Visitors to the National Slate Museum and the National Roman Legion Museum, both in Wales, walk around exhibits that might be difficult to interpret without some help. Photographs and artifacts are often hard to put into context (such as a Roman device that was a valuable tool at one time, but appears to be merely a small gray stone today). Printed material posted on exhibits and on walls do not do the exhibits justice, the museums' curators say, since there generally is insufficient space for the volume of content, and it is difficult to tailor information for each specific type of visitor—such as …

Several Miami-based Centric Consultingmobile developers landed a top prize in an international competition hosted by Citi. The team's platform, BlueBeak, allows users to send money to friends, who can then withdraw the funds from an ATM without a debit card.

The Girl Scouts have long sold cookies in order to fund their programs, but this year, they are taking an entirely new direction in order to make sure that it is even easier to support them, by using online and mobile commerce tools. For the first time, Girl Scouts of America will now allow its members to use a mobile commerce app or personalized website in order to reach out to the people around them and sell the cookies that are critical to their ability to do what they do.

Walmart's CEO, Doug McMillon, revealed on CNBC just why his company cannot take its attention away from mobile commerce. According to the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. boss, his company’s digital business is now overwhelmingly because of mobile. “It is an incredible time of change in retail. There is a transformation going on. This move to e-commerce, the way e-commerce and stores work together, what’s happening with mobile. We knew for example this holiday [season that] mobile would be really important for us but it’s been 70% of the orders that we’ve taken through our digital business,” McMillon said.

 

Hair salon franchise Supercuts is claiming to be the first of its kind to offer a check-in mobile capability in the affordably priced hair salon industry. In an attempt to bring convenience to its customers, Supercuts updated its app for both iOS and Android, including adding advanced search options and check-in capability. The franchise knows that innovating on the mobile front will help drive repeat visits and attract new customers.

Stripe, the e-commerce startup, Tuesday announced it has raised $70 million in a new funding round to put the company's valuation at $3.5 billion. The company, which was founded by a pair of brothers in 2009, was worth $1.75 billion in January. Bloomberg reported that Stripe's current funding round comes from new and exisiting investors. Previous investors inude venture capital firms Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. The new kid on the block this time around is Thrive Capital, according to Bloomberg.

Imagine you’re on your way to work. You walk up the stairs from the subway, and your coffee order is put in automatically. You walk intoStarbucks, past the line, tell the barista your name, and she hands you your tall latte with skim. This is the future of buying your morning coffee with the newly updated Starbucks mobile app. Today, a pilot program to buy coffee by iPhone launched in Portland, Oregon, which will allow you to buy coffee without standing in line to order or handing a cashier your phone to pay. 

Retailer Macy’s and automotive brand Ford are among the marketers trying out a new near field communications solution brought by Blue Bite and Cemusa to New York street furniture. These marketers are using the solution to deliver content and offers through NFC, QR codes and SMS, which will be installed in all five boroughs of New York.

Simon Malls and eBay have teamed up for a connected shopping mall experience that offers holiday consumers an interactive directory, personalized deals and point-to-point navigation on mobile devices in an effort to boost holiday sales. The “Connected Mall” experience has been incorporated at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California and aims to drive more in-store traffic during the critical holiday shopping season for retailers.

Depending on whom you ask, web sales on Cyber Monday grew between 8.5% and 16.0%. But one universal trend emerged on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday weekend: Consumers are browsing and buying more online with their mobile devices. IBM, which estimated online sales on Monday increased 8.5% over 2013, found mobile sales accounted for 22% of all Cyber Monday sales and 41.2% of online traffic. Tablets accounted for 12.9% of sales, compared to 9.1% of sales for smartphones. Consumers browse more using their mobile phones however, with 28.5% of online traffic stemming from smartphones and 12.5% coming from tablets.