With fitness tracking devices already common and Apple Watch raising the profile of smart watches, wearable devices are poised to take off this year, according to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). Smart watches in particular will grow fast in proportional terms, although their overall penetration will remain low.

It is an invigorating time in mobile video, as innovators test new ways to reimagine TV. Periscope and Vessel are recent, very different, entrants that demonstrate how far we are from cracking this code.

The proportion of mobile phone users who managed their bank accounts via mobile at least occasionally has steadily increased over the last few years, from 29% in 2012 to 33% in 2013 and 39% in 2014, per the Federal Reserve.

Long the premium credit card provider, American Express has recently hit a rough patch. It's lost branded card partnerships with companies like Costco and JetBlue, and faced competitors encroaching on retail payments with lower transaction fees for merchants and better rewards programs for consumers, among other problems. So mobile payments and related services will be a central part of the company's turnaround strategy, according to CEO Kenneth Chenault's presentation to investors on Wednesday.

You know how advertisers are always going on about the need for flexibility and transparency? Well, this jargon may soon have a rather different connotation, if Samsung follows through on some rather bold promises made by an unnamed executive in an interview with BusinessKorea earlier this week.

That was quick. It seems like only yesterday (OK, it was a few years ago) that everybody kept predicting "mobile is about to take off" but it just kept on, uh, not happening. Well, now it's happened. A new report from eMarketer predicts that mobile will account for half (49%) of all digital advertising spend this year, rising to 60.4% in 2016, and reaching 72.2% by 2019.

Media consumers have always mashed up and played with their content. But now publishers and marketers have the opportunity to help the audience reconstitute and reinvent media for themselves.

Mobile app security is pretty abysmal, according to a new study by IBM and Ponemon, based on a survey of the security practices of over 400 large organizations that use consumer-facing mobile apps or develop them for other companies. No surprise, a large part of the problem is due to companies rushing apps to the marketplace before proper vetting, simply to keep pace with roaring consumer demand.

Mobile's potential has been constrained by its superficial likeness to the Web. We are missing too many of the device's unique characteristics and promise by merely shrinking the Internet.

No word yet if it has a cute "P" name -- let's call it "Puppy Schmuppy Doggy" -- but Google's forthcoming mobile-friendly revamp of its search algorithm, due out April 21, will have a greater impact on its search result than previous iterations like Google Panda and Google Penguin, according to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji, who shared the news earlier this week at the SMX Munich conference in Germany.