News Digest
Europeans go mobile
Europeans are hanging up on fixed-line calls as they move more to mobile phones, according to a report by research group Analysys.
The study examined the move to Fixed-Mobile Substitution (FMS) and the driving forces behind the change.
"In many markets it looks as if fixed-voice is going to suffer not the slow, lingering decline many have predicted, but a rather rapid one,” said the report’s co-author Dr Alastair Brydon. “At the current rate of traffic migration, 90 percent of all voice minutes in Finland will originate on mobile phones by 2008."
After several years of usage stagnation, the average outgoing mobile-voice usage per subscriber increased by 23 percent during 2006, while five Western European markets have already seen more voice minutes originate on mobile phone networks than on traditional voice and broadband networks combined.
Record online sales
Businesses are being urged to invest in an online storefront after UK e-retail sales in July broke through the £4bn barrier, the highest ever for a single month.
According to research from the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), year-on-year sales growth for the second quarter rose to 52.5 percent, significantly higher than the same period in 2006 (35.3 percent), 2005 (30.8 percent) and 2004 (35.4 percent).
James Roper, Chief Executive of IMRG, said: "Consumers are embracing the internet, as people no longer need to queue at tills or plan their lives around shop opening hours. Any business without an online store just simply won’t be able to compete."
Internet means business
More than half of UK small and medium businesses are using the internet as their main means of promotion and communication with partners, according to research from BT Business.
However, 40 percent of smaller firms have no dedicated website and 21 percent do not have any online presence.
Three-quarters of businesses see the internet as playing a major role in helping them achieve their business aims in the next five years, with 63 percent believing it helps them to compete with bigger players and in different markets.
Ninety percent of those surveyed said they preferred working with companies that had been recommended to them. European mobile use is on the rise
News in brief
IT Managers feel they spend too much time on procurement and administration, leaving them unable to do their jobs properly, according to research by Probrand.
Of the 250 IT Managers questioned, nearly 20 percent of their time is currently spent on procurement and another 20 percent on admin. Fifty percent of IT Managers said price and 79 percent said availability of products were of high importance to their procurement activities.
According to the latest figures from analyst Gartner, more than two million PCs were shipped in the UK in the second quarter of this year. That’s an increase of eight percent compared with the same period in 2006, with the demand for mobile PCs the major driving force.
In-car navigation systems make trips shorter, safer and more environmentally friendly, according to researchers at the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Taiwan.
Researchers asked some drivers to use SatNav and others to use road maps. Their results showed that SatNav-aided journeys were around seven percent shorter in distance than map-guided ones in towns, and two percent shorter in rural areas.
The researchers concluded that SatNav journeys are better for the environment as they are shorter and use less petrol.
This article originally appeared in the October 2007 edition of Expand.