Type of Article: MacTech Blog

Aggressive promotional activity from smartphone vendors and the launch of premium smartphone VR solutions, including Google’s Daydream View, will help drive the installed base of VR headsets from 4 million in 2015 to 81 million in 2020, according to IHS Market (www.ihs.com). That same year, consumer spending on VR headsets will reach $7.9 billion and spending on VR entertainment will hit $3.3 billion, adds the research group.

At a pivotal time for the Internet of Things, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies are blindsiding existing wireless sensor network technologies with multi-kilometer network ranges, multi-year battery lifetimes and cloud-integrated network stacks, according to a recently published report by global IoT research firm ON World (www.onworld.com).

End-user spending for the worldwide virtual personal assistant (VPA)-enabled wireless speaker market will reach $2.1 billion by 2020, up from $360 million in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). By 2020, 3.3% of global households are forecast to have adopted a VPA-enabled wireless speaker.

A new study from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that the value of domestic money transfers, including operator money and social media money services, will reach $520 billion in mobile transactions by 2018, up nearly 200% from an estimated $178 billion last year.