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Nellymoser surveyed the top 100 US magazines published issues betwen July and September 2011 and found that the percentage of advertising pages with at least one action code had risen from 3.5% in January to 5.8% in September, writes Maria Stadtmueller.

ESPN has tasked media discovery company Shazam with supplying additional content to its coverage of the Winter X Games Aspen 2012. When winter sports fans use Shazam to tag the live telecast they will be able to access video highlights, photos, results and music, as well as connect to related social media.

Virgin Media and content agency Redwood are rolling out a new customer magazine which will make heavy use of augmented reality in its editorial pages thanks to a Blippar app. The brand wants the mag to reflect encourage readers to explore its range of entertainment, broadband and mobile services.

NET-A-PORTER is deploying its augmented reality shopping windows around the globe for its new Karl Lagerfeld collection. Consumers turning up at the stores with the NET-A-PORTER iPhone/iPad app simply target different fashion elements in the windows to fire up content such as model showcases, video catwalks and product info.

Power To The Pixel is back with the third iteration of its cross-media course, The Pixel Lab, in Potsdam, Germany, at the beginning of July. Participants will develop the skills to create, finance and distribute cross-media stories spanning any combination of film, interactive, live event, mobile, gaming, TV, publishing and online.

IDC reckons it has identified six distinct consumer market segments for mobile apps in the shape of Tech Evangelists, Impulse Buyers, Experimental Adopters, Pragmatic Purchasers, Green Buyers, and Disengaged Functionalists, writes Steve Mullins.

Unsurprisingly, it’s those in the first category who have been found to be particularly influential.

From Sony Ericsson comes the SmartWatch. This Android timepiece enables wearers to keep on eye on Facebook posts, as well as catch up on tweets, texts and e-mail. All users need to do is download the apps they like to wear and access them via a scratch- and splash-proof multitouch display.

More than 13.6 million smartphone owners in Western Europe’s five leading markets accessed a retail site in October 2011, according to The Connected Europe: How Smartphones & Tablets Are Shifting Media Consmuption report from comScore and Telefonica. The UK had the largest smartphone audience with 4.7 million people, but Germany accounted for the biggest increase in users with a 112% spike year-over-year.