This holiday season, 80 percent of individuals want some sort of consumer electronics device as a gift, according to a survey by the Consumer Electronics Association and CNET, but unless your recipients are already app-loving, ebook-downloading, subscription-paying gadgeteers, buying hot consumer electronics can pose several problems. I’ve tried to outline a few ways around the most common missteps when it comes to giving gifts with bytes, so before you buy Mom that e-reader or Grandpa the latest iPhone, check them out so that you don’t give gifts that, well, bite.

Nobody Wants a Brick: I’d love to offer someone a MiFi this year, mostly because I think the device is the greatest thing since Wi-Fi, and I know plenty of folks who could use it, but no one is going to thank me for giving them a device that requires a $60-a-month subscription plan. Same goes for many of the 3G-enabled photo frames on the market.

If you give someone a network-connected device, you need to give them a connection, too. That means signing them up and paying for an annual service plan when you purchase the item, or choosing a device like the Kindle, for which the cost of the wireless subscription is already built in.

Your Time Is The Most Valuable Gift of All: What’s so cool about many of today’s gadgets is that they allow us to personalize them. Think of the iPhone or the Droid. Over at T-Mobile, nearly half of myTouch users say they have “completely customized” their myTouch phones. That’s great for the tech-savvy, but for many people the app economy is still new territory, so if you’re going to give a gadget as a gift, you should also plan to stick around for an hour or to help the recipient set up their information in the online store, show them how to find the best stuff and warn them about the dangers of digital rights management (how if you download a book on the Kindle, it’s not gonna work on their spouse’s non-Kindle e-reader, for example).

The Perils of Pre-loading: If you don’t have time to spare, you can try to personalize the device for a love one, for example, taking photos of family members on a camera phone and adding in your phone number. When it comes to the Apple ecosystem, you can pre-load a new iPod touch or iPhone on someone’s behalf with your iTunes login information, but once the recipient gets the device they’ll need to link the device to their own account (you’ll want to supervise so they don’t keep downloading content on your credit card). A downside to pre-loading is that any content downloaded from the iTunes store will be stuck on the device, unable to be transferred to the recipient’s computer without a separate program like iRip.

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WebWorkerDaily readers are a diverse bunch. Every week, I profile a different reader and ask them to share what they do, how they do it, and some of their favorite hints and tips.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Tamara Gruber, and I’m a freelance marketing consultant for technology startups. I provide strategic marketing and communications services including outsourced marketing management, marketing plan development, social media programs/inbound marketing programs, content development and event management.

What’s a typical day like for you?

There is no truly typical day, which is why it’s critical for me to stay organized so that I can manage multiple clients, business development and family demands. Generally, I might split my work time into 50 percent one client, 30 percent a second client and 20 percent business development/personal branding. Throughout the day I’m writing, creating marketing materials, developing web content, monitoring and engaging with social networks, performing online research, and communicating with peers and vendors.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I use a Sony Vaio laptop running, unfortunately, Microsoft Vista (I plan to upgrade it shortly) equipped with Wi-Fi, and an AT&T wireless data card for web access when Wi-Fi isn’t available. Paired with my iPhone, this enables me to work from anywhere — home, coffee shop/book store or my daughter’s gymnastics class. When I’m on the go, I use my iPhone to manage email; catch up on my Google Reader feeds; schedule meetings with Tungle; monitor my social networks with Facebook, TweetDeck and Echofon; and catch up on podcasts.

Software and services that I use every day include:

• Microsoft Office — content production, manipulation
• Firefox — browsing
• TweetDeck — monitoring Twitter friends, followers, keywords, competitors, clients
• Google — Docs, Reader, Calendar, Gmail, search, Maps. I’m just starting to use Google Voice.
• Digsby — combined IM client to aggregate various systems and suply alerts for new email messages and FaceBook updates
• Tungle — calendar sharing and meeting scheduling
• Skype — VoIP
• Yammer — sharing and conversing with colleagues
• Photoshop – photo manipulation/layout
• Hubspot — inbound marketing monitoring and analytics
• Constant Contact – email marketing
• Salesforce — CRM (for my clients)
• Wiki (private) — sharing and collaboration
• iTunes/Pandora – music, podcast listening and discovery
• Delicious – social bookmarking and sharing

There are many other Twitter apps and services I utilize from time to time, and I like to try new betas and iPhone apps.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

I have various email accounts and calendars for different clients, so I like to have everything centralized so that I don’t need to keep closing and opening Outlook to see if a new email came in or if I’m available at a certain time. It takes too much time and it interrupts my work flow, so I use my iPhone to monitor if email has come into any of my accounts, and Tungle to centralize my calendar for meeting scheduling.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Netbooks, low-cost portable computers optimized for web usage, are continuing to sell at a torrid pace, with Acer expecting 50 percent growth in the global netbook market in 2010, to 42 million units. In the meantime, standard technologies, operating systems and other options in these diminutive systems are undergoing rapid shifts. Here are eight up-to-date tips to keep in mind if you’re in the market for a new netbook.

