Just sitting here scanning my inbound and surfing the Web for breaking news as I get ready for Day Two of the Mobile Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe (could be worse places to scan and surf, right?), and lo and behold another relevant story pitch comes through, this time from the researchers at NPD Group, who are clearly on the case of mobile consumers. And it seems the mobile accessory that is most important to them is, in fact, the case. And they're paying for it.

Remember how I posted earlier about how everything going on seems to relate to our summits when I'm blogging them, well, here's another amazing coincidence - or synchronicity. Not long after I asked Lowe's mobile chief Sean Bartlett how the retailer is dealing with the trend toward "showrooming" - what happens when a consumer goes to a retailer, does their product research, and then buys the product online via the mobile Web, often while still in the store - the savvy digital media planners at WPP's GroupM just released a report on that very subject.

Weird disclosure by Lowe's chief digital strategist Sean Bartlett during his presentation at the Mobile Insider Summit in Tahoe this morning.

Not because he's doing deals with those brands, so much as he's actually using them. Upon taking the stage for his presentation at the Mobile Insider Summit, Sean Bartlett, director of mobile strategy and platforms at home improvement retailer Lowe's, implied he was a bit under the weather, and said he was "being fueled right now" by Hall's and Dayquil.

Chia Chen, senior vice president and North American mobile practice lead at Digitas went right for the money on the "Money Gap?" panel at the Mobile Insider Summit, saying that from an agency's point-of-view, it's not necessarily how the agency is structured, so much as how it's media vendor partners are structured vis a vis mobile. "We are an integrated agency," he pointed out, adding. "For us, mobile is part of a mix." And then he reminded summit attendees that the mix is what influences budgets - or in the current economic environment, vice versa. "one of the important parts …

Tylted CEO Lon Otremba gave a somewhat tilted explanation for the stock price crashes of Facebook and Zynga in recent weeks.

It came from Christopher J. Golier, vice president-mobile marketing and strategy at the National Hockey League, who given his title, no doubt has a stake in the adoption of mobile media. That said, he started off his presentation at the Mobile Insider Summit with one of those overstatements that I think we all need to be careful of.

By the way, whenever I'm raw blogging these MediaPost events - especially our summits - I get into the zone surrounding the subject matter so much that it seems like everything going on outside MediaPost relates to the specific experience. Hence, I was reading Time magazine's "The Wireless Issue" on my flight out here yesterday (check it out, it's a great issue, especially the fact that all the photos on the cover and in the section were shot via mobile devices). And of course, all the press releases I'm getting this morning while blogging this are ab

Asked by panel moderator Tina Unterlaender, account director-mobile at AKQA, how they measure the success of their mobile marketing initiatives, the "Mobile First" panel gave quite a range of KPIs (key performance indicators), but generally said the ROI may not yet be truly measurable for mobile.

There was quite a diversity of views on "mobile first" strategies for the estrogen-charged opening panel at the Mobile Insider Summit.