U.S. Mobile Commerce Reached New Highs Over Thanksgiving Weekend

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iphone aim push notification On Thanksgiving and Black Friday, retailers sent out 37% more push notifications on average than on a normal day during the last two months, according to IBM.

Push notifications are messages that can be sent through apps to smartphones. These notifications are used by retailers to alert shoppers of deals and promotions in order to drive online sales and in-store visits.

While it is by no means surprising that retailers increased their marketing efforts during Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the increase in the use of push notifications is an indicator of retailers' move towards mobile.

It turns out that the move is paying off. Online sales transacted with mobile devices grew to 21.8% of total online sales on Black Friday, a 43% increase from Black Friday 2012. Total online sales increased 19% year-over-year as well.

In other news...

Tablets doubled their share of mobile ad impressions in Q3 2013, up from Q4 2012. (Adfonic)

Amazon is experimenting with delivering packages with drones. (Business Insider)

New apps are helping consumers to find parking spaces and keep track of their vehicles. (New York Times)

The release of payment cards like Coin and Google Wallet Card may be a signal that mobile payments are still a long way off. (Washington Post)

Black Friday online sales reached $1.93 billion and increased 39% year-over-year, according to Adobe. (Adobe)

Wal-Mart Announced that it sold 1.4 million tablets on Black Friday. (Wal-Mart)

Mobile accounted for 53% of Wal-Mart's total Thanksgiving web traffic, according to Venture Beat. (Venture Beat)

Google's Nexus phones are susceptible to SMS-based denial of service attacks. (PC World)

Thanksgiving was the busiest day on Instagram to date. (Instagram)

Shopping through PayPal Mobile increased 91% on Thanksgiving compared to Thanksgiving 2012. (PayPal)

Correction: The PDF version of our Future Of Digital: 2013 slide deck which we posted last week was missing slides. We corrected this error and the new PDF can be found here.