Don’t Settle for a Tiny Display. As Om has pointed out, netbook specifications continue to encroach on standard laptop specs, to the point that the real differences between them are blurring. And as The Register and market researchers at Canalys report, in 2010, many netbook manufacturers will be emphasizing systems with 12-inch displays, to possibly broadly replace those with screens of just 10 inches. You can already find systems with larger displays, and indeed, you’ll likely have a better experience with them.

Don’t Go for a Tiny Keyboard. Many netbooks come with chiclet-style keyboards that can make typing difficult, but this is rapidly changing. As PCMag.com notes, many new netbooks, such as the Toshiba mini NB205, come with full-size keyboards. I’m also a fan of the keyboards on the Acer Aspire One and Dell Mini 10v systems. Get a keyboard that won’t cramp your style — that’s where the market is headed.

Consider the OS Up Front. Linux-based netbooks continue to offer low price points and often come with good open source applications. Next year, Google will attempt to redefine the netbook with its Linux-based Chrome OS, focused on cloud applications. In the meantime, Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system is squarely aimed at the netbook market, and netbook manufacturers are reporting that it’s ushering in strong sales. As always, consider what types of applications you’ll use as you weigh various operating systems.

Free Apps Can Improve Your Experience. When evaluating a netbook’s platform and what you’ll do with it, don’t forget that there are many free and open source utilities and applications that make navigating, handling hardware resources and other tasks easier. You can find 10 good ideas here.

Complement Low Local Storage With a USB Drive. Netbooks typically make many compromises in terms of local resources when compared to larger laptops, with storage among the most common. You can complement low local storage with an inexpensive, external USB Flash drive, however. There are also useful web sites, especially PortableApps, that you can use to stock up your Flash drive with useful, free applications.

Check the Battery Life. Many netbooks offer outstanding battery life — in some cases, all-day power — but not all of them. Make sure to check reviews of the netbook you’re considering for battery life tests. And once you’ve become a netbook owner, remember to follow best practices — especially turning the brightness down — in order to maximize its battery life.

Take a Hands-On Test Drive. While there are many good deals online for netbooks, if possible, I recommend going to a retail outlet to do a hands-on test drive. Because netbooks are practically defined by the compromises they make, this can help you identify any problems that you might find intolerable over time.

Pointing Devices Matter. Speaking of personal preferences, people always vary widely in terms of the pointing devices they favor. For example, I’ve tried many netbooks that I would never buy simply because the highly sensitive trackpads on them bother me. This is another reason why a hands-on test drive makes a lot of sense.

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Tags: Acer, Aspire One, netbooks, PortableApps, Toshiba

As PC makers such as Lenovo — which said today that it will spend $200 million to buy back its mobile unit — move into the mobile phone market, they are most likely to rely on Google’s Android (both Dell and Acer are using it) to deliver their iPhone-inspired smartphones. So while fellow-computer maker Apple may be the inspiration (and a key enabler by getting the carriers to open up their networks and their application stores), it’s Android that will democratize the hardware for mobile phones by offering a widely adopted, open operating system that divorces the phone from its software.

The OS is certainly becoming popular. Requests for web-based ads from Android-based smartphones are on the rise, according to the most recent stats from AdMob, a mobile ad network in the process of being acquired by Google. When it comes to data requests from smartphones, which make up 44.4 percent of worldwide mobile web requests, Apple holds the crown, but Android has only been available on handsets since September October 2008.

Widespread adoption of Android could lead it to become what Windows was for the PC world, an operating system that can be licensed on any underlying hardware and ensure that a variety of applications run on the machines. There will be room for other players in this multibillion-dollar device market, of course, but for the most part, the computer makers have already settled on Android. (Acer has Windows Mobile phones, too). Ironically, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was aiming to be the OS for the computer guys.

If Android phones proliferate while delivering a consistent user experience and numerous compelling applications (the consistent user experience bit needs work), consumers who want to use the web on their phones can choose their devices based not on what kinds of apps are available on the handsets, but the quality of the network, pricing for access and other carrier-specific factors that consumers deem important.

