This new shopping service is being provided by LV.com, bringing Chinese giants together.
WeChat has now announced that it will be broadening its mobile commerce offerings through the addition of a flight booking service that will be made possible through LV.com (which was formerly called 17u.cn).
This will bring WeChat into a partnership with a company in which Tencent currently has a stake.
The payments in this mobile commerce arrangement will, of course, support WeChat Payment. A consumer will be able to not only buy his or her ticket, but will also be able to receive notifications on the flight status, in addition to other related forms of information. All that they need to do is subscribe to an official LV WeChat account.
Currently, this mobile commerce option is available only in two cities, but this is meant to grow.
At the moment, WeChat is making this smartphone service available only in two cities in China: Shenzhen and Guangzhou. This will be only a starting point for the service, but there are plans to expand it outward into other cities, later on. The company has also specified that it will be broadening the service into the other forms of online booking that are available through LV.com.
Until now, there have been a large range of different categories of smartphone shopping based offerings that have been made available through WeChat. They have used the My Brand Cards channel in order to make it possible for consumers to be able to purchase tremendous ranges of different kinds of goods and services.
The company now feels that by adding the new option of being able to book flights fits in very well with its mobile commerce brand as it has established it until now. It will also be incorporating other travel related bookings in the future, which can include making hotel reservations or booking various types of tourism services such as getting tickets for a sightseeing tour. Those are not yet a part of the shopping experience but consumers should be expecting them before too much time has passed, considering the speed at which WeChat is known to expand.
The telecom is the next among many companies to jump into the wearable technology market.
At a time in which it feels like every week comes with the unveiling or the launch of a new Smartwatch, AT&T also seems to be jumping on board the wearables bandwagon and will be releasing its own version of the device later on this year.
This technology news was made when an executive from the company, Glen Lurie, made the announcement.
Lurie is the AT&T president of emerging devices. He pointed out that the company would be bringing its own smartwatch into the mix and that “I think you’ll see wide-area, high-bandwidth [smart]watches this year at some point.” The telecom has a team located in Austin, Texas, that is working on thousands of different potential prototypes for wearable devices. Moreover, it is also looking into the certification of third party devices that can be used on the company’s own network, explained Lurie.
It is AT&T’s feeling that the smartwatch will be the center of all wearable technology for the first while.
Lurie stated that “a majority of stuff” that consumers will be seeing within today’s wearables marketplace will be in the form of a wristwatch. But he also pointed that this will be the start of a sector that is still very much in its infancy. He said that if the use of those devices does become popular, “and we believe it can”, then these wearables could easily become the center of all forms of wearable technology computing.
At the moment, LTE capabilities are lacking in wearable tech, which causes them to be primarily reliant on other mobile devices – mainly smartphones – in order to be able to provide notifications and download and use apps. However, when these gadgets are developed with mobile broadband connection capabilities, then it will be possible for them to become their own “independent device,” explained Lurie.
He stated that it is quite important that wearables become their own stand-alone devices in order to make them truly practical and appealing to consumers.
His company and Filip Technologies already jointly released the Filip child tracker, which is like a wristwatch and that allows the AT&T network to be used for a parent to call a child. While that product could be improved, it is just that type of idea that the telecom is hoping to bring to market in its own smartwatch models.
