Augmented Reality (AR) may not be a household phrase (or even a good one, for that matter), but power users are getting a dose of opportunity to play with it. We wrote about some of this yesterday (Mobile Tech & Riding along the Back of the Old) after direct mail coupons giant Valpak announced it was going to include AR on its 40 million monthly blue envelope mailers for the next couple of months. And Valpak is not alone in introducing AR to the public in a big way.

Some of the innovative mobile technology seems to be finding a home in old, traditional places. In a snail mail promo I received from Bank of America this week there was an offer to earn bonus points on purchases through my Visa credit card account. All I had to do to activate was call a phone number and then type in the 16-digit registration code provided when prompted. The chances of me taking the time to do that were about zero. But next to the directions was a simple QR code with the message "scan this QR code for automatic …

Using mobile apps in the car buying process has empowered many consumers, arguably giving them an edge over some auto dealer salespeople. With apps like cars.com and Edmunds, car shoppers can find cars for sale from dealers around them based on location, calculate monthly payments and see the current market value of a vehicle. These apps can be very powerful tools in the car buying process. (I researched and bought my last car exclusively through the cars.com app, researching and locating the vehicle we wanted and then driving a few states away to pick it up.)

After writing about how mobile commerce is an end-to-end experience a few days ago, I came across an interesting piece of research that examines many of the components of this shopping behavior. Rather than reviewing the whole gamut of retail shopping, researchers at GigaOm Pro looked specifically at behaviors of only smartphone owners. By types of physical stores, at least by the measurement of extreme satisfaction, there's a range of view.

Mobile shopping is an end-to-end process. While we see a lot of research that measures mobile commerce by where or how consumers pay, there's so much more to the process. Those where-the-money-changes-hands studies typically show tablets as the mobile device of choice, followed by iPhones and then Android phones. Those measurements are only of the actual spending moments of the purchase cycle.

Pushing shopping behavioral change and mobile commerce forward may be driven by small, functional innovations that are highly personal. One such advance just came from a feature added to the CVS mobile app. Through a new "drug interaction checker" built into the app, consumers can now scan the UPC barcode on thousands of products and compare the product details to the patient's over-the-counter or prescription medications, which can be entered or imported.

While mobile scanning is still a distance from mass consumer usage, it hasn't stopped the proliferation of codes on packaging and signage. For QR code proponents, the good news is that most people at least know what they are. The bad news, of course, is that most people have never scanned one. Some new research in the Mobile Commerce Compendium shows that 91% know what a QR code is but 65% have never scanned one in-store. The eConsultancy study is based on a Toluna survey of 1,000 UK consumers looking at smartphone behaviors. It found that more than a third …

For many retailers looking at commerce, more focus is on mobile websites and less on apps. And based on a new study, showrooming is not at the top of retailers' hit lists. The survey by EpiServer was conducted at the annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition and included responses from CEOs, vice presidents, directors and e-commerce managers from 100 atte

The company also saw growth in e-commerce overall, with the revenue of independent online businesses increasing 17% from the previous quarter. Around mobile commerce, the research showed again that iPad is a preferred buying device. As in other research, Bigcommerce found that for online mobile shopping sales, the tablet was the preferred device, with iPad sales increasing 363% to $22 million in sales.

Small businesses sure are getting a lot of attention in the world of mobile commerce. Square, the mobile payment platform, just introduced a digital marketplace for small businesses to sell their products nationally. The virtual location, named Square Market, will allow people to open or