Some companies are taking a crack at using customers' smartphones at physical retail locations to capture more data. One system offers an in-store portal for large retail stores that lets customers use their smartphones to access free in-store Wi-Fi. When customers log in, the system captures customer activity, including in-store locations, and can offer deals and other enticements based on where the customer is in the store.

A Swedish electric device retailer has just granted a contract to the mobile payments service to help the company upgrade its mobile commerce experience for consumers, to offer an enhanced shopping experience over smartphones.

A popular jewelry retailer implemented a mobile point-of-sale application that all but eliminated customer lines and helped increase sales by 318% over the previous holiday season. With the mobile POS application, the chain increased points of checkout from four to 10 in most of its 28 stores across the U.S.

Although a number of mobile customer loyalty and rewards companies have debuted over the years, a good many of these new efforts have been focused on taking the offline concept of the 10-hole punch card and transitioning it to mobile. Another startup has a different take on loyalty - it wants to make these programs more fun, and more like a game you play than a task to complete.

Online mobile payments company BOKU has confirmed its new partnership with U.S. Cellular, the stated goal of which is to maximize the adoption of direct-to-bill mobile operator billing as a payment option.

A new study says that retailers will significantly bump up their mobile marketing spend over the next three years thanks in large part to coupons and advertising. The report says the $55 billion annual spend in 2015 almost doubles the spend that marketers are expected to invest in mobile this year, which is $28 billion.

Almost half (43%) of retailers say that mobile and tablets are among their top three priorities for this year. And while respondents are split regarding mobile's impact on conversion rates, one study showed a net positive impact - 36 percent of retailers say that mobile sales and traffic have helped their company's overall Web conversion rate, while 29 percent have felt a negative impact.

T-Mobile isn't shying away from bold pledges of making NFC a reality this year. The company says it is working with a number of partners to bring a variety of NFC technologies to market

Square CEO Jack Dorsey challenged his team to create a solution for accepting payments at Starbucks, which the mobile-payments company had partnered with in August. When an engineer worked out a solution (using QR codes within the Square Wallet app that could tap into Starbucks' preexisting system), Dorsey was so giddy that he grabbed a high-end bottle of scotch off his desk and gave it to the engineer as a reward. The only catch? As both would soon learn, the bottle of alcohol was worth a lot more than Dorsey had initially realized--roughly $2,000.

London's transit agency, Transportation for London, announced the rollout of contactless credit card readers on all of the city's 8,500 buses last month, allowing riders to charge their bus fare directly to their bank accounts. But the bright future credit card companies see in contactless payments could be cut short by the rapidly developing mobile payments market, which tech gurus see as a huge area for future growth.