Mobile commerce startup Branding Brand released today an analytics report for Black Friday sales on mobile devices detailing that there was a 128 percent year-over-year increase in Black Friday sales and a 221 percent year-over-year increase in Thanksgiving day sales.

Not only sales were up on Black Friday, visits were up by 101 percent, page views increased by 99 percent and the average order value decreased by 7.46 percent.  Thanksgiving day visits were up by 103 percent, page views rose by 133 percent and average order value increased by 19 percent.

The Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company, which was founded in 2008, compiled an index of 66 mobile sites developed by Branding Brand for retailers across a variety of categories including apparel, health and beauty and home goods. The company says it’s the largest index that details only commerce sites specifically made for smartphones, as opposed to non-optimized desktop commerce sites with mobile traffic.

Branding Brand, a mobile commerce platform that powers mobile commerce for sites and mobile apps from brands such as American Eagle Outfitters, Crate & Barrel, and Ralph Lauren, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding back in October, led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from CrunchFund and Eastern Advisors.

With three billion consumer emails in the world by 2014 and 27 trillion shopping-related emails sent to those users a year by 2014 as well, the Sift app for iPad aims to solve the problem of email overload. Launching today, the app creates a visual representation of emails containing product releases, special offers and social recommendations.

“What we do is we take a really mundane and boring experience, which is all the shopping emails that you get in your inbox, and turn it into something that is unexpectedly beautiful, fun, interesting and social,” says Saurin Shah, Sift co-founder and CEO.

Users can sign up for Sift using their email or Facebook accounts. In less than a minute after registering Sift will start detecting a user’s shopping preferences based on their email inbox and automatically re-format the content from their favorite brands into one place. Users can then make purchases from a store’s web page without leaving the app.

Sift features a personalized sales feed that’s sorted by an algorithm based on a user’s shopping and social activities, a popular feed to browse stores by category and a My Shops tab that visually lists all the stores a user follows. There’s also a search functionality and a social feed displaying the activity of friends such as sales they saved or shared and stores they follow.

Sift currently has more than 3,000 stores on board including major retailers like Gap, JCPenny, Banana Republic, Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics and more. Users can even choose stores they aren’t subscribed to via email through the app. Shah says they are doubling the amount of stores in the next couple of months.

The technology from the app can be credited toward Sift co-founder and CTO Ajay Subramanian, a technologist and former VMware software engineer, who built a technology platform that pulls the emails from a user’s inbox and matches them against the data from the more than 3,000 stores in Sift’s system. The app also monitors a person’s inbox and automatically adds new emails from the stores they shop at into Sift’s system.

Shah says some apps that are similar to Sift include clothing curation app Monogram and outfit sharing app Pose, but he adds that Sift is not about just inspirational shopping.

“We joke about this internally,” he says. “We talk about about building the Zynga for shopping in terms of broad reach. It’s an app that everyone can use.”

Sift monetizes similarly to other shopping apps that aggregate hundreds of stores by taking a small piece of the transactions from the merchants made through the app.

The company is currently working on a web-based HTML5 version of Sift that will work on smartphones such as the iPhone and Android, but they currently have no plans for a native smartphone app.

Shah could not disclose funding for the app, but adds that they will share that information sometime in the future.

iPad-only Social shopping app Flit wants to make digital shopping more like in-store shopping. The newly released app allows consumers to search through hundreds of commerce websites, compare items side-by-side, share those item comparisons with friends and purchase items right from within the app.

The free app, which is focused on women’s clothing,  features more than 1000 stores like Urban Outfitters, ModCloth, Amazon, Nordstrom and Macy’s.

“I saw a gap in the transition to online. A lot of the great qualities of physical retail had been lost,” explained Adrian Lall, CEO of Flit. “That was kind of the genesis of Flit.”

The app’s interface is broken up into three tabs: Home, Browse and Compare. In the Home tab, users see their recent shopping searches, favorite shops and sale and new arrival alerts. A ribbon UI element at the top of the app displays different stores to search from. In the Browser tab, users can shuffle through different stores and save items they find (Flit calls the ability to save a “Cute”). Lastly, the Compare tab allows consumers to compare saved items side-by-side, up to three at a time, and share their item comparison with friends for shopping advice.

“It’s kind of a disruption of shopping and social commerce,” says Lall. “It disrupts it by taking some of the metaphors from physical shopping such as looking in shops and moving between shops, interacting with your friends and getting advice from friends and kind of wraps that into an app.”

Lall says the app is unique and first to market, and the technology behind the app’s ability to initiate a user’s search through hundreds of shops in the app’s database is patent-pending.

