Many of the statistics around mobile smartphone penetration, shopping app use, ad effectiveness and even market shares tend to hover around a 50% tipping point right now.

Big data comes to Aisle 3. Stop & Shop is actively encouraging customers to scan groceries as they shop in order to integrate offers and reduce checkout costs.

One thing that irks me is that my car GPS always provides a significantly different ETA than my smartphones. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to test once and for all which is most accurate and why.

Mobile product scanning and price checks give the retailer an opportunity to engage the customer on a human level, especially when the POS systems buckle under the strain of too many marketing inputs.

The much bigger and more significant market for mobile payments involves using a mobile phone to pay for things where you are not. Payments while mobile is where the real money and potential reside.

As the volume of research around the mobile industry continues to swirl, we thought it time to take another snapshot of where various parts of the market stand at this stage. Almost 90% of U.S. adults now have a mobile phone and more than half of them (55%) use their phones to go online, according to Pew Internet. Almost one in five do most of their online browsing on their phone.

The check-in ritual continues to look for models that provide value, establish real relationships with brands, and avoid pointlessness.

What if retailers could find a way to incent shoppers to scan products in their stores to promote sales of those products to others who are not in the store? That would be true 'reverse-showrooming.'

Some longstanding Web brands are being discovered for the first time by users on mobile platforms because their desktop services become especially powerful and relevant in this new context.

In Manhattan this week, a tale of two industries is playing out at the Javits Center. Upstairs, book publishers were still trying to dial in for a clue to mobile marketing. Downstairs, a blog convention had thousands of self-publishers already speaking to readers across platforms.