M-Commerce

Amazon is enlarging its Kindle universe to expressly target children. It has rolled out Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a service that offers several different types of content for children 3-8 years-old, including books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows. The monthly price for Prime members i...

Google acquired retail coupon company Incentive Targeting, giving it a way to target consumers with deals based on their preferences and broaden its e-commerce presence. Incentive Targeting works with manufacturers of grocery and consumer products to design personalized, timely coupons and special o...

How can classic retail, the brick-and-mortar physical stores dotting our neighborhoods, compete with the likes of Amazon and Zappos? Can real-world retail survive e-commerce? And if it can, what's the trick? How do retailers intend to meet this growing threat? We're now seeing something insidious t...

Holiday shopping this year will take place on multiple channels, with many shoppers doing research and buying online or on mobile devices. That's according to Deloitte's 2012 Annual Holiday Survey, which found that shoppers who use multiple channels plan to spend more money than retail shoppers. Omn...

Isis, a joint venture of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, has debuted its long-awaited mobile wallet initiative in Austin and Salt Lake City. It joins a number of other initiatives -- Square and Google Wallet, to cite just two examples -- competing in the nascent mobile payments industry. Whether Isi...

The launch of smartphones with the capacity for e-commerce created a new channel for Internet merchants to address, mobile commerce. M-commerce revenues are expected to grow to $31 billion by 2016, according to Forrester Research. The number of mobile devices available for making purchases on the ...

Trulia, an online real estate listing company, hit it out of the park Thursday in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock priced at $17 per share and then opened at $22.10. It rose an eye-popping 48 percent to reach $25.20 per share at one point before settling in at $24 p...

Groupon is entering the mobile payments space with its own offering, Groupon Payments. The service, which facilitates credit card transactions, is available to any small business in the U.S.; however, it's offered to Groupon merchants at cheaper rates. Groupon is positioning the service as easier an...

There has been a lot of hype about mobile payments, especially last year, with executives proclaiming adoption to be a rapidly growing trend. While we know that consumers are using their mobile devices to access information on the Internet, are they actually using them to shop? The idea of purcha...

A group of major retailers in the United States on Wednesday announced a new mobile commerce platform, Merchant Customer Exchange. Members include 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Lowe's, Sears Holdings, Target, Walmart, Shell Oil and Sunoco. The group will announce more members over time. MCX is still searching...

The ETA has announced the formation of the Mobile Payments Committee, a task force that includes representatives from the four main U.S. carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile -- as well as Google, Isis, PayPal, Verifone and Intuit. The purpose of the committee is to develop a cohesive b...

Starbucks has selected Square to process mobile payments at its approximately 7,000 stores nationwide in the United States, in a move that could shake up the nascent mobile payments market in the country. The coffee company had introduced the first mobile payment via iPhone app in 2009. It took mobi...

The mobile payment system Google Wallet now works with all major credit cards and will begin transitioning to a cloud-based model. The service allows users to tap their smartphones to pay at a retail checkout location, rather than having to swipe a credit card or shell out cash. It uses near-field c...

Both Amazon and Google have seen their respective businesses grow by adapting and expanding into areas far removed from their original bookstore and Internet search focuses. Thus it didn't seem far-fetched when rumors intensified Friday that Amazon plans tso enter the smartphone arena -- in part to ...

Amazon has acquired 3D-mapping startup UpNext, according to a report earlier this week. Mapping functionality has become a must-have feature for mobile device makers, but that alone may not explain what Amazon is planning for UpNext. Amazon's tablet, the Kindle Fire, does not sport a GPS radio, and ...