Holiday shopping used to be a terrifying proposition, until the DVD box set came along. DVDs are pretty much always the best presents for anyone who likes watching stuff. And this holiday season sees a particularly awesome bounty of new releases, including complete TV series box sets and remastered classics. Here are the 20 recent DVD releases that are the best bets for holiday presents, including clips of DVD extras. Movies: The Dark Knight just came out on DVD, and pretty much everybody who doesn't hate movies is going to want to own it. Our sister site Gizmodo just reviewed...
The most positive thing ComScore could say about today's new round of holiday online sales figures: At least they're not worse than last year's. After a dismal start to the holiday shopping season, Web surfers have picked up their spending since Thanksgiving, ComScore reported this afternoon. The research firm said that from Dec. 1, the day known as Cyber Monday, through Friday, online spending reached $3.74 billion, a 9% gain over the same period last year. The relatively strong week helped push this holiday season's e-commerce sales, which had declined for the first time ever, back to the same...
AP - Economic meltdown and financial crisis are not phrases you want to hear as you ponder your holiday shopping. But it is possible to find tech-related gifts on a recession-minded budget, be they handy, entertaining or irreverent....
After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent. Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the...
Metasearch engine Dogpile announced Tuesday that it has raised $100,000 toward its goal of raising $1 million to help pets in need. Dogpile donations are being funded through its Search and Rescue program, a service that's designed to help pets by donating a portion of the search engine's revenue to animal-related charities. Each time a visitor uses Dogpile's search or its Search and Rescue Facebook application, the company delivers some of the revenue generated from that query to the ASPCA. "Whether people are using Dogpile.com for their online holiday shopping or just for general information searches, the traffic to...
-- More phone porn: Nokia unveils its N97, the $700 mobile computer it claims is "the world's most advanced." Let the drooling begin. Gizmodo. -- Palm reports some pretty dismal fall sales. (Cue young people: "Wait, what's Palm?") Alley Insider -- Why the cable industry can thwart Sony's plans to get Internet to your TV. Bits -- Aloha, Hawaii Telecom. It files for bankruptcy. WSJ -- How phones and the Internet are changing the way Vietnamese date. How do you say LOL in Vietnamese? CNet -- She just won't go away. Britney is still the No. 1 one search...
I’m lucky. Or, at least I feel like I’m lucky. I don’t have to battle the lines, crowds, and traffic associated with holiday shopping. You see, I have several siblings that love to shop. So, with some careful planning I can deftly delegate all shopping off to each of them. I’m the idea guy. I come up with the gift – they get it. As much as the holidays seem to put people in a good mood, they also seem to drive people crazy when making a trip to any retail store. It’s the yin and the yang of holiday...
The holiday shopping season is officially upon us and for some online retailers, prospects may be rosier than expected thanks to heavy promotional activity to encourage spending (unfortunately also erode profit margins). On Thanksgiving, which has been the heaviest day of traffic to online retailers over the past 4 years, experienced an 11 percent decline in the market share of visits as compared to last year. The websites of brick & mortar retailers took a harder hit with a 16% decline as compared to last year, while traffic to web-only retailers was up 11%. For Black Friday, traffic to the...
