Priceline wants a bigger role throughout the travel experience, such as enabling hotel check-ins or on-site purchases, and views mobile as essential to realizing these goals. One of the ways Priceline is building on its initial success in mobile is with more contextually-relevant features, including incorporating location into the company's iPad application as well as two new products that are launching this week. Although the goal is to drive sales, Priceline's initiatives are increasingly moving away from viewing mobile solely for last-minute to everyday transactions.

Unilever has partnered seven of its brands with digital startups, with the list of companies underscoring where big consumer packaged goods companies are placing their bets in mobile, including on beacon services, music streaming and video. The Go Global program was announced late last year as a way to help Unilever brands such as Vaseline, Hellman's and Surf engage more meaningfully with consumers while helping digital companies grow their reach. One of the partner companies is NewAer, which bills itself as a next-generation beacon platform that enables sophisticated scripting in the device or on the cloud from any beaconing radio …

Tencent's mobile IM and social network, WeChat, has been growing reasonably well since being launched internationally in 2012. In India, it is being promoted by Ibibo, in which Tencent has a stake. Backed by aggressive promotions, including endorsements by Bollywood actors such as Parineeti Chopra and Varun Dhawan, WeChat is looking to gain a foothold in the Indian IM market. The application, which is highly popular in China and boasts of almost 100 million users there, has a bouquet of m-commerce services, including online payments, a proposed wealth management solution, virtual credit cards, etc. However, the company feels that the …

Dr Muhammad Saleem, member commercial of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), has said that the use of mobile banking will help tap 20 percent unbanked people by 2020. Speaking at the 7th International Mobile Commerce Conference, here on Thursday, he said that the impact of mobile financial services by the year 2020 would be more beneficial for the country's economy. "It is expected that it will increase GDP by three percent, create one million new jobs, create upto 600,000 new businesses and increase remittance services by 24 percent at international level," he added. The one-day conference was organised by Total Communications …

E-commerce startup Mulu has unveiled a new mobile application that it calls "The Latest." The application is designed to connect consumers with merchants more adequately by exposing them to products that they may be interested in. The application asks for information concerning what a user likes and uses this data to find products and services that align with these interests. The application can also direct users to content pertaining to their interests, linking to popular news sites and other online media. The application is meant to make it possible for consumers to shop for items that have been mentioned by …

Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, has released the results of a new survey that focuses on mobile commerce. Throughout the world, mobile shopping and payments have become quite popular among consumers. These people tend to be quite reliant on their mobile devices, using smartphones and tablets quite frequently in their daily life. The su rvey from Bain & Co. accounts for 25,000 respondents across five countries and aims to shed light on how their view mobile commerce as it exists today. According to the survey, more than half of respondents noted that they were aware of mobile …

The People's Bank of China (PBOC) issued an edict late yesterday that bans two particular things: epayments made via QR codes, and online 'virtual' credit cards. The move appears to hit out at China's web companies, who rely especially on QR codes to make face-to-face, cash-less mobile payments. Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's Alipay are hit most hard by the new ruling. Both WeChat and Alipay use QR codes for many aspects of in-store mobile payments. Alipay has been using QR and barcode-scanning codes since 2011. WeChat is a relative newcomer as the messaging app has evolved into a sort of …

According to a report that has been issued by Magnami Caruso Dutton, a digital customer experience agency, based on the recent research that they have conducted, mcommerce is playing a growing role in making hotel accommodation bookings. The research was published in the report entitled "Seeing Returns: Building Loyalty at Hotels Through Digital Customer Experience". What it showed was that, to an increasing degree, guests at hotels are reliant upon their mobile devices. As such, providing services and options to be accessed by those devices can help to enhance the experience of those customers. This mcommerce can help to improve …

When it comes to solid mobile commerce performance, every fraction of a second counts, and this message has never been more clear than in the example of the smartphone friendly website from Dick's Sporting Goods. According to the mcommerce statistics from Keynote Systems, Dick's has not been all that consistent. The importance of consistent strong performance in mobile commerce retail websites is very important. Even part of a second can make the difference between making a sale and improving customer loyalty, or sending a consumer to the competition because their site performs better. The better a site performs, the greater …

Mobile payments users spend nearly twice as much through digital channels overall than people not buying on mobile devices, according to a survey of 25,000 U.S. and European consumers carried out by consulting firm Bain & Company. However, concerns over security, privacy and convenience keep 80 percent of consumers from changing their payment behavior and using mobile payments, Bain found. The survey results, covering consumers in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Spain, appear in Bain's "The Consumer View of Mobile Payments" study. While more than half of consumers on average, and more than 70 percent in Western Europe, are …