Mobile Groove

eMarketer has forecasted the growth of the US mobile payments transactions over the next four years. They believe that the annual mobile payments transactions value will increase from approximately $640 million this year to a whopping $62 billion by 2016. That is an average increase of about 230 percent or total growth of 9,600 percent over the next four years. The number of mobile payment users will increase by 6x to 48 million while average annual spending per user will increase by 20x to $1,294. T…

How many times have you started reading an email on your phone while commuting, and then continued it on your laptop when you got home? Or perhaps you saw a commercial on TV for a new car, and then used your tablet to search for the specs and see it in action?  The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior, a new report by Google, reveals that 90 percent of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV.

• Televi…

Two massive brands shared their mobile stories this week at the content-rich Mobile Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Each brand has accelerated its mobile efforts to drive sales, engagement, and loyalty.

Wells Fargo & Company, a financial services company with $1.3 trillion in assets, serves one in three households in the U.S. More than 10 percent of its 70 million customers use mobile to interact with the company for at least part of their customer journey.

This has prompted Wells Fargo…

Developers are replacing a “lost enthusiasm for developing smartphone apps” with a new passion for tablets, according to a survey by Strategy Analytics. The company also notes that the mobile app ecosystem has matured, making it tougher for smaller, niche developers to complete with larger organisations.

• The launch of Windows 8 and Blackberry 10 will see Microsoft and RIM seeking to take advantage of the shift, by enabling developers to easily create products across tablet an…

We continue our series of alternative mobile search app reviews and road tests with Hipmunk, a vertical search engine taking the agony out of travel planning. Instead of horizontally searching across the entire web like Google, Bing and Yahoo! (GBY), Hipmunk searches up and down through one topic area at a time. This laser focus on doing this one thing — and doing it well — allows Hipmunk to play in the major leagues.

Hipmunk was built from the ground up to search for hotels and fl…

In this companion post to our Hipmunk mobile search app road test I connect with Steve Huffman, Hipmunk Co-Founder, to discuss features in the pipeline and opportunities on the horizon.

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Hipmunk is a travel search engine, but there are other alternative mobile search apps and engines that also focus on travel. What makes you different?

At Hipmunk, we are trying to optimize the amount of time you spend on Hipmunk, and we want you to spend as little time as possible on Hipmunk. We’re not trying to …