According to a recent Shopgate report, retail needs to appeal to smartphone using consumers.

Shopgate, a highly recognized m-commerce business solution, has released a report called the “2013 Holiday Guide for Online Retailers”, which provided the top 10 recommendations for success, this holiday season.

Among those points, the focus on catering to smartphone users was a considerable one.

What was explained by Shopgate in its report was that retailers should start acting right away to make their way into m-commerce if they haven’t already prepared their strategy for the upcoming holiday shopping season. It is no longer enough to focus on online shopping in general and as a whole. Instead, a focus also needs to be placed specifically on the mobile channel.

In fact, when it came to getting into m-commerce, the recommendation was “do it now!”

The report from Shopgate pointed out that m-commerce traffic is not only already representing more than 20 percent of all American internet traffic, but it is also expected to exceed desktop based internet traffic by the end of next year. The holiday season is predicted to be the transitional time into that exceptional rate of growth to the point that it will be greater on smartphones and tablets than it is on laptops.

The report pointed to a number of m-commerce findings from several recent studies.

For example, it pointed out that shopping over m-commerce is expected to reach $42 billion by the end of this year, and that it will make up a larger segment of e-commerce than has ever been experienced before, according to eMarketer.

In fact, the report went to the extent of saying that retailers that choose not to take part in m-commerce may be actively choosing not to take advantage of an important source of revenue. It pointed to data from Econsultancy, which indicated that 62 percent of businesses that have created a website that is specifically optimized for smartphones and tablets, had increased their sales. The recommendation for the upcoming holiday season was to use mobile friendly elements such as: coupons, push notifications, ad scanners, daily deals, QR codes, mobile SEO, and product categories.

Smartphones and tablets might be able to be recharged simply by nuking them.

A recent development from tech scientists has revealed that the microwave oven may soon be used for charging the batteries of electronic and mobile gadgets, instead of just for popping popcorn and nuking leftovers.

In a joint project between two educational institutions, this technology may one day be available.

The researchers were from the Institute of Technology in Georgia, as well as from the University of Tokyo. Together, they have come up with the initial form of a device that can gather and store microwave energy from the standard kitchen appliance, so that it can be used to charge the batteries in mobile gadgets.

This could make it very fast and easy to charge gadgets and is very promising for new technologies.

According to a statement in a paper by Yoshihiro Kawahara, the leader of the team, “The energy accumulated over two minutes was found to be sufficient for the operation of some of low-power kitchen tools for a few minutes and operate wireless sensor node for 2.5 hours.”

That said, the team did acknowledge that the charging gadget still requires some work in order to perfect it, as the energy that was stored within the capacitor after the two minutes had passed “was only 15 percent of the ideal case.” The team explained that it may also be able to better the energy accumulation from the leakage that escapes microwave ovens “by using more sophisticated impedance matching and power management methods.”

In another report on the technology, it was revealed that the machine that was built by the team is able to collect the wasted microwave oven energy for charging electronic gadgets. It snatches up the escaped energy that is produced while the device is running for heating up food. It functions by picking up the excess energy through an antenna in the harvester, so that it can then be channeled into other devices such as smartphones or MP3 players. The technology still requires perfection or the microwave would need to run for a very long amount of time to be able to collect any worthwhile amount of charge for the device batteries.