Global Marketing News – 1st July 2016
New data surveillance laws approved in Russia
New data surveillance legislation has been approved by the Russian government.
The new legislation states that online services, such as email and social network companies, need to keep message records for 1 year. If they use encryption, they must also help the Russian security services to decrypt any messages.
Telecoms companies are also covered. They must keep the contents of text messages and phone calls for 6 months, and must keep records of text messages and phone calls (but not the actual content) for 3 years.
The legislation still needs to be approved by President Putin before it becomes law.
It has come under attack from Edward Snowden, who said that the legislation would “take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety”.
BlackBerry BBM wants to be the next WeChat
BlackBerry has joined forces with the Indonesian media company Emtek to help boost the offerings of its BBM app.
Emtek will provide BBM with access to its videos, and will receive payment from BlackBerry every time a BBM user watches an Emtek video.
The company will also work with BlackBerry to help it to develop new services to make BBM a more multi-faceted app.
BlackBerry has said that it hopes the partnership will help to make BBM as versatile and popular as its Chinese rival WeChat.
Indonesia is BlackBerry’s most important market – there are 60 million BBM users in Indonesia, with these people making up two-thirds of the app’s userbase worldwide.
Zalo is the most popular messaging app in Vietnam
Research by DI Marketing has found that the home-grown app Zalo is the most popular messaging app in Vietnam.
80% of smartphone users in Vietnam have Zalo installed on their phones, ahead of Facebook Messenger which comes in at second place with 73%.
Viber and Skype are used by around 4 in 10 Vietnamese smartphone users, with Line being used by around 2 in 10, and Yahoo and Tango being used by around 1 in 10.
The research also revealed that different apps are more popular with different age groups. Zalo and Facebook Messenger are more popular with younger users, whilst Yahoo and Viber are more popular with older users.
Different age groups also use the apps for different purposes. Younger users are more likely to use messaging apps as a chat room, whereas older users are more likely to use them as a news source.
Mobile payments becoming more popular in Canada
Canadians are warming to the concept of mobile payments, according to research by Catalyst Canada.
In 2015, a quarter of respondents said that they intended to make more mobile payments that year compared to the previous year.
This year, that proportion has risen to a third, with women and people aged over 35 being the two groups seeing the biggest increase in likelihood to use mobile payments.
PayPal is the country’s most popular mobile payment app, being used by 70% of mobile payment users in Canada.
Google Wallet and Apple Pay are used by around a quarter of mobile payment users, however, there are differences in demographic distributions. While Apple Pay doesn’t see any major gender or age differences, Google Wallet is far more popular with males and those aged under 35.
Twitter hires VR and AR director
And finally, Twitter has taken a big step towards virtual and augmented reality with the recent hire of former Apple designer Alessandro Sabatelli as Twitter’s Director of VR and AR.
He will head up the VR and AR team, which will be part of Twitter’s machine learning department Twitter Cortex.
Twitter has not revealed exactly what kind of projects the AR and VR teams that will be working on, but the company is clearly keen not to fall behind competitors, with Snapchat having recently acquired the AR company Seene.
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Cal O'Connell
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