India has presented a considerable opportunity for the makers of handsets in China.
There are currently twelve smartphone manufacturers from China that are currently making technology news by cutting their way into the handset market in India over the last few years, and their share is continuing to rise.
A couple of years ago, they took only 1-2 percent, but now they have risen above a 10 percent share.
These companies sell devices that are as inexpensive as $49.99 to the more premium products that are over $650. The technology news that is being made has to do with the fact that they are starting to bite into the share of the market that has previously been held by other manufacturers. As these devices have made their way onto store shelves in India, they have already started to take off.
Technology news was already being made in China where these devices taken a bite out of Apple’s turf.
Now they are moving outward in Asia, as the smartphone market’s growth is starting to slow in China. These manufacturers of mobile devices are looking for opportunities elsewhere, including India, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among others. The growth that they are expected to experience is predicted to be quite fast. India is already the third largest smartphone market in the world and it has the highest growth in the Asia Pacific region for these devices.
According to the IDC, the year over year growth in smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2014 was a massive 186 percent – nearly doubling its figures from the same quarter in 2013. It is estimated that in India, there are slightly more than 30 million smartphones being sold every year.
Furthermore, fewer than one in ten mobile users in India currently has a smartphone, and only approximately 17 percent of the cell phones shipped into the country in 2013 fit into that category. This could suggest to the Chinese smartphone manufacturers that this country is primed and ready for the evolution in mobile tech, and grabbing hold of that market could make massive technology news for those companies.
The company is betting that companies will be looking to wearables and has unveiled its developer pack.
At a time in which wearable technology is drumming up a great deal of controversy, with fitness trackers going mainstream, but while augmented reality headsets such as Google Glass are drawing criticism and nicknames for wearers such as “glassholes”, Salesforce is betting that this will be the tech of the near future for businesses and has now released its Wear Developer Pack.
The hope is that developers will use it in order to build apps and platforms for business purposes.
Salesforce is hoping that developers will use its open source Wear Developer Pack software in order to build systems with customer service, CRM, and a number of other types of business practice in mind. This tech will function with wearable technology devices such as web connected augmented reality glasses, smartwatches, and other mobile gadgets of this nature, and it will integrate them with the company databases that are already sitting on its platform.
While some are calling this wearable technology move an exciting one, others see a considerable risk.
At the moment, the primary focus is on wearables such as smartwatches and AR glasses. While there are many forms of smart clothing that have been unveiled and that are making their way onto the market, those are primarily meant for consumer use at the moment. That said, it is not yet clear whether the business world really is ready for wearables, nor has a solid opinion been collected that would suggest that they are or are not looking to work those gadgets into their operations.
That hasn’t stopped Salesforce, which has decided to make a considerable investment into enterprise wearable tech in order to grab hold of the first mover advantage within this category. The company feels confident that this market will be exploding over the next few years and it wants to make sure that its foundation is well built by the time that happens.
According to the Salesforce senior vice president of emerging technologies, Daniel Debow, “We saw this opportunity,” and said about wearable technology “How can you link these to marketing operations? How can you link these to business operations?”
