ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Swiss consumers are increasingly ordering groceries online using their mobile phones, reports LeShop.ch, the Migros online store.
Sales coming in via iPhones, Androids and tablets more than doubled, to 11 percent of sales at CHF15 million. The rate of growth of mobile phone sales has been far higher than for computer-based sales shortly after they were introduced, says Switzerland’s largest grocery store chain, and it expects cell phone orders to continue to rise strongly.
LeShop says in a press release 3 January that its largest group of customers is families with small children. The average order is CHF285.
The post office’s Express service in 2011 delivered 39,000 tons of food to more than 106,000 households for LeShop. Growth was strong, 7 percent, in the first half of the year but stalled in the second half, leaving LeShop in the black, but with sales at virtually the same level as in 2010.
Coop’s younger online shop, coopathome.ch, saw 10 percent growth in 2011, TSR reported Monday, with total sales of CHF85 million, compared to LeShop’s CHF150m.
Delighted Swiss mobile phone user
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Swisscom will cut roaming rates for mobile phones by 5 centimes a minute each year until 2014, starting 1 October.
The company announced the new rates Tuesday 20 September, saying the 25 percent reduction in roaming charges will kick in this year for subscribers, but only in 2012 for prepaid cards.
Swisscom currently charges CHF.085 a minute. The second 5 centime cut will take place in July 2012.
©2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – It’s raining in the Lake Geneva region today, but that’s not the only reason we are scanning the sky.
To love or not love it, that is the question haunting reviewers around the globe since Apple’s announcement Tuesday of its new iCloud, a kind of digital pie in the sky that will house all our (Apple) device storage needs.
The cloud up there will make life easier for Apple, whose, according to its guru Steve Jobs, is having a nightmarish time trying to keep all our Apple devices synched. And for Apple product owners, it should make our computers lighter and at some point cheaper because they won’t be weighed down by all those operational systems that lie behind our everyday computing.
But the best news in the short term, it appears, is that Apple’s move could put the music industry back on stronger financial feet, with our personal cloud data holding all our music, available to us anytime, anywhere (thereby making us more willing to pay iTunes to get it in the first place). Wired doesn’t entirely agree with this, but it does say Apple’s move could well be an “industry changer” despite not inventing anything and being only for Apples.
For those owners, another bit of good news is that our mobile phone bills could drop, as Apple clouds gather up our instant messages, texts, photos and videos included, on a new system called iMessage, available this autumn, and let us send them for free.
Better yet: for once, all our devices might really be synched, quickly, easily.
There are a few sore losers, starting with mobile phone manufacturers and phone companies, who stand to lose millions. Data privacy protection missionaries are asking uncomfortable questions about the security of the skies above us.
Reviews and comments on iCloud: CNET (video of Jobs presentation), The Daily Record, Scotland, 27/7 Wall St, USA
Innovation: behind the political and business buzzword, part 1
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Six million dollars have been put into savings account by 250,000 small savers in Kenya in just three months, thanks to a creative new project by mobile phone company Safaricom. The phone company’s customers can start with as little as $1, giving the poor a chance to save money in a meaningful way for the first time, says Michael Joseph, outgoing chief executive officer of Safaricom.
Joseph was in Geneva for an Economist Conference on Emerging Innovation, one of several globally active managers who shared what they have learned in order to sell their products in less developed markets.
A key thread which ran through the talks is that conditions in emerging markets are very different from those elsewhere, but companies can sell if they listen carefully to their customers, show flexibility in their corporate structure, and involve local talent in the decision-making processes.
Safaricom started a money transfer system called m-Pesa (pesa means money in Swahili) in 2007. It allows Kenyans in even the most remote parts of the country to transfer money and make small payments using their mobile phones, once they have deposited cash with an agent. M-Pesa today has 13 million customers, 20,000 agents throughout the country, and it moves the equivalent of $15m a day in mostly tiny transactions.
The mobile phone banking system is estimated to move almost 30 percent of Kenya’s GDP, says Joseph, although it contributes only eight percent to the company’s revenues.
Money for phoning, for sending, and now for saving
Three months ago m-Pesa started to offer its customers a new service, M-Kesho, a savings plan that also offers micro-credits and micro-insurance.
Refugee in Brazil in touch with family. © 2010 UNHCR
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Refugees will now have the possibility to initiate searches for their loved ones scattered by conflict or disaster using a simple mobile phone. The service is anonymous, free and secure. It was launched as a pilot project in Uganda 3 September, and 500 users have already registered to use it in the first four days.
Danish NGO Refugees United, which designed a web-based family tracing platform for refugees, has partnered with Geneva-based UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), mobile phone maker Ericsson, and MTN, Africa’s largest mobile phone operator, to make the tracing service available to refugees with access to a mobile phone.
