLITing, the reformatting of graphics characters, and the modeling of the LCD of a native platform controller through the use of a sequential state machine, as well as skipping frame display updates selectively if it appears that the mobile gaming play is falling behind what would have occurred in the same experience on the native platform.