Behind Your Business

More customers chose to point and click rather than park and swipe this Christmas season, with a five percent increase in online shopping over the same period last year, a study by the Internet marketing firm comScore says. By comparison, in-store retail shopping grew only 3.6 percent, according to credit-card spending tracked by Mastercard Advisor's' Spending Pulse.

"Overall this year, we have seen increasing stability in spending, as opposed to the free fall of 2008," noted Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

Cyber Monday A Success

Cyber Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend when online retailers usually offer their best deals and, often, free shipping, raked in $885 million, up five percent from last year's $834 million.

A significant share of the online boost was in electronics sales, which grew by slightly more than 20 percent, with jewelry and watches also producing solid sales. Overall, an estimated $27 billion was spent online.

Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, attributed the sales boost to better marketing and promotion by retailers.

"Sellers are trying different things other than just the usual loss-leader approach," Koenig said. "They have used a number of market plays old and new to coax consumers to open their wallets, and the data we have so far suggests they have been successful."

One such successful tactic, Koenig said, is bundling, or selling multiple, related products at one price. For example, he said Best Buy offered a Hewlett-Packard PC, monitor, notebook and netbook, plus a wireless router with home installation for about $1,200.

But he said while unit sales climbed this year, the revenue generated fell because of the abundance of lower-priced items.

"There were fewer large-screen TVs, but more midsize models in the 20- to 30-inch range sold," he said. "I also think there is some trading down...

For the first time, Apple won't be at the annual Macworld trade show, scheduled this year for Feb. 9-13. But CEO Steve Jobs and his team will still make the next few months interesting. Apple has scheduled a press briefing for Jan. 26 in San Francisco, and Apple watchers are salivating at the prospect of a tablet computer that looks like an iPhone on steroids.

A MacInsider report that Apple registered the domain name islate.com at least as far back as 2007 fueled rumors that the tablet may be named iSlate. While Apple has steadfastly refused to comment on the rumors, there is a consensus among the Apple cognoscenti that the device will be a 10-inch-wide tablet, not much thicker than an iPhone, feature the same multi-touch screen as the iPhone and iPod touch, be keyboard-free, and support music, video, e-books and iPhone apps. The price is rumored to be around $800.

The iSlate is exciting not just Apple "fanboys" but also Wall Street. Apple's stock has reached unknown heights in recent weeks as the rumor mills started going crazy. The stock price has risen from $192 on Dec. 18 to about $211 on New Year's Eve, giving the company a market capitalization of $190 billion.

Is Content King?

There are also rumors that Apple is cutting content deals with publishers, broadcasters and movie studios, suggesting Apple intends its device to be a Kindle killer. An influential review in The New Yorker magazine panned Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and said reading books on the iPod touch was a superior experience.

Is the crazed enthusiasm appropriate? Will consumers really flock to Apple stores to pay close to $1,000 -- far more than a Kindle -- just to watch YouTube videos on a larger screen? Some analysts believe that by cutting content deals, Apple could...

The traditional publishing industry is developing strategies to counteract the adverse effects that digital-content providers like Google and Amazon.com are having on its business. Among other things, publishers facing plummeting sales of physical media and advertising are expected to assert more control over when, where and how their content is made available.

However, Forrester Research Vice President Mark Mulligan believes today's pervasive free content means paid content is no longer king and the traditional media meltdown will continue through 2010.

"As the contagion of free continues to infect everything it touches, the old media business models and products are on borrowed time," Mulligan wrote in a recent blog. "Only with a new generation of media products that play to the relative strengths of the various digital platforms will new successful media business models be built."

A Multitiered Model

Mulligan advises the media industry to align its content assets with current consumer behavior and demand by adopting an entirely new framework for media products. "Just erecting a pay wall around your existing content will simply drive the vast majority of your audiences to the nearest free alternative," Mulligan warned.

Content scarcity may be gone, Mulligan observed, but high-quality, unique content experiences are extremely scarce in the digital arena. "When they exist, they prosper," Mulligan wrote.

Mulligan proposes that publishers follow a three-tiered model to monetize their digital content that consists of free, subsidized and premium content offerings -- a model that Amazon is already following. Beyond offering free books and low-priced best sellers, Amazon recently announced that it will offer exclusive e-book deals on the latest releases from best-selling authors such as Stephen Covey.

However, Gartner Vice President Allen Weiner thinks exclusive e-book deals send out a bad message to the majority of publishers not on The New York Times best-seller list....

The time has come once again for us at Tech Ticker to comment on your comments.  Digging through the thousands of responses, can be an emotional roller-coaster.  Viewer feedback ranges from passionate and well thought to hateful and utterly inco

AT&T is joining Verizon Wireless in an effort to even out the costs of wireless and landline services. AT&T has requested that the Federal Communications Commission approve replacing legacy circuit-switched or public-switched telephone networks (PSTN) with broadband and IP-based connections.

AT&T's request comes after the FCC issued a public notice on Dec. 1 asking for input on what it would take to move from the legacy system to Internet protocols.

"In identifying the appropriate areas of inquiry, we seek to understand which policies and regulatory structures may facilitate, and which may hinder, the efficient migration to an all-IP world," the FCC wrote. "In addition, we seek to identify and understand what aspects of traditional policy frameworks are important to consider, address and possibly modify in an effort to protect the public interest in an all-IP world."

At the Core

At the core of AT&T's argument to replace the worldwide telephone network that carries analog data is that the company is losing landline subscribers each day as more people rely solely on wireless devices. Already 99 percent of Americans have wireless coverage, while 700,000 landline subscriptions are ending each month, according to AT&T.

Between 1999 and 2007 the number of broadband connections rose from less than three million to more than 121 million, according to a report by the FCC. Today, those services are available to nearly 90 percent of American households, and 66 percent of those households subscribe to broadband service.

While the majority of households are making the switch, others will not be prepared to make the change.

"More and more folks are relying on their cell phones or some kind of VoIP service at home, but it's going to be hard to convince an older generation to give up that familiar dial tone that often works even when nothing else does and the...