Global Marketing News – 15th January 2016
Skyscanner worth over $1bn thanks to global investment
The travel price comparison company Skyscanner has just raised 192 million US dollars of funding, putting its value at over 1 billion US dollars.
The investors include companies from Japan, Malaysia and the UK, reflecting the global interest in the company. Yahoo Japan is one company to have invested, following the joint venture deal the two companies made in July. The deal saw Skyscanner power flight search results for the search engine.
Skyscanner has been embarking on an international expansion plan, recently opening offices in Hungary and Bulgaria and entering the Chinese and Japanese travel markets, and has said it will use the money to continue its global growth.
Skyscanner currently has 50 million monthly users from all over the globe and generates an annual revenue of £93 million.
Internet bandwidth in Iran hits 276 GB/s
Internet bandwidth in Iran has increased by three and a half times in the last 2 years from 72 GB/s (gigabytes per second) to 276 GB/s.
The announcement came from the Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi who also revealed that IP capacity in the country has increased fivefold in the same time period.
He also said it was important to develop relationships with international companies to encourage growth and cross-border trade.
This was a point also picked up by Dr Ali Meshkot of TheConsultants.biz in a Webcertain.tv interview earlier this month.
The Minister pledged to increase bandwidth capacity even further in the future, as well as increase the amount of Persian language content online.
Mobile apps are not popular in Spain
Mobile apps are not popular in Spain, according to research by Easy Mobile Marketing Automation (eMMa).
The research found the majority of smartphone users, 54%, had less than 10 mobile apps, with this trend for only having a low number of apps remaining fairly stable across different age groups.
The study went deeper to investigate whether users were simply not downloading many apps to start off with or whether they were uninstalling apps en masse for some reason.
It found that around half of respondents only installed a few apps per month but that there was a significant proportion of smartphone users who did install a high number of apps.
It found that around half of apps that were downloaded were uninstalled almost immediately, with young people and males being particularly likely to download and then uninstall apps.
Entertainment, education and business apps were particularly likely to be deleted by users. In contrast, communication, weather, games, and transport apps were most likely to be kept.
Amazon launches new funny TV advert
The global ecommerce giant Amazon has launched a new humorous TV advertising campaign to promote its app in the UK and Germany.
The advert highlights how fast its shopping app is by showing a woman looking at a man hunched over on a yoga mat being reminded of the shape of a roast chicken and then immediately using a meat thermometer that she’s bought using the app.
The advert uses the tagline “Thought it, bought it” which shows that delivery speed is important to British and German consumers.
The UK and Germany are the two most developed ecommerce countries in the world according to research by Webcertain, with digital buyer penetration rates of 88% and 82% respectively.
Siri now speaks Finnish, Hebrew and Malay
And finally, Apple has launched a version of its virtual assistant Siri that speaks and understands Finnish, Hebrew and Malay.
The update is part of a beta version of the iOS 9.3 operating system and will allow users to ask general questions, although users won’t be able to ask for directions in Apple Maps.
The final version of the operating system will be rolled out later this month.
Siri now supports over 30 different languages.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
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Gemma Houghton
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