Hasta La Gadget!

In 2011 Apple found itself in some hot water for failing to provide the legally required two-year warranty to European consumers. But, since being slapped with a €900,000 fine by Italy in December of that year, few other countries have taken any signifcant action. That’s led European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding to call on the nations of the European Union to step up their enforcement efforts and to cooperate more on consumer protection issues. She also said that the Justice Commission should take a more prominent role in helping various state institutions work together. The call for stricter enforcement comes after only five EU members took any action against Apple for openly flouting the Union’s Warranty laws — and just two (Italy and Bulgaria) imposed any financial penalties. Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg and Belgium are still investigating the company, but it’s not clear what consequences if any remain to be faced. The company has begun to alter its warranty policies to fall more inline with local laws, but there are still concerns about the specific wording that leave room for abuse.

Filed under: Apple

Comments

The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD is cheaper! And finally available in Europe and Japan!

Despite years of chewing the digital cud — not to mention a global financial downturn — there’s no sign of the U.S. or European ecommerce cash-cows ailing, according to two new forecasts from Forrester. In the U.S. Forrester is projecting online retail sales will reach $370 billion by 2017, up from $231 billion in 2013 — a 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years.

The ecommerce growth rate in Europe is expected to be fractionally higher over the same period, although the overall market is obviously smaller. Europe’s online retail sales are projected to hit €191 billion ($247.1 billion) by 2017, according to Forrester, up from €128 billion ($165.6 billion) in 2013 – a 10.5% CAGR.

In the U.S. Forrester notes that online retail will continue to outpace the growth of physical retail stores — something the category has done since its inception, so no change there. The analyst notes two “notable changes” have helped prop up ecommerce growth in recent years: firstly the rise of smartphones and tablets, which is says are boosting the amount of time consumers spend online and generating more buying opportunities.

Forrester’s report notes:

Consumers are more likely to use their phones not only to research purchases — both to learn about products and store options — but also to find the best price for a given item. But it’s not just phones that drive retail web traffic; virtually all retailers report that traffic to their sites from tablets spikes during evening prime-time hours, when consumers are in a leisure state of mind. This also suggests incremental web sessions and conversions, because web retail traditionally spikes not in the evening, but during business hours.

And secondly, Forrester notes that traditional retailers have invested heavily in their web divisions — including by offering hybrid online/offline capabilities such as in-store pickup for online purchases — which it says is also helping to grow ecommerce.

U.S. ecommerce growth is not coming from newbies, according to Forrester, which said it expects only four million people to shop online for the first time in 2013. But rather growth is down to existing web shoppers spending more of their time and money online — and spending it on a variety of goods. Forrester notes that online loyalty programmes such as Amazon Prime and ShopRunner are “one driver”, but the wider driver here is web shoppers getting more accused to spending their cash digitally, and therefore becoming more comfortable buying “high-touch, high-consideration goods like furniture or appliances online”.

The report also notes that ecommerce is also helping to boost the U.S. jobs market — with Forrester and Shop.org estimating that more than 400,000 individuals are currently employed by ecommerce companies in the U.S., projected to reach 500,000+ by 2017. And of course more people in employment means more disposable income that can be spent buying goods online (so arguably that could be another factor fuelling online retail).

European Ecommerce

In its European forecast, Forrester includes a breakdown by country of online retail spend — noting there is considerable variation in the landscape across key markets in Europe. Despite this, it’s projecting CAGRs from 2012 to 2017 of between 9% at the low end, for the Netherlands, jumping up to 18% and 16% for Spain and Italy respectively, the fastest growing European markets over the forecast period:

The ecommerce growth disparity between European countries is generally down to a divide between more mature markets in Northern Europe, where Forrester says online shopping is “the norm”, vs markets in the south where ecommerce has yet to become a mainstream activity — but is projected to grow to become one by 2017.

In more mature Northern European markets, such as the U.K. and Sweden, Forrester forecasts that ecommerce growth will continue to outstrip physical retail growth but will slow, as the markets enter what it calls a “new phase of competitive expansion”. In this phase online retailers will need to optimise and innovate, by creating more personalised shopping experiences across “new touchpoints”, in order to stay ahead of the competition.

The report notes:

Mobile presents an opportunity to reach out to shoppers in new ways, influencing the decision to buy at a critical moment. eBusiness execs must support their online strategies with a mobile strategy that considers mobile as more than just another transactional touchpoint. Instead, they must use features like barcode scanning and augmented reality to capture and analyze offline activity in order to more accurately personalize future online interactions and drive web sales.

