Comms Dealer

Payment service provider NetPay has linked up with NFRN Commercial (the voice of independent retailers representing over 16,000 news and convenience retailers across the UK and Ireland) to lower the cost of taking card payments for NFRN members.

NetPay offers customers online processing, payment terminal and merchant services. The firm's MD, Carl Churchill, said: "We chose NFRN Commercial because of its commitment to getting a better deal for independents. It works hard to help retailers develop their sales and profits to achieve their potential.

"NetPay too are committed to this, saving the average retail newsagent 59% on their merchant services rates. NetPay customers not only benefit from these savings but also insights into their customers through our reporting and analytics tool Revolution.

"Many UK retailers, particularly those in the c-store sector are still not benefiting from the EU's changes to Visa Debit transactions charges, either because they are not aware of the changes or their incumbent provider has chosen not to pass the potential savings on to their customer."

These changes are particularly beneficial to the c-store sector and NFRN members, pointed out Churchill.

"With the charging moving from a pence per instance to a percentage, the times where card charges heavily erode your margin on low value transactions are a thing of the past," he added. "More cost-effective transaction charges mean a bigger promotion of card use and a reduction in the charges and risk associated with banking cash. Many retailers forget that it costs their business money to bank cash and cheques. The average costs for banking £100 in cash is 60p with the main high street banks."

NFRN CEO Paul Baxter added: "The relationship with NetPay gives retailers increased choice and access to the benefit of the recent changes to the Visa Debit interchange charges. This change is something the NFRN has supported and provided evidence on as part of the European's Unions review process into these costs and their impact on our members."

Inventory as a service specialist Agilitas has celebrated 25 years in business with the last 12 months pointing to more significant growth to come.

The company manages IT spare parts inventories and provides technical services to customers across 32 countries and 9,000 locations throughout Europe. These services include technical training, support, product repair and specialist engineering resource.

February this year saw a change in ownership which helped the business increase turnover by over 30%. Staff numbers have grown over 50% from 53 to 80 people.

To mark its 25th birthday Agilitas relaunched its website and appointed a new Marketing Director, Richard Eglon.

"25 years is a great achievement for any business and demonstrates our longevity and ability to adapt to changing technology and the environment around us," said Shaun Lynn, CEO of Agilitas.

"We're delighted to have Richard on board. His appointment is a key part of our strategy going forwards and will help support our continued growth and defining our company proposition."

Chess has been named as the UK's National Champion in The European Business Awards for Customer Focus for the second consecutive year.

The European Business Awards engaged with over 32,000 business from 33 European countries this year, and 678 companies from across Europe have been named as National Champions - going through to the second phase of the competition.

CEO and founder of The Chess Group David Pollock stated: "We have always been an ambitious organisation with a desire to grow and be great at what we do.

"We strive every day to be the best of the best and this award is testament to our efforts.

"We firmly believe that happy people make customers happy and this award shows we are staying true to our vision of being a great place to work and a great place to be a customer."

Adrian Tripp, CEO of the European Business Awards, added: "Congratulations to Chess and all the companies that have been selected to represent their country as National Champions. They play an important part in creating a stronger business community."

Channel Telecom's strong performance has been rewarded with a place in the annual Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 league table, a listing of Britain's private TMT companies with the fastest growing sales over three years.

Channel Telecom debuted the list at 65th and attributes its success to partner acquisition and brand reputation.

Since January, Channel Telecom's partner base has grown by 72%, recruiting on average 10 new partners each month and the firm is now on target to hit £10m turnover this year.

Clifford Norton, MD, said: "To debut at 65th is a wonderful achievement. We've had a fantastic 2015 so far and this achievement underlines what a great year this has been."

Sennheiser's wired CIRCLE headsets have been upgraded to give users improved all-day wearing comfort and call management while ensuring sound quality in a lightweight headset design, claimed the firm.

The upgraded Sennheiser CIRCLE series headsets, consisting of 10 variants, provide professionals with an broader choice of options.

The headsets offer CIRCLE Flex dual hinge ear cups now with soft leatherette ear pads covering the acoustic foam, ensuring closer ear fit, day-long wearing comfort, and optimised sound quality.

The CIRCLE headsets' in-line call control units come in a new, more attractive and sleeker design, making them more ergonomic and easier to use.

A magnetic holder allows easy fixing of the unit to the work desk, ensuring seamless, fingertip call management.

