It’s no secret that smartphone owners are using their devices as a shopping tool more now than ever.

From shopping and researching products to comparing prices and redeeming coupons, shoppers are increasingly tethered to their smartphones.

As a result, retailers are responding with mobile apps and websites designed to attract smartphone shoppers.

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On Monday, the second of three parts of the “Mobile Shopping Survey Series: CPG Shopping Behavior” was published. The series concentrates on smartphone owners’ in-store experiences.

Sponsored by AisleBuyer, the new study highlights some surprising facts about the shopping behavior of smartphone owners in grocery and drug stores.

Incredibly, almost 75 percent of consumers would switch brands if offered real-time mobile promotions delivered to their smartphones while shopping in a store aisle.

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The following is a guest post from Jim Wehmann, senior vice president of global marketing for Digital River.

Mobile commerce continues to generate a lot of buzz among online marketers. It holds out the promise of sizable incremental sales as tablet and mobile smartphone shipments continue to soar. Smartphone sales in 2012 are expected to be nearly 1.8 billion units, while tablet unit sales are expected to climb to nearly 100 million. Mobile commerce in the hands of this many consumers is a very exciting prospect. And it speaks to the very core of direct marketing – go where your customers are rather than waiting for them to come to you. Mobile commerce will truly enable consumers to purchase anytime, anywhere – on the commuter train, at the pool, at the game and everywhere else on the go.

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Our friends over at TextMarketer have published their latest infographic, this time focusing on how businesses are leveraging SMS.

Using original, primary research conducted by TextMarketer, along with supplemental data from ITU.int, Gartner and Juniper, the data shows which industries are leveraging SMS for business purposes — whether it be for mobile advertising & marketing, utility functions, alerts, and so on — in addition to which industries are currently sending the most SMS and how mobile advertising budgets are reflecting the use of SMS.

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No, you’re not seeing duplicate headlines around the web today, Groupon has acquired another company – about ten minutes after its last acquisition of mobile startup, Hyperpublic.

In case you haven’t noticed, Groupon is hungry for acquisitions these days. That much is clear from the freshly announced purchase of Kima Labs by the social commerce giant.

If you’re unfamiliar with Kima Labs, its a relatively new outfit that developed some hot properties in the mobile space, including barcode reader app “Barcode Hero” and “TapBuy,” a popular mobile payment solution.

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Augme-owned Hipcricket is augmenting its red-hot mobile marketing and advertising platform.

On Thursday, Hipcricket announced new features and functionality for Ad Life.

 The powerful SaaS-based platform is further optimized for customer ease-of-use while adding a number of key updates to Mobile SiteBuilder and the mobile couponing module. These enhancements strengthen the platform’s self-service capabilities and enable tighter integration between mobile channels.

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This week, the folks at hyper-local mobile ad network YOOSE revealed a new partnership with adsmobi, the well-known mobile media buying platform.

According to the details presented in the announcement, the new partners are busy crafting and preparing to launch a new location-based mobile coupon service.

As of this writing, the service is pegged to be called “Prime Location.” Adsmobi says that advertisers who jump on Prime Location have much to gain from a “functionally rich, but easy to use, self-service web application to create and manage their location-based mobile coupon campaigns.”

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