In the world of mobile commerce, app revenue keeps chugging along. A new study projects that mobile apps will generate $27 billion in revenue this year, with smartphones leading the way over tablets. With the number of iOS and Android apps each hovering around a million, Apple will generate more than two-thirds of the revenue for smartphone and tablets, according to the study.

When on the lookout for examples of innovative mobile commerce in my travels I often come up short. Sure, there are the obvious ones, when I occasionally see a shopper scan a barcode. On a California trip last week, I did (sort of) catch a couple of examples of mobile commerce in action.

Maybe mobile shoppers need some instant gratification to incent their purchasing while in stores. A reader of The Mobile Coupon App that Didn't Make It, which appeared in this space yesterday, astutely noted that shoppers "like to get the discounts at time of purchase." The former app Endorse asked shoppers to scan their receipts after purchase and receive cash rewards notifications up to several hours later.

As in any growth market, not all mobile commerce innovations will make it over time, no matter how innovative or well-intentioned. One recent mobile commerce fatality is Endorse, the shopping app that provided customer value while also bypassing the retailer. With Endorse, a shopper would receive about 10 coupons each week, theoretically tied to their past purchase behaviors. The twist was that rather than cashing in the coupons in the store, the consumer could photograph and upload the receipt when they got home.

It seems like almost every day there's yet another bit of news relating to mobile commerce from all corners of the world. In the last couple of weeks, we've faced a continuous and wide ranging number of developments, including announcements relating to expansion, joint ventures and mobile commerce deployments. While there may be varying commerce-related issues at different time, each geographic region grapples with each as they come along.

The large-scale adoption of mobile payments faces customer sat issues on two fronts. Any mobile payments discussion generally involves the issue of why a consumer would pay via mobile device, since credit cards and cash work fine enough. But there's another side of the coin, focusing on merchant acceptance and implementation.

A shopping trip over the weekend reminded me yet again of the small and sometimes unseen influences around mobile commerce. Facing a lengthy, multi-city trip, I wanted some new clothes for the road so my wife and I headed out. Upon entering the store, we were informed that there was a mega-sale going on, with everything marked to half price. An instant GroupMe text message passed along the news to my entire family.

For anyone looking to small businesses to be a key driver of mobile payments there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the number of small merchants using a smartphone or tablet to accept credit card payments has almost doubled from 10% last year to 17% now. The key reasons cited for going mobile was the ability to accept payments from any location, though 63% say they have not replaced their traditional point of sale equipment with their smartphone or tablet system.

Coupons and deals keep hanging in as a driver of mobile commerce. Digging into the recent UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper study by comScore, I noted that coupons are still near the top of the list for mobile shoppers. After the ability to buy online and then make returns to the store, the next aspect causing the likelihood to shop with a retailer is the pushing of coupons/promotions to shoppers' smartphones, by almost half (47%) or respondents.

Mobile commerce is seeping into all corners of shopping, no matter the product size or price. After I addressed a group of car dealers who wanted to know how they might leverage mobile in their dealerships recently, some of the questions revolved around the use of QR codes and pricing. Specifically, some dealers wanted to know if they should include car pricing on their mobile listings and whether they should bother to include QR codes on the vehicles themselves.