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Location-based media company JiWire has released a new report detailing the mobile shopping trends among the "on-the-go" audience, which JiWire defines as people using tablets, smartphones or laptops away from their home or workplace. According to the study, 79% of these users are becoming more comfortable making purchases on their mobile devices, even for big ticket items over $1,000.

It also found that these consumers are heavily engaged with local deals services like Groupon and LivingSocial, for example, and had a high demand for tablet computers.

This morning in New York, Microsoft held a VIP Preview event showcasing the next major release of its Windows Phone mobile operating system (OS), known by its code name, "Mango." The press conference, intended for media and analysts, comes on the heels of a string of updates about the next-gen version of Windows Phone. These included features developers will appreciate, like multi-tasking and programmatic access to the phone's hardware; consumer-facing features like turn-by-turn navigation and built-in barcode scanning; as well as features for business users, like conversation views in email and mobile access to documents. In total, over 500 new features are due to arrive in Mango, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced earlier this week.

Moxie, an enterprise social network platform, released an iPhone app for its Moxie Employee Spaces app today.

Moxie started life as nGenera, but changed its name last year. The company invests heavily in usability research, and hopes its products will become the most user-friendly social media applications. Moxie offers both customer facing and employee facing software, and has a history of providing consulting services. Employee Spaces is its offering for internal social media.

Joe Hewitt, the creator of the Facebook iPhone app, Firebug, and former contributor to Mozilla's Firefox, announced earlier this month that he was leaving Facebook to go build "tools." What sorts of tools? Not just mobile tools, but "tools for writers, designers, programmers, whatever," he wrote on his personal blog.

Since then, many developers have been eagerly anticipating the tools Hewitt will create. Today, we get to see what one of those is: Scrollability, a script that brings native scrolling to mobile Web applications.

Mobile gaming continues to be on a tear, and no surprise, it's the biggest single app category in Apple's App Store, accounting for half the downloads of both free and paid apps. According to research data leased by Distimo and Newzoo, during the month of March, more than 5 million games were downloaded by users in the US and six European countries per day.

According to the survey data, these 63 million iOS gamers downloaded an average of 2.5 games per month. The percentage of iPhone owners who play iOS game is between 50 and 75%, and based on the number of gamers playing on iOS devices, it looks as though the iPad alone has started to unseat those devices particularly aimed at gaming, such as the Playstation Portable.

According to a new survey, 63% of 18 to 34 year-olds would be comfortable using their mobile phones to make purchases, versus the older generation (35 and up). This "younger" generation is highly attached to their mobile devices when compared with the older group, too, with 65% reporting they "feel more naked" without their phones than their wallets. Meanwhile only 34% of the older group could say the same.

Mobile payment outfit BilltoMobile is today launching its service globally, covering over 200 mobile carriers in more than 60 countries worldwide. The service allows customers to pay for online purchases using their mobile phones. Currently, the company has relationships with three of the top four U.S. carriers (Verizon, AT&T and Sprint) for its direct carrier billing service. It's also popular in the Asian market, thanks to key investor Danal Co., Ltd. from Seoul, South Korea, a company with a long history in this market.

Through a newly announced partnership with Mobile First, the company will now reach billions more subscribers in the EU, Asia and South America, it says.

Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year.

Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.

Today at the TechEd conference Microsoft announced several forthcoming Windows Phone 7 features for business users. The next release, codenamed Mango, will include several improvements in both productivity and security. Microsoft announced many other features coming in Mango last month at MIX. You can read all about it here.

Mango is expected by the end of the year. Here's a list of what business users can expect.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week week we look at the newly released Adobe Photoshop Touch apps, a couple tools for managing your tasks and more.