This year, mobile sales are predicted to jump to more than 20% of total holiday purchases, and perhaps even surpass 50% for specific retailers in the flash sales category.

And while holiday retail sales and service always pose a stressful challenge when it comes to delivering on the customer experience, this holiday season may require even more early preparation, as mobile sales are predicted to jump to more than 20% of total holiday purchases, and perhaps even surpass 50% for specific retailers in the flash sales category.

Take a look at your phone. Too many apps on it? I feel your pain. Let's clean house together.

The touchscreen text input space could be heading for some serious disruption. If Apple drops its API guard a little more to allow developers to create system global keyboards that could open the floodgates to real keyboard innovation on iOS. (I for one hope so.) That’s not to say novel keyboards aren’t already out there — they are — but uptake is limited on Apple’s mobile platform by how siloed these apps currently have to remain. There are now signs Apple is preparing to be a little more open on that score, which could give alternative keyboards some serious uplift.

Entrepreneurs are now going well beyond building mobile-friendly versions of their websites to create apps that actually add to their bottom line — but doing it well is easier said than done. And a big part of why an app does or doesn’t take off is its usability, plain and simple.

That’s why I recently asked a panel of 11 successful young entrepreneurs the following question:

Content, personalization, and testing have emerged as important strategies for search marketers who think about the content behind the concept and the words that inspire a click that takes consumers from paid search or product listing ads to landing pages. Click to-call-ads take the consumer from the mobile machine to a live human being.

Mobile advertising is booming in the UK but despite all the celebration around it hitting £536m in 2012, we have a long way to go to catch up with actual consumer behaviour.

Earlier this month, IAB UK announced mobile ad spend in 2012 was up 148% on the previous year, citing mobile as the key factor in total UK digital ad spend hitting the £5bn mark for the first time.  Mobile’s contribution was over half the total growth in digital ad spend over the last 12 months.

This jump means mobile now accounts for almost 10% of all digital ad spend. To put this in context, it represented just 1.1% in 2009.

This is great to see, not only for the UK but for the global market. The UK leads the world in both online and mobile advertising, and over the last 5 years we have seen that trends appearing in the UK will quickly spread to other markets.

Reports, financial investments and company earnings confirm a growing change in human behavior to pick up a mobile device first before turning to desktops to conduct searches online.

Some 45% of consumers now reach for their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets first, while 49% use their PC as their primary media resource. Some 46% exclusively use mobile as their default and primary research tool, according to the 2013 Mobile Path-to-Purchase study from Telmetrics and xAd. Results compiled by Nielsen from an online survey of more than 2,000 U.S. smartphone and tablet users focus on the Banking and Finance, Gas and Convenience, Insurance, and Retail categories.

The study also demonstrates that 50% of all mobile users rely on their device at the beginning of the research process, with 1 in 3 indicating that they use their device throughout their entire purchase process.

Local remains the top driver for the mobile-search-first behavior. It turns out that 1 in 3 who use a smartphone and 1 in 4 using a tablet turn toward their device for contact information, such as a phone number, address or map and driving directions.

When properly applied, the negative space effect can result in a clever and elegant logo. Negative space is the empty space between the main elements of a design and good designers know how to take advantage of this to create something that is memorable and captures the imagination. So, today we gathered some inspiring examples of negative space in logos to show you