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Mobile marketing will receive a greater investment next year

Julie Campbell | October 28, 2013

Companies will be spending more to advertise and promote over that channel in the next 12 months.

A recent report on mobile marketing and commerce has determined that showrooming may not be considered to be as great of a threat as expected, as only 11 percent of retailers participating in a study claimed that they felt that it is a shopping behavior that could be harmful to their own revenues.

For this reason, many companies are pouring more money into the channel to help to boost their in store experience.

The research, which was published by BuyDesire and Econsultancy determined that most companies will be increasing their mobile marketing budgets over the next year and that this reflects a greater adoption of the channel, overall. They showed that out of every ten companies, seven have said that they would be increasing their spending in this area within the 12 months following the survey. The purpose is to keep up with the growth of the channel.

Only a small number of companies are currently using mobile marketing at the moment.

However, the current trends are changing and although the majority of companies are not using mobile marketing at the moment, they are changing their tunes and will primarily be doing so within the next year in some shape or form. They will be incorporating these technologies into their overall strategies on a growing basis.

The survey was conducted by the company from July through August and involved the participation of over 500 agency and in-house marketers. Among them, almost one third (29 percent) intend to use tablet optimized websites for the first time in the next year, with a considerable growth in location based mobile marketing (22 percent) and m-commerce (20 percent).

According to an Econsultancy research analysis, Bola Awoniyi, who spoke about these mobile marketing study results, “The research makes it clear we are at a tipping point with regards to mobile marketing and m-commerce. More companies that have been treading water with mobile technology will be taking the plunge in the near future.” It was also seen that only 11 percent feel threatened in any way by showrooming, even though 67 percent noted that the in-store use of smartphones was rising.

Gadgets could one day be charged using the microwave oven

Julie Campbell | October 25, 2013

Smartphones and tablets might be able to be recharged simply by nuking them.

A recent development from tech scientists has revealed that the microwave oven may soon be used for charging the batteries of electronic and mobile gadgets, instead of just for popping popcorn and nuking leftovers.

In a joint project between two educational institutions, this technology may one day be available.

The researchers were from the Institute of Technology in Georgia, as well as from the University of Tokyo. Together, they have come up with the initial form of a device that can gather and store microwave energy from the standard kitchen appliance, so that it can be used to charge the batteries in mobile gadgets.

This could make it very fast and easy to charge gadgets and is very promising for new technologies.

Microwave Energy and Mobile Gadgets According to a statement in a paper by Yoshihiro Kawahara, the leader of the team, “The energy accumulated over two minutes was found to be sufficient for the operation of some of low-power kitchen tools for a few minutes and operate wireless sensor node for 2.5 hours.”

That said, the team did acknowledge that the charging gadget still requires some work in order to perfect it, as the energy that was stored within the capacitor after the two minutes had passed “was only 15 percent of the ideal case.” The team explained that it may also be able to better the energy accumulation from the leakage that escapes microwave ovens “by using more sophisticated impedance matching and power management methods.”

In another report on the technology, it was revealed that the machine that was built by the team is able to collect the wasted microwave oven energy for charging electronic gadgets. It snatches up the escaped energy that is produced while the device is running for heating up food. It functions by picking up the excess energy through an antenna in the harvester, so that it can then be channeled into other devices such as smartphones or MP3 players. The technology still requires perfection or the microwave would need to run for a very long amount of time to be able to collect any worthwhile amount of charge for the device batteries.