It isn’t a secret that there is a huge platform shift underway as consumers transition from the desktop web to mobile + tablet devices. Yet when you look at actual the figures, it’s truly astounding: this year mobile e-commerce sales will be triple that of what it was just a short time ago in 2011, with tablets driving much of that spending growth. Mobile is literally eating the world. For consumers, the process and experience of shopping on these devices is fundamentally different than on the desktop. So consequently for retailers, attracting and retaining customers is an inherently different challenge. And it’s further exasperated by technical obstacles (e.g. lack of cookies) and unique decision tradeoffs (e.g. native app vs. mobile web) which weren’t issues on the previous generation’s platform.

Our latest investment at NextView Ventures, tapCommerce, is dedicated to helping mobile brands to deliver customers, revenue, and ROI across mobile devices. As an ad-tech company, tapCommerce provides e-retailers with an array of services for acquiring and keeping customers on the mobile + tablet platform… and tapCommerce’s website does much more justice to their offering than my short blog post can.

As we were spending more with the company, all three of us at NextView introduced Founder/CEO Brian Long to e-retailer contacts in our network to socialize their offering. The feedback which we received wasn’t just positive – they all wanted to immediately become customers! Unsurprisingly, over just a few short months since founding, tapCommerce has started to work with commerce brands with very sophisticated mobile marketing chops, like JackThreads, BustedTees, and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM.

What really compelled us about making an investment, however, was what we learned about the team. With many of the co-founders having worked together at places like CNET, Pontiflex, and Demdex; on paper it was the right mix of mobile, ad-tech, and online media DNA. But what we heard from people who had worked with them in the past was resoundingly positive… my favorite was one reference who called them “the Real Deal.”

Today tapCommerce announced its $1.2M round of seed financing, which included NextView among our co-investors RRE Ventures, ENIAC Ventures, and Metamorphic Ventures. More importantly, the company is unveiling its mobile retargeting solution and recent partnerships with leading mobile commerce brands. We’re excited to be a small part of something big by investing in tapCommerce, as capturing customers stampeding to mobile certainly is the Real Deal.