Over the last many months, I've been researching and writing a new book about the mobile commerce revolution and the dramatic shift in purchasing behaviors due to mobile and tablet penetration. As many of you are regular readers of this column, I wanted to let you know that the book, Mobile Influence (The New Power of the Consumer), was published today. In the book, we argue that the traditional sales funnel is being replaced by what I call the Mobile Shopping Life Cycle.

Replacements for relatively routine activities could be the drivers for some aspects of mobile commerce. A new study around mobile ticketing projects that more than 950 million phone users globally will use their handsets for mobile ticketing within five years. That would be an increase from about 460 million this year, according to the findings from Juniper Research.

What is the ultimate role of the mobile device in the hands of sales associates? For the last several days I've been pondering the recent Harris poll earlier showing that the majority (59%) of smartphone-armed showroomers prefer looking up product information on their phone to asking salespeople for help. While there may be anecdotal research indicating that shoppers typically ask a sales person to direct them to the location of a product, that majority mobile preference number still seems significant. We know from various studies that consumers want to shop and buy in a physical store, making brick and mortar …

Most of the focus around mobile commerce at retail revolves around everything that happens before the actual purchase. There's smartphone and tablet research, use of geo-targeting as mobile shoppers are out and about and all kinds of incentives near and at the point of purchase. But what about after the purchase is made? According to one indicator, retailers have some work to do to satisfy mobile customers after they buy.

Whenever projections are made, it often becomes news when the projections are either exceeded or fall short. This phenomenon is often magnified around mobile commerce, it being both so relatively new and running at such a high velocity of development globally. The latest NFC projections from Gartner are a good example. The big news, of course, is that the research firm now sees the growth of NFC payments as smaller than initially thought.

Many retailers are in the driver's seat for mobile commerce, but some of them may not yet realize it. Mobile shoppers are actively using retailers' websites to research and increasingly buy. The bad news for retailer is that many of their stores are still being used for showrooming, much to Amazon's benefit. In its second monthly report on mobile retail activity, m-commerce platform provider Branding Brand looked at the state of mobile retail activity compared to a year ago.

For mobile commerce, the tablet is getting bigger even as it becomes physically smaller. The wireless device seems to be edging front and center in the purchase stage of online shopping. A recent Forester Research study found that almost a third (30%) of U.S. tablet owners used the devices for shopping purposes, noting that a much smaller percentage (13%) of smartphone users have ever bought anything via their device. (Of course, there are many more smartphone than tablet owners, so while the percentage is lower the number is large.)

Mobile commerce is still in its relatively early stages. However, the coming growth is projected to be big. Deep inside the massive Cisco Visual Networking Index Services Adoption Forecast released this week are some rather substantial projections around that growth. The study is part of Cisco's ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applications.

As precise targeting of mobile consumers near restaurants continues to improve, there may be an opportunity to link some of the disparate parts of mobile commerce together. Two separate recent studies identify restaurants as being at or near the top of the food chain relating to targeted advertising. In one study based on ad campaigns, 70% of quick service and casual restaurant campaigns leverage geo-targeting. A separate report found restaurants to be in the top three industries using location-based ads.

A new look at mobile power users finds that they spend a disproportionate amount of time using apps compared to average users. For purposes of the data analysis by SessionM, power users were defined as the third of people responsible for the most in-app actions on the company's rewards-based network. These power uses accounted for most (78%) of the total time spent in apps. This reminds me of the old 80-20 rule, where 80 percent of a given activity is done by 20 percent of the people, among various other iterations.