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For all the download choices available across several app markets, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to select the apps that best fit their mobile and lifestyle needs.

Seems we are all talking more about affluence and wealth these days, but do we have a good handle on what those terms mean, and what it takes to be truly affluent?

Physical retail has become more challenging. Maintaining profitability in an industry rife with online competition and in-store product researching is not easy.

Clicks do not matter. Traffic does not matter. Click-through rate does not matter.

The only encouraging piece to Apple’s historical innovation might be its tendency not to invent, but to improve.

Mobile advertising may find itself overtaken by a more sophisticated and subtle mobile marketing of targeted promotions dependent on user profile, behavior, location and context.

The question is: How can brands make the most of customers’ data, while honoring their wish for privacy?

Despite high expectations and a rise in overall mobile shopping, retailers are still struggling with how to deal with this shift in consumer behavior.

Many large organizations are finding that they are at risk of losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of valuable customer phone numbers that they are not able to contact via their call centers or mobile marketing efforts.

Mobile advertising, as we know it today, sucks. The flashy banner and display ads – even lots of search ads – just do not generate the same results as they did on desktop computers.

As more brands have entered the scene, as more exposure to luxury brands has occurred, as Asian consumers have traveled abroad and have had diverse experiences, and as technology has enabled more learning and access to brands and their stories, consumer motivations have shifted.

Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs, but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales and downloads — is often lacking.

Where, only a year ago, 80 percent of all Web site traffic to luxury sites was from laptop and desktop computers, this has shrunk to less than 65 percent today. By this time next year, most luxury site visitors will use tablets and smartphones.

The annual advertising awards season is in full swing, and I would like to use my unofficial ballot to nominate spammers as the most creative people in mobile advertising.

“Mobile first – well, kind of” published June 20, 2013 in this publication really had very little to do with the concept of mobile first or the fundamentals of deploying a mobile strategy across your brand.

The concept of a smart watch is nothing new. Sales of smart watches in the past have just never gained the same fervor as smartphones. It seems many of us have replaced our wristwatches with smartphones.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau chief takes issue with Mozilla, maker of Web browser Firefox, for planning to ban third-party cookies. Randy Rothenberg spells out why this move is bad for consumers and marketers.

If you are thinking of competing with a mobile commerce presence for holiday 2013, the time to start innovating is now.

There are only a few powers that are trying to lock the mobile ecosystem: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Du. And while Apple and carriers are unabashedly closed fiefs, Google’s Android may not be truly open.

One of the most important auditory cues associated with any brand-name product is the brand name itself. The brand name is not really a sensory signature in itself or an example of sonic branding, but it still has the power to make or break a product line’s success.

Physical currency may eventually be an historical relic. Mobile purchases are the present and future.