Is Apple Pay A Success?

Over a year ago after Apple Pay took the United States by storm, the smartphone giant has made only tiny ripple in the global payments market, hindered by technical challenges, low consumer take-up and resistance from banks.

Smartphone Buyer Fatigue Hampering Growth

Apple and Samsung dominate global smartphone markets with several new flagship handsets unveiled each year.

IBM To Offer Assistance To Battle Ebola

IBM is helping to contain the Ebola outbreak with tracking software that acts as a platform for sharing information about the disease.

Backed by supercomputer-powered, cloud-based software, IBM’s communications and data analysis system allows African citizens to communicate their concerns and report cases of the virus with voice calls or toll-free SMS directly to the government.

The data from the messages and locations can then be used by government agencies and health bodies to mobilise resources where they are most needed across the country.

It can also be used to find specific regions with growing numbers of suspected Ebola cases which require urgent supplies, as well as speeding up response times for body collection and burial.

The software was set up via a partnership between IBM’s recently established Africa research lab and Sierra Leone’s Open Government Initiative.

IBM’s chief scientist at the African research centre, Dr Uyi Stewart, said that the firm saw the need to quickly develop a system to enable communities directly affected by Ebola to provide valuable insight about how to fight it.

“Using mobile technology, we have given them a voice and a channel to communicate their experiences directly to the government,” he said.

Affected countries such as Sierra Leone have already benefited from the system, which has seen expedited deliveries of essential items such as soap and electricity.

The system also takes advantage of radio broadcasts to encourage people to get in touch and express their opinions about the outbreak. The general public are being alerted to the entire programme via this medium.

“Radio is a powerful medium in Africa but its potential to gather and analyse audience feedback has not been fully seized,” added Dr Sharath Srinivasan,  director of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at Cambridge University.

“We are working with IBM to offer people across Sierra Leone a channel to voice their opinions and, crucially, to ensure that the data is rapidly analysed and turned into valuable insight about the effectiveness of public service announcements and possible public misconceptions about Ebola.”

IBM said it is currently looking to extend the work to analyse mobile phone signal data in order to monitor and track population movement, enabling scientists to map and predict the spread of disease.

Last week, it emerged that cyber criminals have been taking advantage of the recent Ebola outbreak to trick unsuspecting web users into downloading malware sent in emails that purport to come from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Uncovered by security researchers at Trustwave, the malware was flagged when it appeared that criminals had crafted bogus WHO emails encouraging people to open a .RAR attachment to find out how they can protect themselves against Ebola.

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Will IBM Realize Growth In 2015?

International Business Machines Corp said it is projecting growth in its hardware sector next year as the company invests in research and development and abandons low-performing ventures.

The comments come less than one month after the world’s largest technology service company reported its lowest quarterly revenue in five years, weighed by sluggish global demand for its hardware, which plunged 23 percent in the first quarter of 2014.

The company added that growth in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa remain strong, and blamed falling revenue in China on government reforms affecting state-owned clients, and on the country’s hardware-heavy portfolio.

“We move on and we spread ourselves out, more industries, more clients, cloud, data, et cetera, around there,” said IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty at an investor briefing on Wednesday.

Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter said to stabilize the hardware sector IBM would continue to “refresh” hardware and further invest in research and development.

“Quite frankly, we are seeing very good growth out of software, good growth out of services, but challenges in hardware,” said Schroeter. “We will stabilize that hardware base and I am comfortable we will make that happen in 2014,” he said.

He reiterated the company’s EPS target for 2015 of at least $20. He expects a shift to higher-value business to bring in $3.25 and share repurchases to add $2 in earnings per share by 2015.

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Africa To Lead Global Bandwidth Demand

Africa’s demand for Internet access to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography.

Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said.

Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said.

The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.

The hunger for the Internet varies among African countries. Through 2019, bandwidth demand is expected to grow fastest in Angola, at 71 percent per year; Tanzania, at 68 percent; and Gabon, at 67 percent.

Many new cables have been built to Africa and around the continent in the past several years, giving service providers excess fiber capacity that can be turned on when needed, Kreifeldt said. As that fiber gets lit up and supply rises, prices should fall for enterprises and other users in African countries, he said. However, due to relative scarcity, a given amount of bandwidth between Africa and Europe costs about 10 times as much as the same size connection between Europe and North America, he said. Africa’s bandwidth gains aren’t expected to shrink that gap.

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Poor Get Online With Cloud Phone

Start up firm Movirtu has made plans to help 3 million or more people in poor countries use mobile services by giving them personal phone numbers, not phones.

Working with a U.N.-affiliated initiative called Business Call to Action (BCtA), Movirtu will offer the numbers, which it calls mobile identities, through commercial carriers in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. People in those countries who typically borrow phones from others will be able to log into the carrier’s network and use their own prepaid minutes and bits of data. The service is called Cloud Phone, though it operates within a carrier’s own infrastructure rather than on the Internet as a classic cloud service would.

Having a personal mobile identity can save users money in two ways, according to Ramona Liberoff, executive vice president of marketing, strategy and planning at Movirtu. First, they can use mobile services without buying a phone, which is a luxury even at US$15 or $20 for people making $1 or $2 per day. Second, the cost of prepaid service from a carrier typically is less than what consumers in those countries pay someone to borrow a phone, she said.

Though it’s customary in many of these countries to lend a phone to someone in need, the borrower is also expected to pay the lender for the usage. The average savings from using regular prepaid service instead is estimated at about $60 per year, Liberoff said.

The service will help people to use mobile banking, insurance and farming assistance services as well as make phone calls, Liberoff said.

Some of these services currently can only be delivered to individuals and not to someone sharing a phone. Personal mobile identities could be a boon to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that want to use mobile technology. “In many cases, there are great NGO programs that can’t reach 80 percent of their base,” because those people don’t have their own phones, Liberoff said.

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