Demographic-wise, the app is geared toward female iPad users between the ages of 25-45. Lall says women’s shopping tasks are a lot more complicated than for men.

“Women basically need to explore and discover more, visit more stores, compare more items, see items side-by-side, so it’s very targeted to women,” Lall says.

Flit uses its customer’s Facebook profile to power its social element, allowing users to ask friends via notifications when they want an answer to Flit’s “what is cuter” question.

Lall believes no one has beaten Flit to creating this type of app service. One competitor that is a little similar to Flit is Buyou, which also aggregates multiple store results, but has far fewer integrated stores, he says.

Flit monetizes through an affiliate program. The company works with a subset of their retail partners, generating revenue through click-ins and conversions. Flit is also continuing to build out its retail partners by adding new stores as affiliates everyday.

Flit encourages diversity with stores ranging from large retailers to small boutiques, and if a consumer doesn’t see one of their favorite stores, he or she can suggest it to Flit.

Lall couldn’t disclose who’s backing Flit and for how much, although he says a later announcement is coming to clarify this information. Flit has received funding from unnamed institutional and angel investors.

Local commerce app Rumgr recently released its first major update since its launch in February, adding new social features in hopes to become a player in the mobile social commerce market.

Rumgr is an iPhone-only app that allows users to buy and sell new and used goods on mobile. The Las Vegas-based Rumgr was founded by former Zappos developers including Rumgr co-founder and CEO Dylan Bathurst. Users can sell products by taking pictures of items with their iPhone camera and posting them to Rumgr. Users looking to purchase can scroll through the app’s Rummage tab that displays all the items for sale based on your location via GPS and sorted by distance and newness of the item. Once a sale is accepted, a private chat between the buyer and seller is initiated to complete the transaction. The app is not about searching for specific items, but rather finding hidden gems in a user’s local area from friends and neighbors.

“You don’t go to a garage sale looking for something specific,” Bathurst tells Inside Mobile Apps. “You go to a garage sale for that fun experience of finding something really interesting. We wanted to bring that kind of aspect of local commerce to an iPhone app.”

In an effort to continue making the Rumgr community a focus, the recent update added new social features including two tabs titled Profile and Following, so users can follow their friends and neighbors and also set up user profiles. The Rummage section also saw some changes like the ability to move the map to different areas, which aren’t local, meaning users can see what’s being sold from non-local areas.

Community guidelines specify what can be put on Rumgr. If the people at Rumgr see an item for sale as a problem, they’ll reach out to the seller and tell them why they took their item down. On the other hand, Rumgr still wants to let users have fun by letting people use the app in different ways. Rumgr release top 10 lists each month on its blog of what interesting items people post on the app ranging from houses to pens and pencils.

The app currently has no monetization features and has about 300 to 500 daily active users. Rumgr is still developing the idea for the app and also trying to see where it fits in the mobile local commerce market, but the company is seeing steady growth, says Bathurst.

The company also makes it a point to get out of the office and meet customers at coffee shops to chat about the app. Bathurst even personally emails every user who signs up to ask them how they like the app so far. That user feedback is helping to set the course for where Rumgr goes in the future.

Bathurst says he’s seen a lot of mobile location-based buying and selling apps come out trying to tackle similar problems but with very different approaches like Yardsale, HipSwap and Craigslist.

“We have goals beyond just buying and selling. That’s what really differentiates us is that we’re not just trying to be a place to hock your goods and get rid of them, but kind of a place that people want to go to sell because they know they’re going to have a great experience there.”

Our AppData traffic tracking service shows that Rumgr doesn’t rank on any leaderboards as of today.

Right now the folks at Rumgr have priorities and are only focusing on the iPhone app and its community, but they do plan expand to different platforms once the iPhone version is nailed down, according to Bathurst.

“The biggest thing that the future holds for our company is really focusing on the social aspect of buying and selling,” he says. “Really going down the road of helping people have great quality sales between their friends and neighbors and really focusing on building that community where there wasn’t one before.”

As for the future of local commerce on mobile, Bathurst believes the potential over the next five to 10 years is huge. He adds that the used goods market will always be huge because times are always going to be rough, which means people wanting to sell used goods to make money.

Rumgr has received $500,00 in funding to date and is backed by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Zappos “No Title” Fred Mosseler, Zappos CTO Arun Rajan and CEO of Resort Gaming Group in Las Vegas Andrew Donner.

Seattle-based Amazon is the undisputed leader in online retail. Now the web-based marketplace is challenging retail competitors with a mobile app that allows consumers to compare prices while standing in brick-and-mortar stores.