New software-based sound enhancement profiles automatically adjust audio settings to optimise both voice quality for calls and users' multimedia experience.

CIRCLE headsets feature ActiveGard technology that protects users from acoustic shock and sound surges.

In addition, a Noise at Work limiter offers additional protection in compliance with EU legislation. To ensure practical and secure transport and storage, the headsets come with a nylon carry pouch.

Lars Riis Rasmussen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, EMEA, at Sennheiser Communications, said: "Over the last few years our CIRCLE series headsets have become a popular and valued all-day working tool in many contact centres, offices and Unified Communications environments. We have used customer feedback to further improve the product range."

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts a healthy adoption for 5G, with service revenues set to exceed $65 billion by 2025, compared to just $100 million during its first year of commercial services in 2020. This figure would represent approximately 7% of all operator-billed service revenues.

Juniper notes that while the first commercial roll outs are expected in 2020, widespread adoption will only occur from 2025, with national spectrum licensing occurring over a period of years as per 4G.

The new research - 5G Market Strategies: 4G LTE Evolution, Spectrum Analysis & Opportunities 2015-2025 - observed that there is a growing consensus around the development of 5G standards in terms of both technology and performance aspects. The '5G vision' includes key requisites such as network speeds of at least 10Gbps, 1ms latency or less, improved spectral efficiency, low energy consumption, better battery life, higher device density - along with improved reliability and flexibility.

Juniper Research found that 5G will not only enable faster connections but will act as a catalyst for a wide range of new consumer and enterprise experiences, including both data intensive and energy efficient applications, high definition 4K-8K video, self-driving cars, advanced virtual reality, and a sensory/tactile Internet - constantly monitoring and controlling. Also noted was that operators will need to consider multiple service deployment scenarios to achieve an adequate ROI from their network and licence investments.

Research author, Nitin Bhas, said: "These discrete segments or services will require transparent and competitive pricing based on data usage, device type, and speeds. This means that profit margins will vary with regards to the sector enabled."

A new study from Juniper Research has found that wireless charging adoption for mobile devices will increase rapidly in the coming years, with nearly 40% of households in the US and over 20% in Europe using wireless charging by 2020.

The new research - Wireless Charging: Opportunities, Applications & Standards 2015-2020 - demonstrates how the technology can provide a springboard for many data services, across a range of sectors, as well as providing more convenient power. However, consumer perceptions of the technology, particularly around its efficiency compared to wired charging, are likely to keep interest in the technology relatively low in the short term.

With more devices now implementing wireless charging (smartphones, tablets, wearables and soon laptops), infrastructure providers are starting to roll out support for the technology, in a way similar to public or customer Wi-Fi. The research notes that this visible infrastructure presence has a key role to play in increasing awareness of the technology, where it can be tried without committing to a purchase.

One of the biggest areas of potential for wireless charging in the coming years will be the provision of additional data-based services alongside the charging itself. While easing 'battery anxiety' is a key appeal of the technology, the easy data exchange will in future enable a variety of over-the-air services through the charging points.

"Wireless charging will ultimately be about more than the power and speed of charge," said research author, James Moar. "The ability to pinpoint device location through data exchange enables all kinds of location-based activation functions around the home, the car and in the leisure industry. Industry stakeholders must be ready to leverage this capacity."

Other key findings include:
• With regulatory and MNO approval, Japan will lead the world in adopting longer-ranged resonance-based charging technologies. In cost-driven markets, induction-based charging will remain predominant for the next 5 years.

• A fifth of all wearable devices will incorporate wireless charging by 2020. This will have a huge impact on the space, permitting diverse designs without physical connectors.

The wearables market is set to treble in size in the next five years and become worth over $25 billion, according to industry analyst firm, CCS Insight.

Its new global forecast for wearable devices - which includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented and virtual reality headsets, and wearable cameras - indicates the market is set to grow from 84 million units in 2015 to 245 million units in 2019.

"Smartwatches will remain the main source of wearables revenue, delivering over $9 billion of sales in 2015," said Ben Wood, CCS Insight's chief of research.

"Those who labelled Apple Watch a failure need to think again. In its first quarter of sales it accounted for around $1 billion of revenue and we expect sales to continue to rise, particularly in the all-important fourth quarter."

Furthermore, the explosive growth of fitness trackers will see sales more than double in volume between 2014 and 2015. Until 2019, these devices will remain the biggest wearables category by unit sales.

