Wal-Mart typically leads the retail industry when it comes to implementing innovative technologies. Its IT department has been known to experiment with bleeding edge technology such as radio frequency identification (RFID) to track products from the distribution centers to warehouses and on to the store floors. It appears Wal-Mart has done it again by testing a technology on the edge.

As the controversies surrounding digital privacy become more public, the responses of media companies especially become more important and telling. I have always contended that despite the efforts of the ad infrastructure to erect self-regulatory regimes around privacy, it really is the publisher in the end who faces the consumer on these matters. Civilians just don't care or know who Rubicon Project, ValueClick or AudienceSciene are.

During the last decade of covering behavioral targeting online I have seen piles and piles of data mined from peoples' digital travels. The digital universe has helped surface countless audience affinities and statistical correlations that many of us never suspected. But there are some consumer behaviors that require no sophisticated data queries or cookie-dropping. They are as obvious as they are, alas, under-utilized. To wit: walk through the aisles of any grocery, big box, apparel or media retailer and count how many people are on their cell phones. Amazing, isn't it?

Bonn, Germany-based Deutsche Post acquired nugg.ad AG, Europe's largest targeted online ad platform, earlier this month for an undisclosed sum. Nugg.ad will continue to operate independently as a Deutsche Post subsidiary, which runs a large direct mail operation, as well as the courier delivery service DHL Express.

OneScreen is making plans to add behavioral targeting on top of video context. When and what consumers watch will become data, reused for targeting, according to Atul Patel, the company's CEO.

Why would Blue Bunny ice cream want to partner with the Minnesota Twins for promotions? After all, isn't baseball pretty much a male-oriented sport, and aren't women still making many of the brand-level decisions when it comes to common food purchases like ice cream? "We found out in the data we collect that women in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market have a particularly strong engagement with the Twins," says Bob Klein, chief strategy officer, Blue Chip, which works with 75 of the top 100 retailers and major consumer brands to develop marketing strategy at retail.

The movement into value-added services by companies throughout the online advertising space continues to get more interesting. First we saw Google provide free tools and services to support online ad sales. Now find demand-side platform are building networks of tech offerings on top of real-time bidding platforms.

Everyone knows that having a child is the ultimate game-changer in all of our lives. From your basic attitudes toward just about everything from personal diet (mmm, fish sticks) to media habits (that 93rd re-running of "Toy Story 2"), nothing is ever the same. But a new survey from Placecast and Harris Interactive shows how parenthood also affects your receptivity to marketing messages, mobile messaging in particular. While traditionally we may think of male, gadget-loving, smartphone-toting early adopters as the sweet spot in these first years of mobile marketing, in fact the most eager target may be Mom.

"At one time I was a big believe in the old statement 'On the Internet no one knows you're a dog,'" says Eduard Goodman, chief privacy officer at Identification Theft 911. "That's no longer true, and the concept erodes a little more every day."

It has been a couple of weeks since we convened in San Francisco for OMMA Behavioral West 2010. It was a successful show all around, I thought, with some strong insights and arguments from our keynoters and panelists and a good deal of discourse from the audience as well. A number of people have asked about accessing the content, especially presentations. Let me highlight some of the key moments and direct you to resources now available online.