Price Check by Amazon is, as the name implies, an app that allows consumers to compare prices with Amazon.com and its merchants. The app features four methods for checking prices using a one-button interface for each method. The first method is typing the name of the product. The second is scanning the barcode of a product using a smartphone’s built-in camera. An image-centering feature helps users accurately scan barcodes, but we found the process to be a bit difficult. Users can also take a picture of an item directly as a third price-check method, but the function seems limited mainly to books, DVDs, CDs and video games. Lastly, a user can generate a search query for an item in the app using their phone’s voice-recognition feature. From there, a customer can log into their Amazon account to complete the purchase if they want the price of the product on Amazon.

Aside from prices, the app also provides product descriptions and customer reviews. Every product a user looks up has a “Submit Price” button, so if the price in a store is cheaper than Amazon, the user can share the in-store prices with Amazon. Users can also share product prices via Twitter, Facebook, text message or email.

Price Check doesn’t display ads, nor monetize through any other means besides goods purchasing.

Interestingly, Price Check’s main competitor is Amazon Mobile — which displays much of the exact same information, such as customer reviews. Features that are exclusive to Price Check are the voice functionality and price submission button. The voice functionality doesn’t seem like that much of a distinction, given that Amazon mobile users could just click on the search field and activate their smartphone’s voice recognition feature for the same effect.

According to our AppData metrics tracking service, Price Check is currently ranked 62 (top chart) under the lifestyle genre in the Apple App Store and sits at the 23 (bottom chart) spot in the shopping category and 498 for overall applications in Google Play.

Amazon Mobile ranks No. 60 (top chart) for the top free apps category in the App Store and slightly higher in Google Play ranking 54 (bottom chart) among top free apps. Google Play is reporting 500,000 to one million installs for Price Check by Amazon and five million to 10 million for Amazon Mobile.

Even if there’s not much to set Price Check apart from Amazon Mobile, we found the app to be a simple, useful tool for making cost-effective purchasing decision. We have reached out to Amazon to find out if there are plans to introduce new features to Price Check that would better differentiate it from Amazon Mobile, but haven’t heard back as of press time.

Price Check by Amazon is available for free on both iOS and Android, respectively. You can follow the app’s progress with AppData, our tracking service for mobile and social apps and developers.

Zooz is aiming to improve mobile payments with a single solution service that allows developers to offer PayPal, credit card and carrier billing options in one screen on iOS, Android and — as of today — HTML5 apps.

The Tel Aviv-based startup wants to address what CEO and co-founder Oren Levy sees as a lack of standardization in mobile payment options. With some apps using PayPal, some using credit cards and some redirecting to other apps or mobile websites, Levy believes consumers are often unable to use their payment platform of choice, and are unsure if they can trust mobile apps to safeguard their financial information. Developers, meanwhile, see too many users abandoning purchases partway through the payment process.

By integrating the Zooz SDK into their apps, developers can offer mobile shoppers the choice to pay with PayPal, major credits like Visa, MasterCard and American Express, or direct carrier billing from over 70 different carriers in the U.S. and Europe. This makes it easy for developers to let customers pay how they want, which in turn boosts conversion. One app in the Zooz beta test saw its conversion increase from 30 percent when using PayPal as the only purchase option to 60 percent after offering credit card, carrier billing and PayPal payment options through the service.

Users who pay through the Zooz system never have to register with Zooz or download a separate app in order to make payments, but users can choose to complete a one-time registration process that associates their payment details with their mobile device. Users who choose to do this will see their payment details pre-populate the next time they make a purchase on their registered device in a Zooz-powered app, even if it’s a different app. If a user does choose to register their device, they can also set up a secure four digit passcode to prevent unauthorized purchases. It’s a different approach from rival payment startup Clover, which requires users to download a separate app, but then promises subsequent transactions will be completed in seconds.

“If you look at numbers, every additional step you require from the user reduces the conversion rate of an app,” Levy says. “While some competitors are looking more to process credit card payments, we’re looking to standardize the mobile checkout. Just like you’d go to a website and see the VeriSign seal and know that page is secure, our vision is for you to go onto a mobile app, see the Zooz screen and know it’s secure and you can trust that screen and app with your credit card and PayPal details.”

Zooz offers two tracks to developers who want to use the company’s services to process payments. For independent developers who don’t have merchant accounts with major credit card providers, Zooz will process those payments for them, taking a fee of 2.8 percent, plus 19 cents per transaction. For users who choose to pay via PayPal or carrier billing, Zooz doesn’t charge the developer, instead directing the transactions as part of its greater service. For larger developers with merchant accounts, Zooz acts as a mobile payment gateway, earning affiliate fees for directing transactions.