Eventually, if handset exclusivity becomes a non-issue and networks open up, then the handsets and the network will be divorced as well, leading to a world where consumers will benefit from competition amongst device makers, software firms and even the carriers. In this future, pricing innovation (and maybe even actual competition) by carriers will matter, given that those factors are the primary concerns for wireless customers when choosing a network. Prepaid carriers will have an advantage, although I imagine the larger carriers will have to fight to keep consumers happy — leading to lower prices or more services.

Developers for the hottest apps will also win, as OS makers try to attract and sign exclusivity agreements with them much like Sony and Microsoft fight for the hottest console games. On the hardware side, expect few traditional handset makers to survive, especially after the computer makers learn from their mistakes and get their later-generation phones out. Maybe some handset OEMs will be bought, but without a proprietary OS and the exclusive access to carriers that are in the process of being swept away, they have less value.

To survive, handset OEMs will need to either build out compelling services such as Motorola’s Blur or Nokia’s Comes With Music efforts, or pander to a large, specific community of users with features that really matter to its members, as Research in Motion is trying to do with the business market. Even the efforts to build differentiating services or focus on a community may not help handset makers, but doing nothing isn’t an option.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  20 Comments
Tags: AAPL, Acer, AdMob, Android, Apple, Dell, GOOG, google, Lenovo, MOT, Motorola, Nielsen, Nokia, Research in Motion, rimm

It’s that time of year again. The holiday shopping season has shifted into full gear, and so have the economists, analysts and retailers who wring their hands over things like Black Friday sales figures. Or those of its fake, and widely mocked, online counterpart, Cyber Monday (which is far from the busiest shopping day on the web — online sales at Amazon, for example, typically peak in mid-December).

Overall, a modest improvement over last year’s dismal performance is expected. Forrester Research projects an 8 percent rise in holiday sales online, up from the 5 percent growth rate last year. comScore sees growth at 3 percent, all but erasing the 3 percent drop last year. But while online retailers are sure to see stronger sales than their offline rivals, the desperate discounts happening across the board threaten to erode any profits they may have once hoped for this season.

For my money, the best indicator is the average consumer shopping budget. Despite all the hot items for sale, we’re still feeling the pinch of the economic downturn, and as such, budgets are back in vogue. A Gallup poll showed consumers plan to spend an average $638 per household this season, up $22 from last year. But a survey by the National Retail Foundation said they will spend $683 dollars, or a decline of 3.2 percent, following on the heels of an 8 percent drop in spending last year.

Think about that. The NRF — the trade group pushing the annual Cyber Monday charade — expects consumers to spend even less than last year. And with respected analysts publicly predicting a double-dip recession, such caution on the part of consumers is more likely to grow in December than abate.

To that end, retailers are responding the way they did last holiday season — with ultra-steep discounts early on. The price war that Wal-Mart is waging against Amazon may stretch consumers’ dollars, but it’s hell on other retailers, who must either match discounts or risk losing customers. Already, 2009 is shaping up to be a repeat of 2008, when retailers desperately slashed prices to entice wary consumers.

That is undoubtedly worse news for brick-and-mortar stores than it is for online stores, where operating costs are lower. Many big retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy are responding by pushing deep discounts on their web sites, but in doing do, they risk cannibalizing sales from their offline stores, while the costs of running those stores remains the same. Which means that even if overall holiday sales figures do increase by a few percentage points, profits at many retailers may decline or be eliminated entirely.

The Black Friday deals tracked on Twitter aren’t just a stream of bargains, they also measure the desperation retailers are already feeling. Gap’s site was offering sweaters at 50 percent off. Betsey Johnson took 40 percent off everything in its online store. Even Apple is getting into the deep-discount spirit.

Discovery-oriented sites like Twitter are helping to spread news about bargains, further boosting the appeal of online shopping among consumers, as Colin noted earlier this week. In Apple’s iTunes store, the second best-selling paid app last week was RedLaser, which scans barcodes and offers instant price comparisons with online sites.

As with last year, there is likely to be one outstanding success story in this bleak retail environment: Amazon. In an environment where penny-pinching consumers are driving down retail profits, Amazon – the master at thriving on razor-thin profit margins – is thriving. Goldman Sachs and Piper Jaffray recently raised their revenue estimates for Amazon, citing a rise in unique users and overall traffic.

As long as the economy remains weak, the progression of the retail industry remains clear: All retailers must become more like Amazon – low prices, tiny margins – or suffer a slow death.

