Public transportation agencies are hopping on the mobile ticketing bandwagon -- well, more like lumbering on -- but for the most part their efforts haven't been coordinated, with each city's system offering its own dedicated app. A new European alliance is aiming to change all that, by introducing a global standard for mobile ticketing services using near-field communication (NFC).

Mobile ads should not just be smaller, location-aware, or "native" in the familiar sense. Their basic functionality should conform to the mobile use cases.

As promised, Google is rolling out a new button in mobile search ads that allows users to make a purchase directly from that ad. The new mobile "buy" button takes consumers to a mobile landing page where they can complete transactions, including picking sizes, colors, and other details, according to TechCrunch, which reported the news this morning.

It might seem as if the world has gone emoji-crazy in recent years, and while it would behoove marketers to understand how to use the weird icons effectively, they still need to understand their audience and shape their message thoughtfully.

In its beta version, Apple's News aggregation app does what Apple tends to do lately: improving on an established genre without rethinking it. The result reminds us just how bland the news aggregation experience is.

Amazon Web Services is making app testing easier with a new service, the AWS Device Farm, which allows developers to run their apps on a whole range of real devices and observe the results, which should help iron out bugs and performance issues, the company announced Thursday.

After several years of so-so fitness trackers and the abomination known as Google Glass, the debut of Apple Watch was supposed to inaugurate the age of wearable devices, taking them mainstream and multipurpose. However, the first few months of sales figures seem to suggest our tech-obsessed world isn't reacting to Watch with the same kind of feeding frenzy that greeted the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. That's according to a report from Slice Intelligence, which shows that sales of Apple Watch have tumbled 90% from its debut.

It's a brave and wonderful new world out there. Sure, Europe is falling apart and China's stock market is circling the drain -- but on the other hand, now our friends can watch us play Candy Crush Saga via live-streaming. That's right, this earth-shaking new feature comes courtesy of Sony and Twitch, which have partnered to create Live Screen Streaming, a new Android app that lets mobile users broadcast what's on their screen to other mobile users.

The rate of growth in tablet devices has slowed in recent years and is now going into reverse, according to a new forecast from Gartner, although growth will return in coming years. In fact, shipments of all types of devices (except mobile phones) are set to decrease at least temporarily in 2015, and total expenditures on computing devices will decline for the first time this year as a result.

Mobile gaming is one of the great unexplained phenomena of our time. Marketers hoping to harness this incredible user engagement will need to ask some basic questions about what exactly we are doing when we play.