Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The acceptance of mobile payments in countries such as Japan, North America and some Western European countries will lead to 50% of consumers in such mature markets using a wearable device or their mobile device to make payments by 2018.

Three types of mobile payments or wallets were identified by Gartner, namely smartphones or wearable tech, branded mobile wallets from banks or credit cards and branded mobile wallets from retailers.

However, rather than mobile payment wallets that are tied to a device, Gartner forecasts that cloud-based solutions will have a better rate of adoption as they are able to "reach a wider audience and can support many use cases beyond face-to-face or in-store options".

Last year, a report on wearable payments from Tractica predicted transaction volumes will increase significantly over the next five years rising from around $3.1billion in 2015 to $501.1billion by 2020 and accounting for about one-fifth of all mobile transactions and 1% of all cashless payments in retail....

Google today announced that it plans to officially bring Android to smartwatches through its new project called Android Wear. It will enable developers to use features such as Google's Voice Search and health-tracking apps on wristwatches.

It's a free, open-source operating system, just like the smartphone and tablet version of Android.

According to a Google blog post, Android Wear will have many of the features found on existing smartwatches, including the ability to display updates from social media, message alerts, shopping notifications, and news....