It's not one, not two, not even ten...

Yahoo Inc, under the tutelage of their zealous CEO Marissa Mayer just hit 20 on Wednesday. 20 startups/companies all under its wing. Amazing score one can say!

Adding to the long list of startups that Mayer has acquired since in her short span 1 year at office, Yahoo just acquired the app making firm Lexity to boost its acquisition rate by nearly a quarter.

Studying this takeover trend, there are two plausible patterns that emerge. For one, Yahoo dabbles into these bids just for the sake of a erstwhile popular brand that's vacillating now. On the second count are those firms that are vacillating yet have a vast talent pool that now works on Yahoo's payroll. And most importantly, most of these takeovers include mobile app companies that will surely benefit Yahoo in some form, once they are integrated with it.

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I recently read somewhere that an average smartphone user cannot leave his phone alone for six minutes and check it up to 150 times a day. Researches have also revealed the fact that apart from using the smartphone for making and answering calls, users use them for almost 90 minutes a day, this includes browsing the internet and using various smartphone apps. Another eye-opening fact that has been revealed is that users spend more time using smartphone apps than browsing the internet.

According to an article, that I recently read on hbr.org, "Users spend, on average, 82% of their mobile minutes with apps and just 18% with web browsers. They download about 40 apps to their phones (out of more than a million available) and regularly use about 15."

In an event only for developers that was held last night in San Francisco, Twitter shared some interesting updates, that's surely going to take our Twitter experience to another level.

In order to help users to make their content easily available and more attractive, Twitter has added three new types of Twitter Cards with mobile app deep-linking, a new way to allow users to view content within an app.

In a blog post by Jason Costa, the Head of Platform at Twitter, he described mobile app deep-linking in Cards as "a new feature that closes the loop between content creation, content discovery and app downloads. With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed".

What's the first thing that strikes us when we think about the best technological development this decade?

First came the Internet, then the wireless technology and finally the smartphones. The important cog in the chain of things is however eCommerce. There was a time when concrete stores defined real commerce but not so anymore.

The new reality is that the demarcation line between this online-offline seller has been bridged. If one has a good enough mobile connected to the net, one can access anything and everything.

The relative advantage with shopping online is that it gives the customer greater choices for the same product. Pricing can also be accommodated based on individual choices while best deals are always up for grabs.