The EU's app sector has gone from zero to digital superhero in less than five years. By 2018 it could employ 4.8 million people and contribute €63 billion to the EU economy according to a report presented in Brussels today. The study, carried out by GIGAOM for the European Commission, shows that Europe's app developers are up to the challenge of taking the global lead. Currently, EU and North American developers generate the same levels (42% each) of app revenues in crucial EU and US markets. Although the future is bright, developers have raised concerns about the skills gap, connectivity and fragmentation which could put the app boom at risk. (RAPID, IP/14/145, 13.2.2014)
Five years ago Europe’s app sector did not exist, but by 2018 it could employ 4.8 million people and contribute €63 billion – in consumer spending, contract work and advertising - to the EU economy according to a new report published today (13 February).
The study, “Sizing the EU App Economy”, is part of Startup Europe, a Digital Agenda initiative supported by Commissioner Neelie Kroes to promote ICT and web entrepreneurship. The Commission is hoping example of the potential of apps will be a spur to “infuse EU countries with startup energy.”
Today, the CDC estimates that there are more than 130 million Americans currently living with a “chronic disease” — in other words, the many types of long-lasting conditions that “can be controlled but not cured.” With Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, arthritis diabetes and heart conditions among the most common (and costly) examples of chronic conditions, sadly, it’s no surprise that this category is responsible for 70 percent of deaths each year in the U.S. and accounts for more than 75 percent of the country’s healthcare costs.
Clickdrive wants to be the first open platform device that connects all driving apps and aftermarket monitors. The small black box, which plugs into an adapter under your steering wheel, lets you run several apps simultaneously from your smartphone, directly on the device itself, or on Clickdrive’s cloud platform.
“There are a bunch of driving apps coming out of various natures, but what we don’t have is the ability to use more than one at a time,” says Mark Sutheran, co-founder of Clickdrive, which is based in Singapore, but works with international car models.
In the beginning there was the Web, a thicket of virtual pages connected by hyperlinks that enabled blogging to flourish and companies like Google to make piles of money by directing people where advertisers wanted them to go. Today mobile apps increasingly rule our free time and require us to dive into separate, walled-off digital containers that don’t link up.
That’s now changing as ad technology startups, together with established companies such as Google and Facebook, seek to reinvent the hyperlink. They’re rolling out technology that makes it easy to put links into a mobile app, Web page, or e-mail that with a single tap take a person to a specific section of another app installed on the device.
“Mobile is opening up new opportunities in ‘boring’ products,” Dónde co-founder and CEO Anthony Nicalo once said. His company, which makes a mobile product and store locator service for brands and retailers, may be one example of that.
Shopcloud is launching a new indoor location technology that it says will deliver “breakthrough” accuracy for finding your way inside big buildings, and it says it relies entirely on sensors already built into modern smartphones.
Indoor navigation is a technological challenge that small and big companies alike are tackling. If they succeed, then tracking the location of people in places such as shopping malls could help retailers make great strides — and generate a lot of revenue from location-based advertising.
Mobile phones have generated enormous insight into the human condition thanks largely to the study of the data they produce. Mobile phone companies record the time of each call, the caller and receiver ids, as well as the locations of the cell towers involved, among other things.
s the ascent of health & fitness apps in the iTunes app store a sign of things to come for digital health and the wearables and quantified self movements?
Christmas happens to be especially important for mobile apps, especially in the US, as millions of news iPhones and iPads are activated on that day. App rank movements around Christmas are often indicative of new market demand and perhaps even be predictive of future trends.
Elephanti, a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings.
The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store to store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items.
