Ok, I'm freakin' out. This past week, my life has looked too much like early scenes from "Dawn of the Dead" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." You know, the ones where the protagonist increasingly encounters people in full zombie form. First, there's one, then two, and pretty soon the brain-dead are outnumbering the brain-living.

Emojis are everywhere. Indeed, the number of active campaigns containing the cartoonish images has increased by 557% in the last 12 months, according to fresh findings from Appboy.

As the western mobile market matures, users can become jaded and stubborn, only allowing a few select apps (one or three of which are most likely owned by Facebook) into their confidence, and using them heavily. Time spent with new apps can sometimes be measured in minutes or hours, before they are remanded to the uninstall bin for eternity, never to harvest the rich datasets they were secretly designed to.

Judging by the numbers, the startling success of Pokemon Go marks a major turning point for mobile gaming. With augmented reality and geo-location technology having sufficiently matured, mobile games are ready to redefine entertainment as we know it. Right? Well, threatening to dim mobile gaming's big moment, Pokemon Go maker Niantic Labs is facing criticism for collecting a ton of user data, including physical movements, email addresses, and select Web browsing history.

Combine '90s nostalgia with cute cartoon creatures, add the latest augmented reality technology, and offer it up to millions of smartphone owners itching for a light diversion from current events. What do you get? Apparently, the runaway hit that is Pokemon GO.

Without jumping to conclusions -- or rushing to blame -- it's important that we as an industry consider the role that mobile is playing in our nation's present affairs. Take the shootings in Falcon Heights, Minn. and Baton Rouge, La., this week. Without the ubiquity of sophisticated smartphones or the personal broadcasting channels that social networks have become, we would have never known about them. Without video footage of these horrific events -- combined with platforms that facilitate their rapid sharing -- they surely would not have had the same societal impact.

Without jumping to conclusions -- or rushing to blame -- it's important that we as an industry consider the role that mobile is playing in our nation's present affairs. Take the shootings in Falcon Heights, Minn. and Baton Rouge, La., this week. Without the ubiquity of sophisticated smartphones or the personal broadcasting channels that social networks have become, we would have never known about them. Without video footage of these horrific events -- combined with platforms that facilitate their rapid sharing -- they surely would not have had the same societal impact.

So Explore.org's bear cam is back. That's right, the four-camera livestream at Katami National Park in Alaska that we all know and love is as much in season as the salmon those bears are after.

Scrolling has become second nature for most consumers. If we're on our phones -- and we're on our phones a lot -- chances are we're scrolling through social media, news, photos, or some such content. It's no surprise, then, that the IAB is so excited about the "scroller": a new mobile ad format that was conceived with this ubiquitous behavior in mind.

More than any algorithm or mobile feature, Facebook's single greatest achievement was weathering the arrival of non-cool (read: older) users. For people of all ages and cool quotients, the social giant just became too useful to give up. Now Snapchat faces the same challenge, as older users are finally figuring out what all the fuss is about.