Mobile-related technologies for the past week, in 3 (or almost) words: No More Ads, Farewell Tablets, SMS 2.0

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THE WEEK IN 3 WORDS

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SEASON #03 – WEEK #10

3. NO MORE ADS?
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As per a recent report by PageFair and Adobe*, the usage of ad blockers has been growing very
fast last year and especially on mobile. Given that Internet traffic is to be dominated by mobile
in the coming months / years (and already is in some countries - US, UK, France, etc.), blocking
advertisements is becoming more and more natural for end-users and could reach up to 80% of
users**.
Additionally, ads blockers are no more limited to user’s will. Shine, providing an ads blocking
solution for operators’ network, has signed Three Group, who planned to deploy it in UK and
Italy.
This is a huge threat for advertisers, who will have to move to alternate solutions like “native
advertising” - the ads are managed by the sites & applications editors themselves and directly
managed from their platforms (and not from 3rd party ads servers). This means the look & feel
of ads will have to be much more adjusted to the hosting platform and differentiating the ads
will be harder.
But it’s also a very good opportunity for advertisers to renew their approach for communication
and bring added-value to their customers.
(*): http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report-the_cost_of_ad_blocking.pdf (**): http://in.tune.com/tmc-site-ad-blocking-report

5. FAREWELL TABLETS
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It’s one of the learnings of the MWC 2016 held in Barcelona this February: tablets seem to have
vanished from vendors’ catalogs…
Indeed, none amongst Samsung, LG, HTC and Sony have announced an upcoming tablet. Apple did
not attend to the conference, but there is no rumour of a new coming iPad and its iPad sales are
expected to continue to decline in the first quarter of 2016*.
There are several reasons why vendors denigrate tablets: users are not changing their tablets as often
as their phones - because they have no real needs for better performances or thinner devices - and
smartphones are getting bigger and bigger, thus approaching tablets experience.
The hope for tablets probably lies in professional usage. Microsoft Windows Surface Book is
becoming a real success** while Microsoft mainly emphasis the capacity of its tablet to replace a
traditional laptop. Apple follows the same path with the iPad Pro, equipped for a laptop-similar usage.
(*): http://www.gsmarena.com/apples_ipad_sales_expected_to_drop_to_a_record_low_in_q1_2016-news-16675.php (**): http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-beats-apple-online-tablet-sales

7. SMS 2.0?
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With its 1 billion active users*, Whatsapp is definitely making a lot of envious competitors,
especially mobile operators, that were leading the messaging market with SMS.
At Barcelona World Mobile Congress, a bunch of them, along with Google, announced a joint
effort** to bring RCS - Rich Communications Service - by default to their customers.
RCS is older than Whatsapp and suffered from lack of (technical) cohesion between operators
so far. By involving Google - that recently bought a RSC specialist Jibe Mobile - operators may
manage to give a breath of fresh air to their initiative. Google will provide free RCS client and
integrate it to Android.
The position of Google in this collaboration may be strictly at its own interest to compete
against Facebook (Whatsapp) and Apple (iMessage), by leveraging the marketing capacity of
operators to push hard on RCS - which looks now as a kind of iMessage for Android OS. But
what do the operators have to win, given that if they try to monetize RCS w/ fees it won’t stand
a chance against free messaging apps?
(*): http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/whatsapp-hits-one-billion-users-remains-in-search-of-revenue/ (**): http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160222005526/en/Global-Operators-Google-GSMA-Align-Adoption-Rich