Author: Rebecca

The video streaming service saw a tremendous increase in its smartphone and tablet based revenues.

Throughout the holiday shopping season, Blinkbox – a video streaming service owned by Tesco – experienced a massive increase in its mobile commerce sales, to the point that they were considerably greater than their overall online sales.

The company reports that its sales through smartphones and tablets increased by a massive 674 percent.

That said, including its mobile commerce sales they saw an overall year over year increase in their revenues over the same period ( November 25 through January 5) of 245 percent, when taking all channels into consideration. That said, the increase specifically over mobile devices reflects both effective marketing by the company and rapidly growing interest in these gadgets by consumers, when it comes to consuming streaming video content.

Within the mobile commerce sales category at Blinkbox, it was tablets that truly led the way.

As a result of an impressive mobile marketing plan by the company, the largest growth in sales figures was by far over this channel. That said, it was tablets – including the Hudle devices from Tesco, itself – that truly produced the largest share of results. In the three months that led up to Christmas, the company managed to sell 400,000 of their own tablet devices.

Those tablets are sold preloaded with the Blinkbox app. That mobile marketing strategy was certain to have played an important role not only in the number of sales that occurred over mobile devices as a whole, but particularly over tablets. Clearly it was a highly effective strategy, considering the totals that the company was able to achieve during that period.

During that span of time, a very impressive 65 percent of the mobile commerce sales that came in for the Blinkbox video streaming services originated from devices other than laptop and desktop computers. This includes connected TVs, game consoles, set top boxes, and other types of connected device, in addition to tablets and smartphones, of course. This channel has clearly proven itself for the company and it will be interesting to see what direction it chooses to take in order to encourage this growth to continue.

The popular Ingress location based game is opening itself up to Apple smartphone players.

Niantic Labs from Google has managed to produce an exceptionally popular augmented reality mobile gaming experience for Android smartphone users, but the next step is going to be a launch for users of iPhones, as well.

This will allow the Apple device users to enjoy the same experience that uses geolocation technology.

This augmented reality mobile gaming opportunity begins as a location based MMO, which uses positioning in the real world in order to impact the various events that are going on within the game. From there it expands into a type of broad scale virtual reality event that continues to grow the more the Ingress players continue to unravel its mysteries.

As a part of the celebration of this growing augmented reality mobile gaming experience, Niantic Labs has gone a step further.

Niantic Labs has now released a video series that is made up of two parts in the form of a retrospective. The purpose is to show the creation of the geolocation game experience and to document the way that the story has progressed until this point. The name of the official documentary that has been released is “Ingress Report: Ingress Year One.”

The videos are both interesting and informative, even to those who have never before played the Ingress game. It is a fascinating way to catch the viewer up with the latest in this experience which has become an event unto itself.

This will be certain to attract iPhone users who are looking forward to being able to take on the game for themselves once it is released in a format that is compatible with their own devices. Rumor has it that this will not be long off and that the release for this version.

That said, this remains big news in the augmented reality mobile gaming world, as Google had previously made the experience available only to users of devices based on its own Android operating system. However, the more players there are of the game, the better it gets. Therefore, this could lead to a considerable influx of players that could greatly improve this already highly enjoyed game.