PayAnywhere, a leader in mobile point of sale solutions, is receiving high praise in response to the launch of its innovative and freshly revamped merchant portal known as PayAnywhere Inside. The company touts its PayAnywhere Inside platform as a robust merchant portal that gives merchants an inside track on their sales, with new features.

Some predictions are saying that by the year 2018, AR technology applications will be worth investments of $2.5 billion. According to a recent market forecast issued by ABI Research, by the year 2018, developers will be making investments of more than $2.5 billion in augmented reality apps, particularly in the marketing and retail spaces.

If you're still not convinced about the impact a mobile app or online shopping platform can have on your business, a new report on Australia's spending habits may give you that extra push. One in three Australians surveyed by eBay stated that they have shopped online while watching a movie, while one in five admitted to making purchases while in the bathroom.

Macy's is getting a head start on back-to-school season with a campaign that circles around mobile and social as key ways to connect with college students this year. The retailer is using SMS and a mobile microsite in its campaign to give away a $500 gift card this year. Macy's continually turns to mobile in its seasonal campaigns since its core demographic is heavily tech-savvy.

Mobile point-of-sale is not just for small merchants any longer. Increasingly, large retailers such as department stores are also embracing mobile to streamline in-store transactions and enhance customer relationships. Of merchants with 500 or more employees, 61 percent have either already deployed mPOS technology or plan to do so some time in the next 12 months, according to a recent report from Yankee Group. The trend will be in evidence during the upcoming holiday season, with numerous department store associates equipped with mobile devices to complete transactions.

Watchmaker Bell & Ross is taking its print advertisement to the next level by placing a QR code on the page to allow consumers who are interested in the product to find more information and purchase products from their mobile devices. The latest Bell & Ross ad for its WWI Chronographe Monopoussoir with a QR code is found in the July 2013 issue of Robb Report. The QR code takes consumers to a mobile-optimized site where they can learn more about the timepieces and make purchases.

Rolf Weber and Dan Jarosch took the plunge and started brandsExclusive (BEX) in August 2008. It was probably fortunate that they were in a Berlin bar at the time, celebrating Weber's birthday. The good vibes of the surroundings may have temporarily helped diminish the scale of the challenges facing the co-founders. The global financial crisis had been simmering for a year, and would come to the boil a month later with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Bank. This increased the challenge for the Australian-based Germans of attracting capital Down Under, where there was initial resistance to their business concept.

While there is a large amount of research and actual data on m-commerce available for more mature markets such as the US, there is surprisingly little information available on the emerging market countries. In South Africa, we found some interesting statistics in the "World Wide Worx Mobile Consumer in SA 2012" survey. Per the survey, phone-based purchases of physical products that are delivered to the buyer are made by only four percent of urban cell phone users.

Mobile shopping is gaining more and more acceptance among consumers. In a new study, nearly half of the Indian respondents (49 per cent) believe in the security of in-store mobile payments. Meanwhile, 68 per cent have downloaded their banks' apps on their mobile devices.

Target has announced the winner of the $75,000 grand prize in its Retail Accelerator contest: a mobile retail concept called "Divvy." Jointly promoted by Target and Fast Company, the Retail Accelerator competition was designed to foster digital innovation in retail by challenging developers to build a new mobile experience for Target. The Divvy concept is designed to improve the group shopping experience by allowing multiple users to update a shopping list in real time while making it easier to split the bill and distribute receipts. A group of New York-based digital developers and co-workers called Team Pilot submitted the winning …