In addition to its retail industry solutions portfolio, AT&T today launched Digby Mobile Commerce, a platform designed to help retailers design, deploy and manage mobile commerce web sites and rich applications optimized for smartphones. This is yet another medium for business customers to extend the reach of their products’ information, reviews and promotion to customers via a virtual sales representative accessible from mobile devices. It’s also tightly integrated with AT&T Mobile Barcode Services which allows retailers to provide information, pictures of products, rich media and an enhanced shopping experience when potential customers scan barcodes.

“By adding Digby Mobile Commerce Solutions to our portfolio of Mobile Marketing Solutions, we’re able to offer retailers a comprehensive set of services for promoting, merchandising, and selling product through a mobile channel,” said Chris Hill, Vice President, Advanced Mobility Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions.

“Digby mobile and in-store application development and mobile commerce features, combined with AT&T’s retail industry consulting practice and mobile marketing solutions, give retail companies exactly what they need to engage potential customers who are on-the-go and in the store.”

AT&T’s Digby Mobile Commerce will breed customer loyalty as businesses create mobile websites that display rich product images and live catalog. It’s also an encouraging factor for shoppers to regularly connect with their favorite brands and shop wherever they are. Payment card Industry (PCI) Level 1 certification is used for a sacure consumer’s online transaction. Moreover, Digby Mobile Commerce gives retailers the ability to tack their success wth deep analytics and traffic data from websites and applications.

AT&T is building out its customer service features in an effort to regain customers, an especially important initiative since losing exclusivity in selling the iPhone, and facing network wars with Verizon. It’s interesting how the network giant is looking to offer the service in a more direct sense. The platform develops applications for iOS, Android and Blackberry.

AT&T has been up to a lot lately. We’ve recently seen (and still seeing) the mobile giant prepping for the acquisition of T-Mobile, the industry’s 4th largest network. Moreover, a survey conducted by InMobi, a mobile advertising network, says that the merging of AT&T and T-Mobile will overthrow Verizon in terms of consumer ad impressions. On the bad side, we’ve also seen them with too much “bad journalism” as George Ou coined it. And instead of worrying about merging of two giants, Verizon decided to employ Google Voice into their service.