Zooz’s technology and security features have been in development for just over a year, and recently came out of a four month long closed beta. Although fairly new, Levy tells us about 1100 apps on iOS and Android are already using Zooz to process payments. The company is backed by $1.5 million round of seed funding from Lool ventures, Rhodium, Kima Ventures and other angels.

Enabling push notifications in a mobile app can double its engagement level and user retention according to Urban Airship.  The startup, which provides in-app purchase and push notification services to other mobile developers, is touting the results from another growing startup — travel accommodation booking service Airbnb — as proof that push can have dramatic results.

Airbnb has been working with Urban Airship since December 2011, offering users the chance to receive push notifications whenever they receive a message about a potential rental. In situations where both the host and guest enable push notifications, Airbnb bookings are now completed up to 8 times faster.  Airbnb users who have opted to receive push notifications are also half as likely to let responses expire, and Airbnb hosts who receive push notifications will respond to inquires three times faster than when they are notified by email alone.

Thanks to its partnership with Urban Airship, Airbnb is now sending 1.5 million SMS and push notifications a month and more than 25 percent of all messages sent through the Airbnb website are received via iPhone. The number of Airbnb users that are set up to use its service via mobile has increased by 200 percent in the past three months, from 20 percent in February to 60 percent today.

While impressive, Airbnb’s push results are typical, according to Urban Airship.  Earlier this year the company released a study from another client, data compression app Onavo. That study showed Onavo was was able to increase its awareness by 75 percent and overall satisfaction by 50 percent after signing up with Urban Airship.

Although it is a multi-service company, push notifications are quickly becoming the core of Urban Airship’s business. The company is now sending 88 million push notifications a day, an impressive amount considering the it took the company just under two years to hit 20 billion push notifications, a milestone it passed in the beginning of May.

Urban Airship has so far raised $21.6 million in venture funding. The company’s Series C round closed in November and netted the company $15.1 million from Verizon and Salesforce, both of which joined as strategic investors after working with the company.

Pew: Almost half of Americans now own smartphones — According to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46 percent of American adults now own smartphones and only 41 percent own feature phones. In May 2011 35 percent of American adults owned a smartphone.

Adobe unveils AIR 3.2 — Adobe has announced the latest updates to Adobe AIR. Version 3.2 of the tool includes both 2D and 3D hardware acceleration, which will allow games to run at 60 frames per second.

Gamevil hits 100 million mobile downloads — South Korean publisher Gamevil has now seen 100 million cumulative downloads on iOS and Android. In August, the company announced it had reached 50 million cumulative downloads.

There are now 1 billion mobile subscribers in China — According to new government statistics from China, the country has become the first in the world to have more than 1 billion mobile subscribers. 74 percent of of the company’s total population owns a mobile phone, reports TechWireAsia.

Millennial Media rolls out self service advertising — Mobile ad network Millennial Media now offers self-service advertising under as new product called mMedia.

DeNA signs deal with Qihoo 360 – DeNA has signed yet another deal to help the company establish its Mobage network in China, reports Penn Olsen. The Japanese mobile-social game company has inked a deal with Chinese company Qihoo 360 to add a Mobage app to the company’s Android market.

EA puts Battlefield 3: Aftershock out of its misery – A week after yanking its poorly reviewed mobile game Battlefield 3: Aftershock from the App Store to to poor reviews, EA has decided to permanently shelve the game according to a report from Vox Games.

PayPal now in almost all U.S. Home Depot stores — As of Feb. 28 shoppers in almost every one of the 2,000 U.S. home depot stores can now pay for purchases using a PayPal card, or a mobile phone number and PIN combination, according to the official PayPal blog.

Official Angry Birds theme park on the way – The Särkänniemi Adventure Park is adding an expansion based on Rovio’s hit franchise, Angry Birds called Angry Birds Land. The extension will be open to the public this summer. Last year, Rovio famously shut down a fake Angry Birds themed amusement park in China.

Playspan: virtual goods consumption up 28 percent since 2009 — According to a study conducted by digital monetization company Playspan, U.S. consumers bought $2.3 billion dollars worth of virtual goods in 2011, spending an average of $64 dollars per person. Playspan included purchases within a game or app, purchases from a console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, prepaid cards and purchases from online stores and publisher’s websites in its study.

Dungeon Overlord expanding, going mobile — Night Owl Games has added the first expansion to its Facebook game Dungeon Overlord, titled The Succubus Stories. The developer will also be unveiling a companion mobile app for iPhone and Android at PAX East in April.