European markets currently display considerable variation when it comes to “multiple touchpoints” for online shopping, according to the report — with increasingly sophisticated and complex behaviours in some but not all Northern markets. For example, Forrester notes that Germany has “notably lower” mobile shopping adoption than elsewhere in Europe, and few “multichannel customer offers”.

Sensors are quickly becoming a category of external hardware gadgets unto themselves, and Slovenia-based CubeSensors is creating a set that essentially monitors your living space to provide you with aggregate data about noise, temperature, humidity, light, air quality and more to provide clues about how your environment might be affecting you and those around you.

CubeSensors are small hardware cubes that pack a bevy of sensors within, at just 2-inches long, wide and tall. They’re powered by an internal rechargeable battery, so that they don’t need nasty plugs to work, and they stream their data over Wi-Fi to a cloud-based dashboard to track information and provide it to users in real-time. They can be set to provide alerts, and the data can either be made public or set to private access for keeping it within the household.

The info collected by the CubeSensors, which ship in a starter pack with either two or three devices and a bridge to link them to your home network, can be viewed through a single app that resides on a user’s smartphone. The Cubes can be set to send alarms when certain conditions are met, like when noise or temperature reaches a certain level, and you can view historical data to track the effectiveness of any methods you take to change the influence of environmental factors.

Each sensor includes an accelerometer, a thermometer, a barometer, an air quality meter, and a humidity sensor. They’re being sold with the pre-order model that has become popular for hardware creators, with the MYO armband and Lockitron being two recent similar examples. The difference here is that CubeSensors is asking for $10 up front as a down payment, whether your order the $249 starter pack with two cubes, or the $349 pack that comes with four. CubeSensors CEO Ales Spetic says that $10 is fully refundable, however, and the startup did win the Best Hardware award at this year’s Launch Festival.

This kind of environment monitoring devices aren’t entirely new: Russian startup Lapka offers sensors that contain similar detection capabilities, which we saw at CES this year. But the unobtrusive wireless design, with a system that’s expandable to accommodate a variety of different types of environments is very interesting. There’s also the possibility that the data gathered by the CubeSensors could eventually be made to integrated with other devices and apps, adding to the dream of a sophisticated connected smartphone.

The proportion of web traffic coming from tablets has pushed past smartphones for the first time, according to Adobe’s latest Digital Index which has tracked more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide, between June 2007 to date, to compare which device types are driving the most page views. The monitored markets are the  U.K, U.S., China, Canada, Australia, Japan, France and Germany. While the difference between smartphone and tablet traffic is marginal — with tablets accounting for eight per cent of the measured page views and smartphones seven per cent — the growth in tablet page views is impressive, especially considering how new the category is (the first iPad launched in April 2010).

Of course both mobile device types still account for a fraction of the total share of page views when compared to desktops/laptops — which accounted for 84 per cent of the page views, according to Adobe’s data – but both are taking a growing share, and tablet growth is on an especially steep trajectory:

Adobe attributes the rise of tablet page views to how well-suited the form factor is for web browsing, with the most obvious attribute being tablets’ larger screen size vs smartphones (albeit, that gap is closing as some tablets shrink and some smartphones swell). On average, Adobe found that Inter­net users view 70 per cent more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone — so tablet users are doing more leisurely (and presumably leisure time) browsing.

While there is a good spread of different activities across both tablets and smartphones, Adobe’s index indicates that online shopping is a particularly popular activity for tablet users. Retail web­sites receive the high­est share of tablet traf­fic across all indus­tries, according to its data, while auto­mo­tive and travel shop­ping websites also get a “sig­nif­i­cant share” of tablet traffic:

Writing on its digital index blog, Adobe adds:

We’ve been keep­ing a close eye on how quickly tablets have taken off. Just ayear ago in Jan­u­ary we uncov­ered that vis­i­tors using tablets spend 54% more per online order than their coun­ter­parts on smart­phones, and 19% more than desktop/laptop users. Dur­ing the past hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son we saw that 13.5% of all online sales were trans­acted via tablets. And last month before the Super Bowlwe learned that online view­er­ship via tablets dou­bles dur­ing big sport­ing events. Now we know that not only is tablet traf­fic more valu­able in terms of ecom­merce and engage­ment, tablets have also become the pri­mary device for mobile browsing.

The U.K. leads Adobe’s Index for tablet page views, with the U.S. second:

All coun­tries tracked saw their share of traf­fic from tablets dou­ble over the course of 2012 — a trend Adobe expects to con­tinue through 2013. It added that some slight dips in tablet share in certain countries in November were down to PC traffic surging, rather than tablet page views dropping: