As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.

Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.

This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.

This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.

Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.

According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”

The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.

In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.

Apple’s CEO has placed the spotlight back on the ability to complete transactions with iOS devices.

Tim Cook, the chief executive at Apple, recently dropped some hints regarding a mobile payments strategy for the iPhone manufacturer, as well as for the use of the Touch ID feature that was recently added to their mobile devices.

Though this was clearly not an announcement, it was certainly a hint about things to come.

Cook linked the idea of mobile payments with the Touch ID system technology that is included in the latest smartphone releases from Apple. When he held a conference call with analysts, discussing the earnings of the company, he stated that this is sector “we’ve been intrigued with,” and added that “It was one of the thoughts behind Touch ID.”

The feature was unveiled as a security enhancement but could also provide mobile payments verification.

The TouchID until now has been meant for making it easy and convenient to unlock the iPhones without having to enter a password. That said, ever since it was first seen, there have been speculations made regarding its potential use for verifying an individual’s identity if the device is used for making a purchase.

That said, Apple has not yet given any other online merchants the opportunity to use the device for making verifications of purchases. It has also not provided access to the fingerprint scanner of Touch ID to third parties. Equally, it hasn’t provided third party access to the Secure Enclave verification computing resources from A7 for any other reasons.

During the conference call, Cook did say that there has been a positive response from the public to the existing form of Touch ID functionality. He expressed that Apple is seeing that people enjoy being able to use it for verification in order to make purchases from the iTunes store. He said that they have been watching people liking the opportunity to purchase content ranging from books to music and movies. His description of the purchases using Touch ID was “incredibly simple and easy and elegant.”

More specifically, he did go as far as to say that in terms of mobile payments, “It’s clear that there’s a lot of opportunity here.”