Tag: apple

Monitise could soon be free from Visa as company evaluates its stake in mobile commerce

Monitise, a British mobile payments firm, received bad news from Visa, one of its primary shareholders, this week. Visa is evaluating its stake in Monitise and may sell off its shares in the coming months. This has sent Monitise’s stock plummeting, but the firm has partnerships with other prominent companies that could mitigate the loss of Visa as a stakeholder. Monitise has managed to garner support from consumers in the United Kingdom that are interested in mobile commerce.

Visa hires JPMorgan Chase to evaluate its options concerning Monitise

Visa is currently “considering its options” regarding its stake in Monitise. In 2009, Visa took a 14.4% stake in the firm. Together, the two companies have managed to promote mobile commerce in the United Kingdom, introducing a variety of services developed by Monitise to Visa customers. As Monitise matured, Visa reduced its stake in the firm to 5.5%. Now, Visa has hired JPMorgan Chase to evaluate its options for the future.

Visa is beginning to focus more heavily on its own mobile commerce initiatives

Visa has been putting more focus on its in-house capabilities, especially where mobile commerce is concerned. The substantial growth of Monitise has lead Visa to believe that the firm is much more capable than it had been in the past, now that it has established a commanding foothold in the UK’s mobile commerce space. As mobile commerce continues to grow more prominent throughout the country, Monitise is expected to garner more support from consumers and retailers.

Apple finds support fro Visa for its ambitious Apple Pay service

Though Visa has been focusing more heavily on its own initiatives recently, the company has shown strong support for Apple Pay. The service is the first mobile payments platform from Apple, and Visa has teamed with the company to make sure its customers can use Apple Pay to purchase products from their mobile devices. Apple is new to the mobile commerce space, so the success of its new service is still uncertain.

An unexpected bug has derailed Apple’s plans to release its iOS 8 Health and fitness apps.

The much anticipated Apple Healthkit apps (health and fitness-related tracking apps) that were designed for the company’s Healthkit platform, and were to be released with the recent launch of iOS 8, have been postponed due to an unspecified software bug, which means users and developers will need to delay their plans for this new software, which is expected to be one of the major features of the Apple Watch when it is launched in 2015.

Healthkit is a key feature of Apple’s newly released iOS 8 platform.

Although Apple has not shed any light on the nature of the bug or how or why it occurred, representatives of the company have said that they are working on developing a solution in the next couple of weeks.

In a statement she made, Trudy Muller, an Apple spokesperson, said that “We discovered a bug that prevents us from making HealthKit apps available on iOS 8 today.” Muller added that “We’re working quickly to have the bug fixed in a software update and have HealthKit apps available by the end of the month.”

The Healthkit platform was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The platform was created for application developers who want to disseminate health information or collect it. Apple sees the mobile technology as working in tandem with its devices to gather health data from users and have this collected information sent to doctors with the permission of patients.

According to Apple, the patient’s health information is stored by Healthkit in a centralized location that no one else can access without the permission of the user. The electronics giant says that its new mhealth platform could help improve healthcare and the method in which medical professionals receive information regarding the health of their patients.

Several fitness-tracking app developers had planned to take advantage of the Apple Healthkit apps platform.

Some developers, including Strava, Lark and WebMD have jumped on board and apps from these companies were expected to be available at Apple’s App Store on iOS 8 when the latest operating system was launched last Wednesday. However, these Apple Healthkit apps are currently unavailable for download.