Mobile is exploding. Over 100 million people in the US have smartphones, consumers are spending over 60 minutes a day consuming media on these devices, and people glance at their phone about 40 times a day. That is a massive and very active user base. You would think that advertisers would be rushing to take advantage of this untapped goldmine of an opportunity to reach consumers. However, as Meeker showed there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of time people spend on their phones and the number of advertising dollars allocated to mobile. The mis-equilibrium numbers vary, but estimates range between consumers spending 10% to 24% of their media time on mobile and advertisers putting only 0.5% to 1% of their budgets there.

Borrowing a page from Starbucks’ successful mobile payments strategy, PayPal has begun piloting a new application that enables users to make purchases via a unique bar code linked to their account.

PayPal continues to test the waters for different mobile payments solutions, with the new PayPal inStore app just the latest example. The app, which generates a unique bar code to make a payment similar to the Starbucks payments app, officially launched yesterday and is available at Coast, Oasis, Warehouse and Karen Millen stores for a total of 230 locations.