Online Sales Surge 26% on Cyber Monday

“Cyber Monday” (the first Monday after Thanksgiving) was a success for retailers on two fronts: traffic and sales, according to two Internet industry analyst reports. Traffic on retail sites rose 26% on Cyber Monday compared to the same day last year, Web site metrics company Hitwise found in its survey, while comScore reported that Cyber Monday sales reached $733 million this year. The day is referred to as Cyber Monday because of a sharp increase in online shopping that day.

What this means for traditional brick and mortar stores long term is not clear, but for online retailers it’s very good news. The more people order online and have good experiences the more likely they will be to continue moving all of the purchases online. This will continue to present new opportunities to current dot com businesses and entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

dot com on…

Internet People Video

This video is the perfect tribute for us “internet people”. It’s only a few minutes long, PG-13, and pretty funny, so give it a watch when you have a few minutes to spare.

[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/v/2pPCkhYMQgY[/youtube]

Me.dium

Brad Feld turned me on to Me.dium months ago and at the time I had troubles with it and my ie 7.0 browser so I bailed out on using it. I hadn’t checked it out since until earlier today when I spotted a “Mom Minute” invite on the Me.dium blog. While I’m not a mom, I do have a mom and I’m married to a mom so I went ahead and crashed the Mom Minute party put on by Me.dium.

It was pretty cool! There were 20 or so moms and a few party crashers like me. I mentioned two of our new sites for moms and dads, momz TV and dadz TV, and could see via the Me.dium viewer in my sidebar several of the moms going to the sites. I got a few positive comments and hopefully one or two will send some suggestions or videos to add.

While I don’t necessarily want people tracking my every move online it’s a great tool to have when online with friends or people with similar interests. Not to mention it’s a great way to meet others with similar interests.

The download is free and can be found here: Me.dium download.

My user name on Me.dium is ‘davidc’. Look me up.

European Moms Spend More Free Time and Money Online

The European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) performed a study* of internet usage among European moms and came up with some interesting conclusions:

• 75% of the time moms spend online is for personal reasons and online activities are becoming a valuable and crucial part of their busy everyday lives.
• Moms who use the internet and have babies and very young children (0-4 years old), are far more likely to visit family and kids websites (61%) and banking and finance sites (63%)
• 79% of all online moms have bought items online, buying 10 items on average in just six months. Mothers of younger children are the most likely to buy online - 86% of women with children aged 0-9 years old bought a product or service online compared to 75% of women with children aged 10-18.
• Since 2005 there’s been a 63% increase in the number of moms who regularly download TV programs and films.

Although there aren’t comparisons between European and American moms I suspect the numbers would be similar. When moms, arguably the busiest among all of us, spend a significant amount of their free time online then they’ve cut back on something else. Soap operas? Tea with the neighbors? Just where they cut back isn’t in the study, but one thing is strikingly clear: Companies that ignore the continuing shifts in people’s daily lives, as evidenced again in this study, will be the dinosaurs of tomorrow. On the flip side, there are still major opportunities for entrepreneurs to tap into the revolution.
* The study involved 7,036 random telephone interviews with over 1,000 respondents in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Nordics respectively and 500 respondents in Belgium and the Netherlands respectively.

Penryn Chips and ITV

Intel’s new Penryn chips  being introduced today (Nov 12, 2007) will bring us high definition, full-screen, internet TV (ITV).

Intel’s chief sales and marketing officer, Sean Maloney, says that the Penryn chips’ increased computing power would begin the transformation of today’s choppy and blurry videos into high-resolution, full-screen quality that will begin to compete with the living room HDTV.

“It’s biggest impact is high-definition video,” he said. “It will be highly addictive.”

The new chips will begin doing their thing for us in the first quarter of 2008 within notebook PCs, marketed as the Intel Core 2 Extreme and Intel Core 2 Duo.

Quarterlife - The Internet TV Show

The first made-for-internet TV (ITV) show, “Quarterlife”, is debuting tomorrow the 12th.

For more information on the show visit the Quarterlife Show page and if you’d like to read more about this risky project that the creators of “Thirtysomething”, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, put together with an investment of nearly $2 million, you can find an article on Freep.com and another on FastCompany.com’s Technology Blog.

I just watched the preview and I predict it’ll be a smashing success. The fact that the series was snubbed by the major networks and only available online coupled with the fantastic timing of the writers strike will drive loads of viewers and if the successful Thirtysomething series is any indication of the quality of the content I think it’ll work and help create yet another wave of the internet revolution.

YouTube is cool, but people still want to sit back and be entertained. The networks better be paying close attention.

The 2007 Weblog Awards

The Best Blog award goes to PostSecret. For all results visit the 2007 Weblog Awards.

PostSecret is one of the more interesting sites to browse through periodically. The letters, photographs, and postcards with deep dark secrets scribbled on them is fascinating. PostSecret is also the largest advertisement-free blog in the world.

 

Online Graphical Dictionary

Visuwords is 30 years too late for me, but if you have kids they’ll love this cool dictionary that’s unlike any other I’ve ever seen.

On the homepage you just type in the word, any word, and like a cell it begins to multiply into new words all related in some way to the original word entered.

School English teachers could make great use of this as it’s far more interesting to explore words with this then the traditional methods used since I was a school kid.

Here’s how they describe it:

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

• It’s a dictionary! It’s a thesaurus!
• Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
• The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.
• No membership required.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.

Enjoy!