Regent Hotels & Resorts is simplifying travel preparation through a new mobile-optimized site that allows guests to explore hotels and book rooms. The new site will help make the traveling process easier for guests. Affluent consumers increasingly turn to their phones when executing luxury transactions and working with a user-friendly site enhances the hotel experience.

Groupon is encouraging consumers to download its mobile deals application by offering them a $10 Target gift card for $5. The company turned to its email database to reach its existing users. Over the past few years, Groupon has been steadily building up its mobile efforts.

Global mobile advertising company InMobi is hoping to make fast inroads into the marketing spend of Australian business by offering advertising space on smartphones and tablets - one of the fastest-growing advertising categories. The Bangalore-based company promises to bring new expertise to a sector that is seen as having huge growth potential but still insufficiently understood by Australian advertising agencies.

Canadians still prefer cash, but they are slowly starting to pick up their smartphones to make purchases. According to the latest report from Technology Strategies International, a research firm, there is a very slow but upward growth of contactless mobile payments in Canada, to the degree that it will one day replace the current leader, cash.

Google Glass may have something to offer in the way of mobile commerce. Google Glass has been receiving a great deal of attention for its potential as a powerful social platform. The device's augmented reality features certainly lend credence to this as they would, quite literally, change the way people see the world around them and interact with people in that world. Indeed, it is often the association that augmented reality has with entertainment and social networking that wins Glass most of its attention. The device may, however, have promising prospects in the realm of mobile commerce.

Space architect John Spencer has a grand vision for the future of space travel -- one with luxury space yachts and hotels, and dune buggy racing on the moon. That's where PayPal wants to come in. The tech company is working with Spencer, and organizations like Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), to launch a galactic money transfer initiative in hopes of shaping what spending money in space will look like. Spencer will join PayPal, famed astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and SETI at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., on Thursday to kick off the discussion.

Telefnica Digital has brought in mobile money specialist Monitise to help develop new mobile payment and commerce services, starting in the UK. Telefnica Digital, owner of the O2 brand, wants to take full advantage of a market which analyst IDC forecasts could be worth a trillion dollars by 2017.

A startup in India aims to reduce buyer's remorse by enabling consumers to make better buying decisions based on intelligent comparison techniques and a value for money index. "To be honest, the basic idea for FindYogi came from the temptation of making quick money through SEO," admited Naman Sarawagi, co-founder of FindYogi when I asked him about how he came up with his product.

QR codes in Abu Dhabi will offer mobile device users the chance to learn more historical and background information about specific locations as well as about the streets and their names. The Municipality of Abu Dhabi City will first be implemented in the capital. These barcodes are being created as an element of the Abu Dhabi Emirate Street Addressing, GeoNames and Signage System (ADAGS), which is designed to provide the unique identification of addresses and streets within that emirate.

Wells Fargo this week rolled out another addition to its digital ATM receipts offering, introducing text message receipts at its more than 12,000 ATMs across the country. The bank already gives customers the option to receive an e-receipt to their online banking inbox or personal email account. They also have the option to select "Print Receipt" or "No Receipt" at the ATM. According to Alicia Moore, head of Wells Fargo ATM Banking, once the bank started offering e-receipts it knew it wanted to extend the convenience to text messages as well.