Travel is one of the world’s largest industries, and it continues to get bigger and bigger. The Internet had a huge impact on the travel industry early on, as consumers swarmed to online travel agencies to find the best prices on flights and hotels, and took to online travel guides to plan their trips in advance. In 2012, online U.S. travel sales surpassed $100 billion, according to comScore.

GPS will tell you how to get to the nearest Apple store. With iBeacon, Apple hopes to guide you around once you're inside, whether it's to pick up an order, upgrade to a new iPhone or shop for a pair of headphones.

On Friday, Apple Inc. will begin using the technology at its 254 U.S. stores to send you messages about products, events and other information — tailored to where you are inside, provided you have downloaded the Apple Store app and have given Apple permission to track you.

Using the iBeacon feature, the app will notify you if the computer you ordered is ready to be picked up, for example. Show a clerk your screen with the order number, and the clerk will get it for you. Walking by an iPhone table? You may get a message asking if you want to upgrade, check your upgrade availability and see if you can get money for trading in your old phone.

Amazon Payments made changes to its Privacy Notice and User Agreement and Unauthorized Transaction Policy, informing users through its annual notice emailed to Amazon Payments account holders at the end of October. "Each year we send out a notice to every person that has an active Amazon Payments account with important information about our privacy practices and how you can report errors or unauthorized transactions related to your account," the email notice began.

There is already technology that will can save your phone's location if its battery dies or can send text messages after the power has gone, but what if you could buy a phone that never lost power again because it was permanently on charge?
It sounds too good to be true but that's the idea behind a revolutionary technology called Wysips that converts energy from both artificial light and sunshine into electricity that can be used to keep your mobile alive.
It uses light-collecting crystals that can be fitted beneath or on top of the screens of phones, tablets and even smartwatches, and early prototypes have been able to convert 10 minutes of light exposure into four minutes of extra battery life.

The Search Agency is now back with a comparable look at the 100 top -multichannel retailers- in the US (read: brick and mortar stores that offer e-commerce). Using the same criteria as in the previous test (see below), the firm examined mobile site load time, site format, store locator and presence/whereabouts of a search box.

When Apple released the latest version of its iPhone operating system, this fall, it wreaked havoc on Life360’s location-based app. Life360’s service allows family members to keep tabs on one another by tracking their smartphone locations and displaying them on a map. But tens of thousands of Life360’s iPhone users were suddenly complaining that the app no longer worked as well. Life360 was inundated with emails from users upset at how the app worked after updating to iOS 7, according to Life360 CEO Chris Hulls.

Luckily for Life360 and a slew of other location-based apps, Apple is planning on changing how its location services feature works back to pre-iOS 7 days, according to several iOS developers who have been using a beta version of the software. That is, the forthcoming iOS 7.1 will allow apps to access users’ smartphone locations even when apps are turned off from running in the background. The change will likely mean increased utility for location-based apps and a corresponding goldmine of user data for mobile platforms and their advertisers.

Verslag Cross Media Café: De toekomst van mobiele media diensten

Google has released its latest Google Cloud Endpoints project for general availability, which aims to make it easier for mobile developers to tie their apps into Google's APIs. For mobile developers, Endpoints provides a simple way to develop a shared Web back end and also provides critical infrastructures, such as OAuth 2.0 authentication, eliminating a great deal of work that would otherwise be needed, according to Google.

The allure of digital banking is typically its convenience, and ironically, the less banking customers go into physical branches, the more likely they are to interact with their financial institutions.

A July 2013 survey by Maxymiser surveyed US consumers who owned at least one computer, tablet and smartphone, and found that nearly three-quarters of respondents visited a banking website or mobile site more than five times per month. About seven in 10 respondents to the survey visited physical locations fewer than five times per month