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Posted by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Amazon.com, black friday, comScore, cyber monday, online shopping

Mac OS X is a wonder. When it comes to personal information management, entertainment and the Internet, it’s got all the basics covered. Beyond that, there are a handful of “essential” apps most Mac owners install on a new machine within minutes of booting it up for the first time. Handbrake is undoubtedly one of those essentials. And it just got a serious new upgrade.

Handbrake is a very handy (pun intended) DVD-ripping utility that converts DVDs to self-contained video files that can be played back on a computer or mobile device. (Contrary to the outright lies of major motion picture studios, there’s nothing wrong with having digital backups of movies you already own). In addition, DVDs can be converted into a number of formats, resolutions and aspect ratios. For many years, it has served as the single easiest way to get my movies off-of DVD discs and onto my iPods, iPhones and even my PSP.

The latest release, Handbrake 0.9.4, includes support for Snow Leopard, and is also available in 64-bit editions for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. It also adds the ability to include multiple subtitle tracks to exported video and a new “live preview” for viewing the likely outcome of an export before committing to a lengthy rip.

According to the release notes on the Handbrake website, the latest version includes new features like “macroblock tree rate control” and “weighted P-Frame prediction.” I’ve absolutely no idea what any of that means, and although they do provide links to explanatory articles, it made my head swim. I’ll just assume it’s all very swish and futuristic and good for my rips.

The introduction of a 64-bit version is good news for those of us using true 64-bit multi-core processors, though the performance increase is a fairly modest 10 percent. The software also supports non-DVD encoding, which is great news for those of us who do a lot of video editing. (I prefer to use Final Cut but often have to import raw data into iMovie only to export it out to a format Final Cut will accept. Handbrake won’t cut out this extra conversion step, but it performs far faster than the monolith that is iMovie and provides more flexibility in export formats.)

It’s not all about video, either. Handbrake offers great audio encoding options, including the newly-added ability to encode AAC using OS X’s Core Audio (which means far higher quality than was possible previously).

Of course, there are a lot of other software titles that offer similar functionality (Aimersoft’s popular DVD Ripper, for instance) but Handbrake is free. Although this means it has no official support, it does enjoy an active and enthusiastic user community so if you get stuck you won’t have far to go to find answers and help.

If you are using a 64 bit machine and want to get the full 64-bit goodness from Handbrake, you’ll need the 64-bit version of VLC Player, the latest nightly builds of which can be found here. (Please note that VLC Player 64-bit is beta software and as such offers no end-user support.) Handbrake 0.9.4 is available from the Handbrake website now.

Mike Janes, chief executive and co-founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based FanSnap, a search engine for live event tickets, is no fan of the New York Yankees (he loves the Red Sox), but he was happy to see them in this fall’s World Series. Why? Since they were playing the Phillies, a rivalry as old as professional baseball itself, it boosted the number of people looking to buy tickets to the games, thus giving a bump to the number of people using his service. The company, which launched back in March, has just unveiled a new feature: Seat Alert, which notifies fans when the seats that meet their specific requirements are made available.

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, this week I’ve been able to catch up with some of the companies I’ve written about in the past such as FanSnap. The company, which started out focusing on sports events, has since expanded to music concerts and Broadway shows, with its sales now evenly split between those related to sports and those not. FanSnap currently has 800 interactive maps that allow folks to pick and choose the live event tickets they want to buy. Yankees-Phillies games along with tours by musical acts such as U2 and Lady Gaga have revved up business for the company, Janes said.

FanSnap has about 200,000 unique visitors every month, he told me. “We continue to grow by focusing on our strategy to concentrate on hot events and hot venues.” Web analytics companies Quantcast and Compete put FanSnap’s number of uniques lower, but concur with the firm’s claims as to its growth. FanSnap has raised about $15.5 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital.

After launching as a plain-vanilla search engine, the company has been trying to turn itself into what Janes likes to call the “Yelp of venues.” To that end, FanSnap has been asking its users to write reviews of their seats and upload photos of them in order to help out future buyers. The company has launched an iPhone app as well. “We want to become the single best source of information for fans,” said Janes, who was formerly chief marketing officer of StubHub.

It’s a great goal, but FanSnap clearly has its work cut out for it. It needs to improve its listings directory, for one. And it needs to redouble its efforts to get users to upload photos. I did quite a few random searches and ended up on numerous venues with no photos. Most importantly, it needs to quickly build interactive maps for some of the more popular venues — notably the Oakland Coliseum and the Angels Stadium.

