Author: Julie Campbell

The company has taken several of these apps down, including “Real Racing” and “Dead Space”.

Electronic Arts (EA), the mobile games publisher, has now taken down a dozen mobile games from online marketplaces such as Google Play and from iTunes, without having given any prior public warning that these options would no longer be available.

This has arrived as quite the surprise to many players who had still been enjoying these titles.

The common belief is that the mobile games published by EA have been of exceptionally high quality and these titles were among the better options that had been available. Some players have responded with disappointment that these titles have been taken down. Some of the higher quality app titles that have been removed from the online stores have included “Flight Control,” “Dead Space,” Real Racing,” “Burnout Crash,” “Mass Effect Infiltrator,” and “Bejeweled 2”.

Two of the more popular mobile games from that list have been “Real Racing” and “Flight Control”.

Those popular game apps were among the more surprising removals by EA. The reason is that they have been popular and were considered by many people to be among the mobile gaming opportunities that established devices such as tablets and smartphones as legitimate platforms for players.

As there hadn’t been any announcement made by EA to warn the public, fans of those games have been quite disappointed as they were not provided with the opportunity to prepare for the removal. Beyond the disappointment is a general surprise felt by many as the games were taken down regardless of their high quality and the lengthy lists of positive reviews that they have received.

Still, there remain a number of mobile games that EA has continued to support, such as “EA Sports UFC Mobile,” and “The Simpsons: Tapped Out”. Each of those popular titles can still be downloaded as usual and the regular updates for those options appear to be continuing on without interruption. Some early reports have suggested that the games were taken down as a result of the most recent update to iOS 9 and because – as popular and high quality as they may have been – they might not have been earning very much money for EA.

According to a new report, the large financial institutions are falling behind with the latest tech.

Despite the fact that mobile banking and payments are right at our doorstep and are being used at an increasing rate, in Canada, almost half of all banking execs don’t believe that they have the IT systems, infrastructure, and processes in place to be able to meet present – let alone future – customer needs and expectations over their smartphones.

The report was entitled “Banks: Customers Expect That You’re Always On and Available, Are You Ready?”

The report was made by CenturyLink and it pointed out that even some of the central services still require better IT. It pointed out that when it come to mobile banking and technology, about 40 percent of C-level financial execs who were surveyed didn’t feel that the IT infrastructure was in place for meeting the basic banking service needs to the level of customer expectations. CenturyLink’s managing director of financial services, Roji Oommen, said that “To stay competitive in a technology-driven marketplace, Canadian banks must be both financial institutions and mobile technology innovators.”

While mobile banking may not yet be keeping up with technology, it’s not that the resources aren’t out there.

The hope that CenturyLink certainly has from the insight in this report is that the banks will see that it and companies like it area already offering the types of services that will help those financial institutions to get themselves on the right path. These strategic technology partners do actually have the potential to spot the mobile tech solutions that are needed and to help in their integration – if not implement them on behalf of those Canadian banks.

The report also determined that 78 percent of banking execs in the country felt that customer demand for improved mobile banking and technology based services would cause them to be required to do more outsourcing. It stated that when those execs were asked about what parts of their IT are currently being outsourced, 86 percent said that they did so for IT infrastructure requirements, while another 72 percent said that they were outsourcing for their IT security.