A new start-up, Openspace, is launching a physical store where consumers can visit and discover the latest mobile applications.

“If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to Verizon, AT&T or Best Buy,” said Openspace founder Robert Reich. “But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?”

To help solve that problem, Openspace opened its first physical storefront last week in Boulder, Colo. Open six days a week, the store is staffed by “App Gurus” who make recommendations and try to eliminate “app-rehension.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Previously, Reich founded Boulder-based OneRiot, which uses social data to make mobile advertising more targeted. The company was acquired by Wal-Mart in September.

Openspace is just getting off the ground, so all the details haven’t been nailed down — like how the operation will make money. But in the next year it hopes to partner with developers to take a percentage of sales that result from applications promoted in the store.

Consumers can also do things the old-fashioned way and visit the company’s Web site to get recommendations. On the site, the company categorizes applications by interests — many of which won’t be found on iTunes — including such nontraditional subjects as Occupy Wall Street, zombies or “games a 10-year-old girl will enjoy.”

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

Whether Openspace will be able to make enough money off referrals to offset the high costs of real estate and full-time staff will be the bigger question.

The promotion goes live Saturday and will serve as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores.

This holiday season, mobile commerce is surging as more people become comfortable using applications on their phone to compare prices or simply shop when not at home or at work.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the biggest online shopping day of the year so far, mobile sales reached 6.6 percent, jumping from 2.3 percent in 2010, according to IBM’s online retail study.

Amazon is not the only company hoping for a strong mobile Christmas.

Last quarter, eBay started airing TV commercials – its first in the past few years — to promote its mobile applications. The company estimated that mobile commerce merchandise volume this year will hit $5 billion. Additionally, eBay’s PayPal unit is expected to exceed $3.5 billion in mobile revenue.

Amazon has never released figures on how well its mobile applications do.

While the information empowers consumers, it terrifies retailers, who increasingly are feeling like showrooms — shoppers come to to check out the merchandise but ultimately decide to walk out and buy online instead.

Amazon’s Price Check app, which is available for iPhone and Android, allows shoppers to scan a bar code, take a picture of an item or conduct a text search to find the lowest prices. Amazon is also asking consumers to submit the prices of items with the app, so Amazon knows if it is still offering the best prices.

“We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round,” said Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile. “Now, we are enabling customers to use the Price Check app to share in-store prices while they search for the best deals.”

While Amazon’s applications and its $5 incentive can be viewed as friendly to consumers, physical retailers will see it only one way — as an attack.

The one-day promotion Dec. 10 will offer 5 percent, or up to $5, off on as many as three items.

But the strategy might backfire. Not only are employees upset that they’ll have to staff the stores instead of being able to stay with their families, the move could cannibalize the retailers’ own online and mobile efforts.

Historically, shoppers have lined up in the early hours on the day after Thanksgiving — which has come to be known as Black Friday — to race into stores and be the first to scoop up discounts ahead of the holidays.

This year, stores are jumping the gun by opening a day earlier. Wal-Mart will open at 10 pm, two hours ahead of last year’s opening; Toys “R” Us will open at 9 pm, an hour earlier than last season; and Target will open for four hours when the clock strikes midnight.

On behalf of employees, Change.org has kicked off a petition, “Tell Target to Save Thanksgiving,” which argues that night openings rob hourly and salary workers of time off with their families.

But there may also be an economic reason to maintain standard practices.

Most of these retailers have major online presences and multiple mobile applications, including on the iPad. If they are open 24 hours a day online, must they actually open the doors, too?

After all, Amazon.com is never considered closed.

To get a sense of the strategy, we talked to someone who works on mobile and online strategy at one of the major retailers that is opening early. He told AllThingsD that he was worried about the impact opening early will have on mobile traffic, since traditionally their peak traffic hits between 3 am and 5 am, before stores open on Black Friday.

If customers have the option of visiting the stores in person earlier, it’s unclear whether that pattern will continue — and whether people will do some extra shopping while killing time standing in line waiting for the doors to open.

Even though mobile is still a small contributor compared to online traffic or store traffic, the retailer in question has scaled its infrastructure to accommodate this early-morning surge.

In general, the 2011 holiday season is expected to drive record sales online and from mobile devices.

Chase Paymentech, which analyzes information from the Top 50 e-commerce retailers, reports that online sales are up 25 percent compared to last year. A separate study by IBM predicts that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from the last holiday season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year, on “Cyber Monday,” mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.

But Andrew Lipsman, VP of industry analysis at comScore, said he did not believe the impact of opening early would be very significant.

“Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday are not huge online spending days,” he said. “So, even if sales are relatively soft, it should not have a significant impact on the full season for online retailers. At the end of the day, it will likely be a rounding error — if anything.”

ComScore’s data excludes sales made on tablets or mobile phones, but it estimates that those devices account for a minor amount of e-commerce spending — roughly 3 percent.

Here are the key online shopping dates in 2010:

Target Photo Credit: djLicious.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today after CLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

Both applications will enable consumers to shop online or see what’s available locally. Orders can be shipped or picked up.

The apps are being released ahead of the end-of-the-year shopping frenzy, which many retailers are hoping will be one of the busiest mobile commerce events ever.

“As customers use more smartphones and tablets, the Wal-Mart customer is doing the same thing,” said Gibu Thomas, the company’s SVP of mobile and digital.

That’s true, and it’s scary for big retailers. Increasingly, consumers are scanning barcodes to get reviews and compare prices before deciding whether to make a purchase or go somewhere else.

Thomas said the apps are not a defensive move against this trend, but rather a way to give consumers what they want. ”We want to know how we can help our customers shop better with us, which will make them shop more with us,” he argued.

Wal-Mart’s first iPad app launched about a week ago.

It lets people browse inventory in their local store, while also seeing what else is available online. Instead of duplicating the online experience, they’ve created categories. For instance, in the home section, shoppers will browse a catalog-like experience, where they’ll see pots and pans, stereo speakers and outdoor fireplaces without any additional information.

To see prices or more details, a user will have to choose an item.

The major new feature of the iPhone application, which originally launched more than a year ago, will be a shopping list with integrated voice dictation using Nuance’s speech recognition, and discounts through a partnership with Coupons.com.

The app will be available as soon as it receives Apple’s approval.

This app gets pretty close to what many companies have been describing as mobile commerce — minus near field communication that would allow users to tap and pay. And, at Wal-Mart’s scale, this is truly something for the mass market.

Thomas said 90 percent of consumers who come to a Wal-Mart store on a weekly basis come with a shopping list.

The iPhone shopping list feature will allow people to enter items manually using predictive text. Type “cheddar,” and you’ll see a number of cheese brands and the price of each item.

Consumers will also be able to enter items using their voice. When Thomas demonstrated it to me, the app was fairly accurate. It recognized orange juice and sour cream as one item each, but Campbell’s soup came up as two.

Because the real price is listed, budget-conscious shoppers can decide how much to pay for groceries before even getting to the store. Coupons from Coupons.com will also be integrated into the shopping experience. You might type in “yogurt,” but decide on Yoplait for the discount.

For some stores, Wal-Mart has given consumers the ability to find out what aisle the items are in from the phone. That capability will roll out to more stores as it comes out of beta. Eventually, the information could be overlaid on a map to show the most efficient route for getting all of your items.

Thomas also said the company anticipates being able to store shoppers’ receipts electronically, so that items purchased will be uploaded to an individual’s device, making it easier to create shopping lists in the future.

“We think of your mobile phone as your loyalty card. We don’t have cards but we think of it in the sense that you can use your phone to surface real-time discounts,” he said.

The applications were built by @WalMartLabs in Silicon Valley, which serves as the technology hub for the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer.

But in this game of one-upmanship, Square has thrown down the gauntlet by announcing this morning that it has made the payment process hands-free.

The San Francisco company, which was recently valued at $1 billion, said it has made it as easy to pay as saying your name.

A new version of its application, called Card Case, will leverage geo-fencing capabilities in Apple’s latest operating system update for the iPhone. The technology will identify when a person is within 100 meters of a favorite merchant.

Square’s Director of Products Megan Quinn explains that when a shopper is within range, a tab at that establishment will automatically open — without that person ever touching his or her iPhone. Once the user places an order and goes to pay, all they have to do is give their name.

The merchant will see on its iPad that a tab has been opened in that person’s name from inside the Square app.

Once a customer gets outside of the 100-meter range again, the tab will automatically close, whether a transaction was conducted or not. In theory, this means it would only be open for a few minutes if the shopper simply walked by a coffee shop and didn’t stop.

In addition to having to have an iPhone with the latest operating system, the consumer will also have to designate shopping establishments at which tabs could be automatically opened.

Since Square opened it up eight weeks ago, 20,000 merchants nationwide have joined the Card Case app’s directory.

In May, Square unveiled its mobile payments strategy for small retailers, including the iPhone and Android applications for consumers and the iPad software for merchants. Before that, it had focused primarily on allowing small businesses to accept credit cards using a swipe accessory plugged into a smartphone’s headphone jack.

Quinn said the most obvious benefits to the new features are speed and ease of use; however, there’s a more touchy-feely reason, too. “We’ve removed the artifacts from the experience, so it’s about the interaction between the merchant and the customers.”

In other words, it’s like walking into Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

[Photo credit: Wikipedia.]

To address that perceived problem, Google is kicking off an awareness campaign today to promote building sites that render better on smaller screens.

After all, maybe there’s not always an app for that — or there doesn’t always have to be.

