We may be about to find out the level to which mobile shoppers are willing to be targeted in stores as they shop. Earlier this year, a study by ResearchNow showed that while a third of women shoppers love it when reminded of in-store sales by a sales associate, a majority (58%) said they would be "thrilled" if they received a personalized offer on their smartphone while in the store. Now Swirl, the well-funded Boston-based technology company that sponsored the research, is rolling out a national platform for retailers that can deliver personalized content and offers to shoppers based on …

Banks are edging closer to mobile shopping. This is a move from the mobile payment end right into the shopping and product selection part. I sat down recently with Lisa Stanton, President of Americas at Monitise, the technology company that enables mobile banking, with more than 300 financial institutions as customers. The company last week announced a deal with U.S. Bank to accelerate the delivery of a shopping service that provides a way for top-tier retailers to let consumers buy from leading brands via mobile.

Here come the holiday price matches for mobile shoppers. Before heading to checkout at Staples today, I did what I always do there. I loaded my ShopSavvy app and scanned the $160 product to see what it really should cost. In about five seconds, I found that same electronics item for $115 at Target. I showed my phone to the cashier and she checked to make sure the item number was the same on my phone and on the product and she instantly matched the price. No questions, no hassle (though she did need a manager to sign off on …

Some retailers may be getting on the mobile commerce train. A new survey finds that most retailers are starting to take mobile commerce seriously, with most (79%) saying it is very important. This is an increase from 59% who answered that way last year, according to the survey by Internet Retailer. One of the drivers seems to be that merchants are becoming more positive about getting mobile sales.

It's been three and half years since Shopkick hit the market and both the in-store shopping rewards app has evolved with the market. I sat down with Cyriac Roeding, CEO and co-founder of Shopkick, this week to catch up with what they've learned about consumer shopping behavior since the app was launched. The bottom line? "Consumers like the store more and they buy more," says Roeding. "Shopkick has reached the top spot among all the shopping apps and now has more active users than the Starbucks app."

The offline and online worlds of mobile commerce continue to become more closely intertwined. Though the idea of ordering something online and picking it up in a store seems so obvious a concept, it it's taken quite a while for it to catch on in any big way, at least from the merchant side. And the notion of mobile shopping combined with same-day pickup is not necessarily what Amazon has been longing for physical retailers to embrace.

QR codes are on the move - literally. I've seen quite a lot of different mobile technologies at the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas over the last couple of days but one of the most intriguing was around a new type of QR code. Rather than the traditional black square, static QR code, a mobile remote payment company showed a code that is constantly in motion. The code can carry personal identify information and its targeted use is for ID and ticketing, according to Janos Koka, CEO of Cellum, the European mobile payments application developer.

For mobile shoppers, brick and mortar still rules. That was the key message repeated in various ways at an opening panel at Money2020 in Las Vegas today. Members of the panel, titled Loyalty and m-Commerce: Making In-Store Mobile Commerce Personal, were Mike Grimes, SVP of Catalina and Keith Anderson, VP of RetailNet Group. One of the issues tackled was the discount tipping point to move customers to pick one retailer over another.

For all the talk about mobile payments not yet ready for prime time, there sure is a lot of interest in mobile payments. As I prepare to head to the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas starting Sunday, I'm rather amazed at the scope of interest. The event says it is sold out at 4,200 registered attendees with more than 1,500 companies represented. Based on the barrage of invitations to meet with CEOs of mobile payment related companies I've been fielding over the last week, there's a lot of high-level activity in the space. The organizer reports more than 375 CEOs …

Mobile wallets continue to grow behind the scenes. I wrote a while back about how much of the technology around mobile commerce is best left unseen and how some retailers are incorporating technology into their own apps, converting them to mobile wallets. Now you can add Subway to the group. The company just inked a deal for Paydiant to power a range of mobile wallet capabilities, including payments in the food chain's mobile app. Paydiant already had deals with Pulse, part of Discover Financial Services, Diebold, Bank of America and Capital One.