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Fresh on the heels of yesterday's launch of location-based mobile discounts app Shopkick, yet another geo-targeted mobile shopping service prepares its own take on mobile couponing and promotions. But don't worry - you can breathe a sigh of relief - it's not yet another iPhone app to download.

Instead, the new "ShopAlerts" service is actually a white-label platform that allows retailers and other businesses to send location-triggered mobile text messages to consumers who've opted in to receive them.

Yes, geo-fenced, geo-targeted mobile couponing, discounts and promotions have arrived.

Arguably, electronics makers choose Chinese companies to make and assemble their products for one reason above all the others. It's cheap. But recent actions in the Chinese labor market may qualify the country's status, at least to the point of raising the prices on those products, including the iPhone.

All Things D mentioned the Hon Hai company's bump in employee wages after the rash of suicides at their Foxconn plant, but they also noted that after is not the same as because. China's wage inflation is more systemic. The New York Times's David Barboza agrees.

North Carolina has asked online retailer Amazon.com to turn over the names and addresses of every customer who has made a purchase on the site since 2003 and what they bought. The N.C. Department of Revenue is making the request in an attempt to audit Amazon's compliance with state sales and tax laws, according to a Reuters report.

Amazon says revealing this data violates customer privacy and has filed a lawsuit to prevent having to turn over the records, which hold the transaction details on 50 million purchases over a 7-year time frame.

Yesterday major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they're looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.

Moan and groan all you like about SharePoint, Outlook and other Microsoft products. We'll happily listen to your troubles and agree. But this time around we have to say it: Microsoft Dynamics POS is pretty slick. The 2009 version of the software was released today and is an easy-to-navigate resource for SMBs managing retail businesses.

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of enterprise software that includes a CRM and various ERP solutions which can be either on-premise or hosted. Dynamics Point of Sale is specifically aimed at mid-market and specialty retailers, providing them with a tool for store management.

While the U.S. economy is still puttering through a recession, a new marketing study from the National Retail Federation's Shop.org and Forrester Research found that at least some online retailers have been able to take greater marketshare in the last few months. About 46% of the 117 retailers polled in this study also said that they had no plans to scale back their original budgets for 2009, though 54% of all respondents expect their overall growth to slow during the next 12 months. Over the last few months, shoppers have become increasingly price-sensitive, and this has clearly helped some online retailers to outperform their brick-and-mortar competitors.

Over the last year, eBay has been trying to slowly move users away from its auctions and more towards purchases of fixed-priced items. Last week, however, eBay announced that it plans to return to its roots and that the company wants to put more emphasis on its auctions business again. Judging from the latest data from Compete, eBay's former strategy was clearly not working and was actually driving users away from eBay and toward other fixed-price retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

US retailer Sears today announced the beta launch of ServiceLive.com, an online marketplace specifically for home improvements and repairs. The goal of ServiceLive.com is to connect Sears customers online with local service providers. The core of ServiceLive is an auction system, in which users can name their price for doing home improvement or repair work, and service providers bid for that job. It's a great example of how the Web can potentially improve a 'real world' process. For example instead of phoning around to try and find a suitable plumber, you can enter your job details into ServiceLive and (hopefully) local plumbers will then bid on your job.

With the rise of app-laden smartphones like the iPhone and Google's Android OS, now on T-Mobile's G1, many penny-pinching shoppers have downloaded barcode scanning applications onto their mobile devices. These apps allow consumers to compare the prices of merchandise on a store's shelf to competing stores in the area just by taking pictures with their smartphone's camera. The prices are instantly retrieved and displayed on the mobile phone so consumers can know before they buy if they're getting a good deal.