ORLANDO, Fla. – Imagine walking into Costco, opening up the store’s mobile application, and finding the exact brand of t-shirt you’re looking for within minutes; without having to speak to a sales person. Or maybe you’re at Whole Foods where you regularly buy chocolates, only to have the store’s mobile application tell you there’s a chocolate [...]

Today’s highlights ran the gamut from payment apps to digital wallets, location-based services, and social gaming, to mobile apps for social good.

It wasn’t 3D stealing the show at this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, but near field communication (NFC), a technology thought to settle, once and for all, the “mobile wallet” and “mobile payment” discussion.

It looks as though all that whining may have finally paid off. In a tweet sent out by the @GoogleNexus twitter account, the big G announced to thunderous applause “Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3) update now rolling out to Nexus S and Nexus One.”

You’ve got to hand it to BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. Just when everyone is expecting the firm to give up and go graciously into that good night, the Canadian phone maker gives the tech world the collective finger and puts out yet another BlackBerry (or should that be Blehberry?)

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, California, CEO Eric Schmidt pulled an unreleased Android phone (rumored to be the Nexus S) out of his pocket and released the newest tidbit of Gingerbread intel: it will include a Near Field Communication feature.

The people that work at Apple Inc. (AAPL) have been known to create news by simply arriving or leaving the company. Late last week that news came in the form of Benjamin Vigier. Apple has hired the near field communication expert on the heels of a series of patent applications with remarkable NFC components, Near [...]