Christopher Mikkelsen, who founded and now runs Refugees United with his brother David, told GenevaLunch that while the web-based platform is used by about 4,000 refugees to search for missing family members, the availability of internet access in Africa is low, but mobile phone penetration is almost 50 percent. He says that 75-80 percent of refugees have access to a mobile phone in Africa and can use the service. The project promises to go global at the end of the month.
“For the first time, refugees themselves are drawn into the equation to trace family members”, he says, paving the way for “the bottom of the pyramid” to take charge of their lives. The platform is open, and users decide just how much information they wish to share. Typically, traces are made based on nicknames, birthmarks or other distinguishing features that only a family member would recognize.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The hottest change in the airline industry is the rapid move to BCBP, bar code boarding passes, whose use has nearly doubled in the past year. By the end of 2010 airports should have 100 percent BCBP coverage, meaning that airlines should be able to adopt this service if they want to, allowing anyone with any type of mobile phone to check in by showing the bar code from his or her phone: the end of the paper check-ins. The change is a particular boon for people who are traveling and who don’t have easy access to printers, possibly most airline passengers. Currently, 115 airlines use this and another 23 plan to.
Iata, at its annual media conference in Geneva Tuesday 15 December outlines some of the other improvements passengers will see in coming months, with the goal of moving people through airports faster.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Friday often brings some of the world’s stranger bits of news, from amusing to weird to hard to believe:
- Young people who are not yet of voting age, in Geneva, Switzerland erected the first new and relatively small minaret, defying the 29 November popular vote that bans them: in the Place Neuve, out of cardboard. Institute of Race Relations, UK (Ed. note: here is a design for homemade miniature cardboard minarets, in case they suddenly sell out in Swiss shops)
- Manchester, England: a 29-year-old man was shot dead when he and friends were confronted outside the money exchange where he worked. Police say he was robbed for cash and for his laptop. A 20-year-old is in custody. Guardian, UK
- A heavily drunk man in the Perm Territory, in the Russian Urals, was saved from flames by his cat. He fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand and when the apartment burst into flames his cat leaped onto him, scratching his face until the man came to and phoned the fire department. Ria Novosti, Russia
- Read more…
Global Humanitarian Forum, Kofi Annan, 23 June 2009, Geneva
Update 2 13:01 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “This conference must provide a powerful voice for the victims of climate change,” Kofi Annan said in opening remarks at the second annual Global Humanitarian Forum, Tuesday morning 23 June in Geneva. The forum is focusing on the impact on humans of climate change during the two day conference that brings together leaders from government, industry and academia.
“We have the knowledge, resources and the technology to reduce the pace of climate change,” said Annan. “What is needed is the vision, the courage” to act. He cited as an example of a good private and public partnership a weather information project recently launched in Africa by the Global Humanitarian Forum, Ericsson, World Meterological Organization and mobile phone operators. “Collecting accurate information about weather and climate across Africa will give farmers better guidance about when to plant and harvest crops as well as helping alert communities about severe storms.”
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The CHF5 you now pay if you’ve rushed onto a Swiss train without buying your ticket in advance will go up to CHF10 on Switzerland’s national day, 1 August. The CFF rail company and public transport authorities have agreed to the increase in order to discourage the growing number of people who get on trains without a ticket, slowing down ticket-checkers and making it difficult for them to complete their tour of the train.
Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) – Swiss will be doubling the capacity and also the speed of its Internet connection lines in coming months, and enlarging its mobile phone base by 20 percent, it has told TSR. The combination should create a major improvement in mobile phone service, particularly Internet via mobile phone. A longer term project will take two years but should provide regular wifi service in CFF double-decker and Intercity trains, where reception is currently patchy.
The United Nations Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Vodafone are joining forces to create mHealth Alliance, a project designed to encourage “innovation and maximum impact” with mobile phones to improve health care delivery, particularly in developing countries. Sixty-four percent of the world’s four billion cell phone users are in emerging economies, according to the UN Foundation press release on the project, and cell phones are targeted for several health care initiatives: the new alliance is designed to act as a complementary umbrella organization.
Waiting in line for iPhones the day they went on sale in Switzerland (2008)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Comparis, the online Swiss consumer price comparison group, argues in its latest press release that the Swiss are spending CHF2 million more than they need to on mobile phones, without any interest in switching to cheaper deals.
A new US study published in a psychology journal today shows that mobile phones are a greater danger “than even the chattiest drivers,” and pose more of a danger on the road than previously thought, adding to a growing body of evidence about their negative impact on road safety. Reuters
Bern, Switzerland (Tribune de Geneve, Fre) – The upper house of the Swiss parliament has voted strongly in favour of banning all cell phone pornography, including soft porn. The lower house is expected to follow suit. The move comes in the wake of several incidents involving gang rapes and other sexual violence by teenagers. Under current Swiss law it is a crime to distribute pornography to children under 16, but the new proposals would ban it altogether from the cell phone market.
