Within the credit card sector, innovative technologies are changing the way people make purchases.

Mobile and alternative payments are experiencing significant growth, with a range of payment providers in the mix including PayPal, MasterPass by MasterCard, Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, and Google Wallet.

In addition, co-branded credit cards continue to lure affluent households and millennial shoppers — which are prime demographics in the payments industry.

It is easy to categorize wearables in the enterprise as simply a variation or next step in Bring Your Own Technology (BYOD), but in reality it is a bit more complicated. While clearly enterprise wearables and BYOD overlap, wearable is a distinct category with its own dynamics and should be thought of differently from non-wearable BYOD.

Embedded systems are part and parcel of every modern electronic component. These are  low power consumption units that are used to run specific tasks for example remote controls, washing machines, microwave ovens,  RFID tags , sensors, actuators and thermostats used in various applications, networking hardware such as switches, routers, modems, mobile phones, PDAs, etc.

Organizations are rapidly expanding BYOD programs, enabling more users to access enterprise applications and data from a wider range of devices. In many cases, they are implementing a hybrid mobility strategy of issuing corporate-owned mobile devices keeping the BYOD policies alive and permitting employees to select from preapproved devices. All these are allowing mobility in workforce and improved productivity by way of anytime, anywhere worker engagement, which in turn increase employee satisfaction as well.

The combination of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud in one integrated stack is called SMAC Stack. It enables each function to help the other to maximize their impact which creates an organization-wide synergic impact. This convergence is one of the most impactful trends for both consumer and enterprise realization within digital media, communications, applications, content, and commerce. Instead of implementing solutions separately, SMAC encourages an organization to build and deploy integrated solutions wherein social/mobile adds connectedness and cloud/analytics makes the organization more agile and responsive.

A Mobile Application (Mobile App) is a compact application that is intended to be used on a mobile computing platform such as a mobile telephone, a tablet, or any number of other network aware mobile platforms. A mobile app can be as simple as an alarm clock, or as complex as a business-specific mobile dispatch application. They can be limited to a specific platform, or leverage a common framework to take advantage of multiple platforms.

In the mobile gaming ecosystem, an app store works as a major OTT distribution platform in today’s highly fragmented digital distribution channel. An app store distributes non-network mobile gaming applications under a downloadable format followed by a paid, free, or in-app-purchase model, or a combined model. The mobile game application then uses the mobile device’s platform to run the gaming software. The popular app stores are Google Play and Apple Appstore; however, there are other app stores who also played major roles in mobile game distribution such as independent app stores run on iOS or Android.

The development of sensor technology has launched many different technology devices in the past decade. From FitBits to iWatches, the technology we see in these small devices is, simply put, incredible. As the technology becomes more accessible, we are seeing more and more industries getting involved with not just smart wearable devices, but smart apparel.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has an ever-evolving definition. Each week, a different company hypes a different definition that includes pieces of the market and ignores others. So, how does Compass Intelligence, a leading provider of Telecom market information, define this space? Take the scenario of a city. There are various public and private elements that add up to a city: homes, commercial buildings, government buildings, factories & industrial, infrastructure, transportation, government services, and the list goes on. Each of these elements has “things.” A commercial building has access control, video surveillance, HVAC, offices, elevators, parking structures, sprinklers, energy management, demand response… and the list continues on. The same goes for each of the elements listed above that add to a city.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) represent large distributed systems of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. CDNs provide solutions for efficiently and effectively managing content of all types. Solutions include core services such as aggregation, management, and distribution of content as well as a variety of value-added functionality.