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Tags: FanSnap, Mike Janes

Updated: Amazon is experiencing some slow response times this morning, and I imagine it’s because the site is getting hammered not only by reporters seeking Black Friday stories, but also millions of customers who asked themselves, “Why brave the cold for holiday deals when I can get whatever I need while sipping coffee in my pajamas?” Some marketing guru may have created the concept of Cyber Monday a few years back to highlight how folks hop online at work on the Monday after Thanksgiving to shop, but we all know that the web scoffs at such a restrictive time frames.

Indeed, the cyber shopping rush has already begun, with Akamai reporting that at around 11:30 a.m. ET some 6,591,354 global visitors per minute were hitting retail sites, which is about 48 percent above normal. I’ve reached out to other traffic and site measurement companies to see how the web sites of major retailers are responding and will update the post accordingly, but it’s safe to say that for FedEx, UPS and all the national agencies responsible for delivering our online purchases, the holiday shipping season is upon us.

Bonus Reading: Check out this post about the black Friday on The Google Blog. ComparisonEngines has outlined its predictions for the 2009 holiday shopping season.

Update: Akamai says the peak for the day occurred around noon ET with 6,689,646 visitors per minute hitting retail sites. Matt Poespel, VP of Performance Strategies at Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, emailed that Avon, Nike, and Zappos were among Friday’s top performers in terms of delivering sites quickly, but Kohl’s and Staples saw intermittent performance problems on Friday.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: Akamai, black friday, cyber monday

The App Store is known for a few things, including the sheer volume of apps available, the tremendous success it’s brought some independent developers, and, most notoriously, for the constant stream of rejections that it issues with remarkable frequency. Now one scorned developer has taken it upon himself to make sure a record of the worst among those rejections is kept.

AppRejections.com is a simple blog that tracks App Store rejections, mostly via user submissions. It also points out the blatant hypocrisy of some of Apple’s rejection policies, highlighting what look an awful lot like different standards for higher profiles devs and studios (read: cash cows).

For example, the most recent article at the time of this writing is about how Star Wars Trench Run was accepted despite containing a huge image of an iPhone, something which has been a pretty boilerplate reason for rejection of apps put out by much smaller studios and independent devs before now. In fact, Apple put out a blanket ban on the use of the exact bitmap which features prominently in Trench Run’s control layout help screen.

It’s early days yet for the blog, with only 14 posts thus far, and it isn’t much to look at, but the idea behind the site is a fantastic one. Accountability is severely lacking in the App Store approval process, and till now, efforts to track and analyze rejections have been scattered at best. Despite the stock template look of AppRejections.com, site creator Adam Martin, himself an iPhone developer from the U.K., is doing a great job of tracking down and soliciting stories of Apple running afoul.

Martin also tracks what apps get let back into the App Store, and why, and also what the implications are for users who managed to grab apps that eventually got pulled before that actually happened. It’s a truly comprehensive approach to the problem of Apple’s pell-mell review policy. If you’re a dev who has a story to share, head on over to the site and let Adam know what exactly happened. The more points of data he can collect, the more complete a picture he can paint of App Store injustice.

If Martin can keep it up and create a really thorough record of Apple’s various hypocrisies regarding App Store management, it’s possible we’ll see some kind of change eventually, owing to a shift in public opinion, or increased rancor from the developer community. Do I think that’s the most likely outcome? No, but one can hope.

Yesterday, while many WebWorkerDaily readers were taking a well-deserved day off and chowing down on Thanksgiving turkey, the team at Mozilla was busy pushing out beta 4 of Firefox 3.6. This new update includes over 140 bug fixes, but perhaps most importantly (to me, at least) it fixes the problems that beta 3 had with Facebook chat. If your beta has not updated automatically, it’s definitely worth updating now via Help -> Check for Updates.

Are you running the beta of Firefox 3.6? Let us know what you think of it below.

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Who said “smartbook?”
Lenovo buys back the Lenovo Mobile group they sold in 2003.
Amazon upgrades Kindles, some get better battery life but all get PDF support.
Black Friday deals — good enough to get us out the door?
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Open Beats Closed in the App Economy

Two major growth areas in technology in 2009 are Facebook and iPhone — not just as consumer phenomena, but as developer ecosystems. Some have called this the “app economy.”

When Facebook launched two years ago, the applications were mostly trivial. But its unprecedented viral marketing power made it possible to capture millions of users almost overnight. Things really took off when Zynga and other free-to-play games added virtual currencies, and developers could monetize the attention they gathered. Facebook had 300 million users, viral adoption, and payments. In just two years, a $1 billion-plus economy was created.