Aeria Games Pivots to mobile – MMO publisher Aeria Games has opened a new mobile office in Santa Clara to focus on developing mobile games, reports Gamasutra. The company plans to release at least one or two titles per month.

[Funding] Charles River Ventures closes $375 million in new funding – Venture capital firm Charles River Ventures has closed its fifteenth round of funding, adding a further $375 million to the company’s funds. Charles River Ventures has invested in Millennial Media, Fiksu and Affirmed.

[Funding] Tello raises $2.7 million – Mobile customer service app developer Tello has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding. The round was lead by True Ventures and Bullpen Capital.

[Release] OnLive Desktop app comes to Android — OnLive’s streaming desktop app is now available for Android tablets. The service costs $4.99 a month an allows users to run virtual versions of the Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

The former lead developer behind EA PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies is behind a new startup that ties real-world deals and purchases to gameplay.

Called Gimmie and backed by $200,000 from mobile incubator Tandem, the company lets gamers earn special points that can be redeemed for discounts on products like iPad cases and pillows. It’s kind of like a cross between the install networks, which give gamers virtual currency rewards if they watch ads or download other apps, and Kiip, which gives gamers coupons when they make in-game achievements.

While users play or take actions in a game like level up or buy virtual goods, they rack up more Gimmie points. Then they can go to an offer wall-like experience for real goods where they can get discounts. Like in-game offers, users can pick whatever products they want. Gimmie is currently in beta with ten mobile app developers and ten consumer product brands. It’s an HTML5-based offer wall, so it works across iOS and Android.

David Ng, the company’s chief executive, said he and co-founder Roy Liu came up with the idea while playing basketball.

“We thought it would be great if we could do a startup that could combine gaming with shopping,” he said. “We thought there must be a way we can make a real-world offer so easy that it’s kind of like a basketball layup or gimmie.”

Liu, who worked for EA PopCap for five years and was lead developer on Plants Vs. Zombies, left shortly after its acquisition by EA and joined Ng.

Gimmie faces more of a hurdle in making this two-sided market work. Unlike Flurry, Tapjoy and W3i, which mainly deal with developers as both publishers and advertisers, Gimmie will need to attract developers and consumer product brands. Kiip has had some success with this in recruiting brands like Sephora, Carl’s Jr. and PopChips, thanks to the hustle of its young founder Brian Wong. Tapjoy has also expanded its advertiser portfolio to brands in recent months, but that was only after it secured a strong network of developer advertisers.

However, now that consumers are reportedly spending more time in mobile apps than on the web, brands are bound to pay more attention to them as an advertising medium and may be willing to take a bet on a relatively small startup as a partner.

For now, Gimmie is free to both developers and advertisers. The presumable business model here would be some sort of affiliate model where Gimmie and the developer displaying the promotion split a fee every time a consumer makes a transaction. But Ng wouldn’t give more specifics.

Gimmie Teaser from GimmieWorld on Vimeo.

The Daily, the iPad only digital newspaper that was launched with plenty of fanfare last year by both News Corp. and Apple is no longer an iPad exclusive.

As of this month, the newspaper will now be available on certain Android devices, thanks to a partnership between the Daily and Verizon Wireless, another one of the newspaper’s original launch parters.

The news may seem somewhat left-field considering News Corp. launched the app at a high profile event last February with Rupert Murdock touting the iPad’s influence on the development of the newspaper. Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and sales Eddy Cue also made a rare appearance at the event, taking the stage to praise the app.

The Daily acted as the test case for in-app subscription services that Apple later rolled out to all developers and publishers.

Given that it was the No. 3 top grossing iPad app for 2011 according to iTunes Rewind, in-app subscriptions for media products show promise. However, the app has failed to break even since its launch. In May, Inside Mobile Apps reported that the Daily had racked up more than 800,000 downloads, but had already lost more than $10 million. At the time News Corp.’s president Chase Carey revealed the company expected to lose $30 million on the newspaper in its first year, but the move to Android may signal that News Corp. is cooling on its desire to take losses on the property. In September, Bloomberg reported that The Daily was averaging about 120,000 weekly readers, far short of the 500,000 readers that the paper reportedly needs to break even.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, so far this year The Daily has averaged somewhere between the No. 20 and 30 spots on the iPad top grossing apps chart.

The Android version of the digital newspaper will be available as a pre-loaded application on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablets. Existing Galaxy Tab 10.1 users will be able to download the app via a software update this month. Subscription rates for the Android version of The Daily will be identical to the iPad version’s, but Android users will subscribe month-by-month for $3.99, whereas iPad users pay $0.99 per week. Both platforms charge $39.99 for a one year subscription.