CCS Insight expects China to eclipse the US in 2015 as the biggest market for fitness trackers, reaching an impressive 18.5 million units as local brand Xiaomi steps up production of its Mi Band and other suppliers look for growth in this market. The fitness band market in China is predicted to be twice the size of the US market and 2.5 times that of Western Europe by 2018.

Wood continued: "As we predicted, consumer awareness of wearables in key markets like China, the US and UK has gone sky-high in 2015. We believe this can be attributed to what we are calling the 'Apple Watch effect' as well as the growing success of brands such as Fitbit in the US and Xiaomi in China."

Another area CCS Insight believes will see considerable growth is wearable cameras. In terms of volume, it will remain the third biggest wearables category for the next three years, with 19 million wearable cameras forecast to be sold in 2017. Despite GoPro currently having a strong hold over the market, CCS Insight expects competition to heat up from 2016 onwards as others target this emerging segment.

Wood said: "As smartphone margins gets squeezed to increasingly uncomfortable levels, it comes as little surprise that many manufacturers are turning to wearables in the hope that they will be the next big source of growth in consumer electronics. However, we caution that these devices will not be immune from the rapid declines in price and profit margins seen in smartphones. Only those players with huge scale, broad distribution, a strong brand and giant marketing budgets will ultimately succeed."

Provider of website hosting and domain registration services Planet Hippo has launched Site Designer, a new website builder solution available as a core component of its hosting packages, enabling users to build their own websites in as little as 10 minutes without needing specialist software skills or the assistance of expensive web developers.

According to Darren Lavender, Managing Director of Planet Hippo: "Site Designer will revolutionise the way that websites can be built and significantly reduce the cost of having a professional looking internet presence."

Site Designer provides access to hundreds of professionally designed templates and over three million stock images.

Every template is fully responsive making them compatible with smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices as pages, text and images are automatically for optimum viewing regardless of screen format.

Users can change templates as often as required, with all text and pictures automatically reformatted to the new design, keeping websites fresh to maintain the interest of visitors.

Users can also add text, pictures, maps and video with the click of a mouse. Additional drag and drop content items include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Maps as well as YouTube and Flickr.

Planet Hippo offers a range of hosting packages with Site Designer as a standard component. A fully featured ecommerce cart is also available as part of the Enterprise package which includes templates that allow the building of an unlimited number of catalogue pages.

Virgin Media Business is to power up to 3,000 businesses in Manchester's thriving Northern Quarter with ultrafast connectivity, giving a boost to the local economy and business productivity in the area.

This announcement comes ahead of a report released tomorrow by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) exploring digital demand among SMEs and the importance of Internet access to their business.

In addition, a study by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that SME productivity could be increased by 10% by doing more online.

Through a package that has been designed to support the connectivity needs of businesses located in multi-tenanted buildings, 3,000 businesses co-located in 300 buildings within Manchester's nine postcode Northern Quarter will now have access to fast and reliable dedicated Internet connections.

Once the ultrafast fibre is installed directly into the premises, each of the small businesses gets their own dedicated Internet connection with equal upload and download speeds.

Similar packages were launched earlier this year in London's Tech City, a technology cluster located in East London. More than 450 London businesses, located in 70 buildings, are now being connected to Virgin Media Business's dedicated connections.

Each small business in a building connected with fibre by Virgin Media Business is able to apply for a subsidy from the Government's SuperConnected Cities scheme.

In his spring budget Chancellor George Osborne announced that the Government will allocate £4 million to establish a technology start-up hub in the Northern Quarter to help create 'thriving local ecosystems' similar to those seen in London.

This followed on from a report published by Tech Nation earlier this year which highlighted that Greater Manchester has seen a 70 per cent growth in digital companies between 2010 and 2013 with one of the highest average company turnover growth rates in the UK.

Peter Kelly, Managing Director, Virgin Media Business, said: "A central part of any technology hub is reliable, secure high-speed Internet. This can make the difference between thriving and merely surviving for small and medium sized businesses so I'm thrilled we're able to bring Manchester's vibrant business community our latest package with the fastest broadband speeds."

Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council, added: "Virgin Media Business' investment in Manchester is welcome. Quick, reliable broadband is the backbone of our digital economy, transforming the way businesses operate and the services they can provide. This announcement represents a bespoke ultra-fast broadband package for small and medium enterprises and will help support some of Manchester's most digitally minded and creative businesses."