'Tis the season to rate mobile competence. Digital think tank L2 says that Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy's and NET-A-Porter are the most "mobile-competent" among what it calls "prestige" brands. In L2's new study, Prestige 100 Mobile IQ, the most recognizable brands were measured across 250 parameters, including their mobile sites, apps, marketing approaches and innovation.

I have been playing with both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet for the last month trying to work through why I have to force myself to use them. In weeks of carrying them around, I still find that their chief attribute is weight. In my everyday digital media routines I am most likely to use them as a relatively light ebook reader when lying in bed. In other words, for all their other functionality, their core use for me remains with each device's roots in the Nook and Kindle eReader platforms.

Mobile 2D codes are inevitably fascinating to marketers even as they remain relatively obscure to many consumers. In a recent study of consumer behavior and QR codes, cmb Consumer Pulse found that only 21% of over 1,200 consumer surveyed in October 2011 knew what the term "QR code" meant.

Much like the Battle of Stalingrad, the mobile skirmishes for consumer attention at retail are likely to become tactical and granular. All of the usual in-store merchandising techniques get disrupted, from shelf arrangements to end cap positioning, salesmen pitches to signage. And what place do manufacturer/suppliers have in all of this now? Do they have better access to the consumer by cutting mobile merchandising deals with retailers in much the same way they might in a circular or in-store exposure? Should they be working with all of these third-party scan code and product-look-up solutions in order to insert themselves into …