Almost simultaneously, the iPhone App Store skyrocketed. Innovative and scrappy developers discovered how free apps could be monetized with paid upgrades and ads. The iPhone had 50 million users, viral adoption, and payments. The result: a $1 billion-plus economy.

However, an important distinction is that Facebook’s open approach gave it much greater scale, creating several companies with $10 million-plus revenue. Apple, on the other hand, has no such successes due to its focus on a closed, high-end phone.

So what could be the next big ecosystem to emerge? GetJar, possibly.

GetJar is the world’s largest open app store, with over 650 million downloads to date and three times annual growth. The key difference from Apple is that GetJar supports all phones, allowing viral adoption from friend to friend. So while Apple will reach a zenith in market share for its high-end phones, GetJar can reach all phones, including smartphones. GetJar already has the scale and viral growth that app developers need. The missing ingredient will come in early 2010: a payment system with global reach and high conversion.

So it’s finally Black Friday and retailers across America are slashing their prices and welcoming hordes of hysterical shoppers. The question, of course, is how generous is Apple being this year? Is it – as it teased earlier in the week – a “happy” Friday for the Apple-buying public?

The answer is (not unsurprisingly) No. Not if you buy from Apple it isn’t.

While Apple observes the Black Friday custom, it never really embraces it. It’s been said before, Apple unashamedly sets higher-than-average prices on its products (particularly when MacBooks are compared to run-of-the-mill Windows computers) and just isn’t interested in doing bargain-basement deals. I guess that’s why they have sixty bajillion in the bank.

Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of some of the more noteworthy price-cuts among the meager discounts Apple has on offer just for today.

Apple TV This’ll rock your world (not); save $21 on an Apple TV, now only $208. I bet that has you reaching for your credit card…

iPods The iPod Nano starts at $138 today, a saving of $11. The iPod Touch enjoys a $41 discount, cost today: $178.

iMacs The 21.5 and 27 inch iMacs start at $1098, a saving of $101.

MacBook Pros 13, 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros also get a $101 discount and so also start at $1098. No savings on the MacBook or MacBook Air, sadly.

All manner of Apple accessories and software get moderate discounts. If you’re interested in picking up the latest edition of iWork, Apple’s productivity software suite, a single user license will cost only $49 today, a saving of $30. (Actually, this isn’t a bad discount, given how sophisticated iWork is.)

The new Magic Mouse gets a measly $5 shaved off the asking price (today’s cost to you – $64 – is still way too much for this mouse).

The 1TB Time Capsule, Airport Extreme Base Station, Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple In-Ear Headphones all get a little of the Black Friday treatment. Not to mention a whole lot of stuff nobody cares about. And there’s no discount on a MobileMe subscription, which is what I was hoping to see happen.

Altogether now… “Meh.”

The same percentage discounts have been rolled-out to Apple’s international stores, but ultimately equate to the same small-time savings. None of this is new — Apple just doesn’t “do” discounts. It’s not in its DNA.

Where the Real Action Is

If you want a genuine discount that makes a real difference to your bank balance, you need to leave Apple’s stores behind and go to its authorized resellers. That’s where the real action is this Black Friday. AppleInsider has a great roundup (including side by side comparisons) of the top Apple-approved resellers and their best one-day-discounts.

If you’re out shopping for an Apple bargain today and stumble across a fantastic deal, why not share the news in the comments below? But only after you’ve helped yourself, naturally. No one expects retail-altruism on a day like this…

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Posted by Liam Cassidy on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments

About two years ago, I wrote about the growing number of download speed boosters, among them an Israeli company called SpeedBit. Well the 10-year-old Speedbit has been speeding along ever since, and last month saw its SpeedBit Video Accelerator pass the 20 million installs-mark. The company, which makes a handful of products, claims that it now delivers about 8 million files daily and has about 18.5 million active monthly users. I’d actually forgotten about SpeedBit, as I kept upgrading to faster connections so that I never had to think about download snarls. But generally speaking, bandwidth (and good connectivity) remains a problem, so folks are still turning to this service because they, too, want smooth video streams with little or no buffering stops.

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Sponsor post: Thanks to Our jkOnTheRun Sponsors! jkOnTheRun – by Edit Staff "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere "; Strap Chrome OS Onto Your Dell Mini 10v jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; An 8-Year-Old’s-Eye View on Jaroo.com’s Kid-Friendly Content NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Speedbit, Video