As we wrote last week, Cyber Monday is a very accurate predictor of what the online holiday shopping season will look like. Many feared that the economic downturn this year would lead to a very modest online recession, or at the very least, a significant slowing in growth.

There was some slowing, but it wasn’t much: Cyber Monday was 15% bigger than last year, which isn’t bad at all. It represented the second biggest online shopping day in history, with nearly $850 million spent.
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Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Yammer is basically Twitter for businesses. Unlike Twitter, is is tailored for the enterprise market, offering desktop, iPhone, and Blackberry apps, IM support, email support, and SMS. And, unlike Twitter, it appears to have a viable monetization model.

In an effort to keep it clean, Yammer only works for corporate email addresses. While it’s obvious to say that Twitter should have done something like this, they it may not be as easy to pull off as it seems. The security issues and needs to larger companies, especially those where privacy is a primary and grave concern, would require some hard work, and Twitter has had enough scaling problems to deal with to keep them pretty busy. Yammer is on the ground floor with enterprise concerns in mind.
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Apple wasn’t exactly promising anything that would set the world on fire with today’s “Let’s Rock” event. In fact, many were forecasting that the stock would fall in reaction to what would be little to get excited about, in comparison to some of Apple’s past blockbuster announcements.

But there was some news made today, and Steve Jobs was there to deliver it. Perhaps the biggest news was the new iPod Nano, which is no longer short and fat, but tall and skinny. It also has a new tapered design and an accelerometer that allows for vertical and horizontal display on the new screen. The accelerometer can also be used to “shake-shuffle” your songs, which is kind of cool (but available on other MP3 players, not unique to Apple). Additionally, the price has not changed but the Nanos have more storage capacity, with 8GB models for $149 and 16GB for $199.
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In what would spell the end of microfiche and be an unparalleled research resource, Google is launching an initiative to archive newspapers in their original form from all over the world, every one of them, in their entirety.

In addition to showing these newspapers in their original form, Google will of course make them fully searchable, so users will get both the text and the original image from the paper.

The platform Google is using is not unlike the one used for Google Books, except with advertising being a lot more prominently featured than with Google Books. Interestingly, Google does not have a “beta” tag attached to this launch, whereas Gmail is still in beta after what seems like years.
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If you were watching football last night, as I was, you were undoubtedly riveted by the sight of Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Gates, a couple of churros, and some shoes. It was 90 seconds of the most outlandish advertising I’ve ever seen in my life, and like it or not, it has a lot of people talking.

The ad is taking a lot of heat amongst bloggers, which is sort of understandable. The ad is about nothing. Nobody seems to get it. The point is impossible to find. It ends with Gates moving his ass in response to an inquiry by Seinfeld about computers made of cake.

In other words, it is completely random, it features one of the richest men in the world playing along in a  completely bizarre situation, and nobody seems to know what the hell is going on. As Kenny Bania from Seinfeld would say, “That’s gold Jerry. Gold!”
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Apple, hungry to build their market in China, has taken a position that will not endear them to the Chinese leadership and much of the Chinese people. Though the Apple iTunes store is not marketed to China, it is accessed there frequently, especially by foreigners in the country–such as those attending the Olympics.

Apple is offering up an album on the service called “Songs for Tibet,” featuring artists like Sting and Dave Matthews, and word is that around 40 Olympic athletes downloaded the album in the last two weeks. Of course, while there is not concrete evidence to support the claim, it appears as if Chinese authorities have blocked iTunes in response to the pro-Tibet album.
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In spite of a long and bloody War on Spam, email marketing is adapting and reaching agreements that guarantee delivery of advertising emails. In fact, email marketers Goodmail report a 500% increase in its email marketing volume from January alone.

In fairness, what they do isn’t just pure spam: they have deals with clients, email service providers (like AOL and Yahoo Mail), and ISPs to deliver marketing emails from companies you have a pre-existing relationship with. I receive a lot of emails (to my designated “spam box” email address) from Stubhub, a Goodmail client, as well as SideStep, and they do successfully get through to my inbox, that is for sure. I even click on them sometimes, and the images come right up.
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comScore’s Ad Metrix results for April of 2008 reveal what we may already have known: the top apparel advertiser on the web is American Apparel.

They racked up around 480 million display ad views in the month that led to about 49 million ad-exposed views. Not half bad, huh?

They’ve been at this for a long time. I’ve been seeing the same style American Apparel ads (lo-fi photos bored looking young hipsters not wearing very much) for at least four years now. New stores are popping up all over the place, and I even succumbed and bought a hooded sweatshirt from them a couple of years ago. For the record, it started to fade after about three washes. Too bad, because all of their clothes are American-made, which is really nice to see.
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Microsoft’s new ad push is called the “Mojave Experiment,” and the point is this: due to bad word of mouth, people have poor thoughts about Windows Vista, but when they actually use it (under a different name, Mojave) they think it’s God’s gift to operating systems.

It is true that Vista (which I admit I also have a limited, but largely positive, experience with) gets railed on by a lot of people who aren’t sure why it’s so terrible. But there is a reason for this: when Vista was released and people upgraded their computers from XP, stuff quit working. Hardware, games, everything: kaput.
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Scrabulous, the Facebook app that has over 500,000 users, has been shut down today in the US and Canada by the Indian brothers that created it. Big, evil Hasbro has put the drop on them and now it’s game over.

But not so fast. What really happened here, and is Hasbro really evil for protecting intellectual property?

Undoubtedly, Hasbro could have handled this situation much better. The best course of action would have been to create their own version of Scrabble for Facebook early on and corner the market. All of these old game makers would be smart to get on their horses because there is money to be made. The brothers that created Scrabulous are making a lot of money.
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