The project, called HowtoGoMo.com, is a public service announcement of sorts that explains why you may need a standalone mobile site — and, if you agree, what to do about it.

The promotional site, which has been delayed for a week, was officially rolled out this morning and detailed in a blog post.

In an interview, Google’s director of mobile, Jason Spero, explained that the purpose of the site is to walk companies through the process of deciding to build a standalone mobile site. Spero joined Google through the acquisition of AdMob, the mobile ad network.

Amazingly, while Apple has successfully convinced everyone that there needs to be an application for everything found on the Internet, mobile needs have not translated as widely to the need for mobile Web sites.

A survey conducted by Equation Research found that two out of three mobile users have encountered problems when accessing Web sites on their phones over the past 12 months. Load time is the top complaint; more than half reported that they had trouble accessing a site from the phone, and 40 percent said they’d use a competing site if they had to.

Beyond being able to view a Web site on a smaller screen, a mobile version could make it easier to book reservations, buy tickets or look up information with fewer clicks.

The new Google site is a resource center that links to a growing list of 15 to 20 vendors and agencies that can help with all aspects of building a mobile site. The site also has an emulator that shows how your site looks on a phone, and offers case studies from other companies.

Spero said the site is not about making money for Google — well, at least not directly.

If more sites were mobile-ready, Google could conceivably help them with mobile ad campaigns. But right now, Spero said, so many conversations for Google’s mobile advertising division start from scratch because so many companies still don’t have mobile properties.

“Google’s interest here is people being able to do business on mobile phones, and once they can, we can offer a great marketing solution for them,” he said. “Having a proper mobile Web site or an app is a prerequisite to marketing to mobile users.”

Ten months after announcing its first round of capital, Shopify has secured $15 million to continue to fuel its growth.

And it might just need that extra padding, since eBay announced — at a big, splashy event last week — that it had entered the same space.

Shopify creates tools and templates to power online storefronts that sell merchandise ranging from stuffed Angry Birds to the latest in protective cases for the iPad.

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners. The first round for $7 million was closed in December.

Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s CEO and co-founder, told me that over the past year the company managed to blow through its two-year plan in six months. Shopify has grown from 10,000 storefronts to 16,000 in 80 countries and has more than doubled its staff to 80; it expects to have 130 employees in the next year.

Lütke declined to provide any specific figures, but back in December he said Shopify was processing more than $100 million in revenues from all of the sites combined.

Along with supporting the growth, Lütke said, some of the capital will go toward unspecified acquisitions.

One acquisition is already making a big contribution: Shopify purchased a company that supported e-commerce on an iPhone application, and already 5 percent of sales on all of the sites it supports come from Android, iOS and mobile Web (not including tablets, because Lütke doesn’t believe those are mobile devices).

The funding will also go toward the Shopify Fund, a $1 million kitty that will finance developers to create e-commerce widgets that plug in to Shopify’s architecture. So far, a number of plugins have been developed, starting with QuickBooks, Mail Chimp and Hubspot.

Shopify was founded in 2006 as an online storefront selling snowboards and other winter apparel. That’s when Lütke figured out how difficult it was to start an online store — he decided to shut down the storefront and focus on reselling the software it had built for Shopify’s own use.

Other merchants Shopify works with include Tesla Motors, Amnesty International and the Foo Fighters.

Last week, eBay unveiled X.commerce, which is designed to help any size retailer — from family-owned stores to Toys “R” Us — stay current as shopping goes online and mobile. The platform has been slowly coming together over the past year as eBay has made several acquisitions, including the purchase of Magento, one of Shopify’s main competitors.

It is eBay’s goal to provide a package of e-commerce services to retailers for free, and use it as a lead-generation tool for its more high-margin services, like PayPal and GSI Commerce.

Shopify charges a flat monthly fee depending on the size of the retailer, and also charges developers a percentage of each application sold on its platform, just like eBay.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus

Zynga is planning to unveil “brand-spankin’ new play” at a press event tomorrow in San Francisco, where it is now expected to share its plans for leveraging Facebook’s new HTML5 mobile platform.

Facebook’s platform, which was announced this afternoon, will run on Apple’s iOS devices and across the mobile Web. It will allow game developers to connect versions of the same application on PCs and mobile devices.

To do so, developers will build the applications in HTML5, which is an emerging common Web language, rather than the more commonly used Adobe Flash technology.

In addition to “selected titles” from Zynga, game developers EA, Moblyng, Storm8 and Wooga are expected to launch games on the platform. A Zynga spokesperson declined to say too much about tomorrow’s event, but confirmed it “will have HTML5 games coming soon to Facebook’s mobile apps site.” The event is likely to include other announcements, as well.

CJ Prober, SVP at EA Interactive, said, “HTML 5 is going to allow us to bring our Facebook social games to mobile users while addressing recent fragmentation challenges faced by the industry. While Flash has worked great for us in a PC environment, it is not supported on iOS and it performs inconsistently on Android, rendering most of our Facebook games unplayable in mobile browsers.”

