The new third-party shopping apps from previously-unknown app brands are rivaling retailer apps in popularity. Many players want shopper attention, bur smart retailers have to rise above a skirmish in Aisle 5.

ShopSavvy and its ad network partner Longboard Media say that the levels of ad interactivity in a mobile app occurring in-store, at the point when people are making purchase decisions, is phenomenal and a while other game from the Web.

Even my wife understands that the iPad gets a user (well, me), into a new and uncharted zone of engagement -- with everything but her. If she figured this out already, why haven't more marketers?.

The mobile payment infrastructure could help media companies rethink a paid-content model they dismissed years ago for their digital wares. As social net myYearbook is discovering, m-commerce gives media a payment platform in all users' pockets.

Let's hope that smartphones and devices finally give this most brilliant product of the digital era the audiences it deserves. There is a level of user engagement here that is rare and unappreciated.

Starting with feature phones and now in HTML5, Cellufun generated enormous mobile Web scale before that was cool. Now it is rebranding its social games as Tylted and hoping to leverage the community of 9.2 million with advertisers.

App alerts are a business and a channel unto themselves. With segmentation of this opted-in core audience for an app, Urban airship is hoping to create a push infrastructure that can be relevant even to the store aisle you are in.

Call me crazy (join the club) but the new Retina Display on the iPad is starting to bug me. Am I as nuts as my wife thinks I am, or am I experiencing the next generation of gadget romance?

Stop hyping the "cloud" and start designing better ways for the multi-screening media maven to push content to the device, time and place best suited to consuming it. Let's get to the next stage already.

For over a decade, digital creatives have asked the question of whether a digital ad carries the same kind of storytelling and emotional oomph as the great TV spots. But according to some fascinating research involving brainwave analysis and ad response, the basic elements of human perception, cognition and emotion stack the deck against advertisers getting from a mobile ad the kind of engagement we might get from a 30 second TV spot.