The Sims Social will be playable immediately on the new iPad app, and the Sim’s mobile app for Facebook’s platform is coming later this fall.

Storm8 CEO Perry Tam is looking forward to all the new eyeballs for the three games that are already live on Facebook’s mobile apps. “Facebook has created a viral channel where millions of people can encounter our games,” he said. “That definitely makes us more interested in developing for Facebook.”

Zynga’s event tomorrow is called “Zynga Unleashed,” hinting at how its games will work on mobile or without wires.

But the struggle to make one cohesive game play across multiple devices has not been totally fixed. Apple does not want to relinquish its lucrative relationships with game players, where it collects 30 percent of all in-app purchases. Facebook, meanwhile, takes the same cut on the Web.

On the new mobile platform, Apple’s payments will take precedence on iOS devices. As Liz Gannes wrote in her story today:

On the downside, there’s one place Facebook wasn’t able to negotiate a consistent experience for users: payments. This was a major sticking point in ongoing discussions with Apple, as I’d written last week.

Facebook Credits can’t be used to pay for virtual goods within native iOS apps or mobile Web apps running within a Facebook app on iOS. Instead, users will have to buy separate in-app currency through Apple’s own in-app payment system.

And this after Facebook just required all of its game developers to switch to exclusive use of Credits earlier this year.

“We realize there’s some inconsistency,” [Facebook CTO Bret] Taylor admitted. He wouldn’t say if Facebook gets a share of revenue for in-app purchases it refers to Apple.

The spots will appear on “Top Gear,” “SportsCenter,” “Tosh.0,” “The Daily Show,” “Top Chef” and “The Rachel Zoe Project.”

The campaign’s tagline is “When it’s on your mind, it’s on eBay.”

We knew that the ad campaign was coming. While eBay hasn’t advertised in awhile, it decided now is the right time, after spending the last year redesigning its site to no longer focus exclusively on auctioning off used goods.

In fact, 62 percent of eBay’s current listed items are being sold for a set price, and 70 percent are new.

The ad campaign, which will also feature QR codes and online ads — including YouTube and Yahoo homepage takeovers — was created by independent San Francisco ad agency Venables Bell & Partners.

It’s not too shocking that eBay is targeting mobile users for this campaign.

This holiday season will likely be the biggest shopping event ever for mobile (only because it’s still so new), with tablets driving a lot of so-called “couch commerce.”

By the end of the year, eBay expects mobile sales to exceed $4 billion. Other e-commerce leaders, such as Amazon, are not as vocal about their mobile revenues, but are equally investing in applications and tools for shoppers to use on the go.

EBay’s apps have been downloaded 50 million times and generate an astonishing amount of traffic — one purchase is made every second. That breaks down to a pair of shoes sold every nine seconds, and 2,000 cars every week.

CityPockets, which is only about a year old, is acquiring the company in an all-stock transaction. As part of the deal, DealBurner founder Jason Fertel will become director of engineering.

Both Groupon and LivingSocial are pushing aggressively to roll out offers that can be purchased and redeemed immediately, rather than having to wait a day. Currently, users must search for offers, rather than having deals pushed to them automatically, based on their location.

Today, CityPockets lets users manage their daily deals purchases in one place, whether they were bought from Groupon, LivingSocial or any of about 30 other providers. In April, it launched a marketplace that allows people to sell deals that they are unlikely to use.

Co-founder Cheryl Yeoh said that with the addition of DealBurner, the goal will be for users to be able to buy those unwanted vouchers on the go, and use them immediately for a restaurant or spa they might be visiting — whether it’s new or something someone else bought but won’t be using.

“I see it going to a more mobile solution, where you can buy and redeem instantly, rather than having to wait for a day. It’s the aggregation of past, present and instant,” she said.

Yeoh said DealBurner will aggregate the secondary marketplace with offers from both Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant, which are the company’s respective marketplaces for same-day offers.

If you sign up for DealBurner and link your Foursquare and other check-in services to the app, it will send you a text message when one of these deals is available for your location, eliminating the need to have to manually open multiple applications and look for deals around you.

Foursquare and other services are already aggregating offers and showing them in their apps. Yeoh says CityPockets isn’t trying to compete with Foursquare, since it is trying to be a more comprehensive service.

Yeoh says CityPockets currently has 100,000 vouchers loaded into its system, with a cumulative value of about $5 million. She said that the average user has purchased 24 deals, of which nine are unused and still valid. That’s way above the four deals that Groupon reports as the average for its customer.

Yeoh launched the company with Jhony Fung at LaunchBox Digital’s Fall 2010 incubator program and has raised $750,000 from Great Oaks Venture Capital. With the addition of DealBurner’s Fertel, there will now be five employees.