Despite the current financial crisis, the spending on Black Friday increased 1% as compared to last year. Americans spent $534 million on e-commerce shopping this Black Friday, announced in a report by comScore.

According to Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman:

Early reports suggest that Black Friday sales in retail stores were slightly better than anticipated in this depressed retail climate, and that performance apparently extended to the online channel, which saw sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday combined increase 2 percent versus year ago.

It’s probable that on Black Friday consumers responded positively to the very aggressive promotions and discounts being offered in retail stores, so it will be important to see how they respond to similarly attractive deals being offered online on Cyber Monday, the traditional kick-off to the online holiday shopping season.

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Though Apple didn’t offer discount this holiday on its prime products the iPhone, iPod Touch and iMac, it however managed to score better sales. The survey was carried out by Piper Jaffray’s team under Gene Munster  who counted the sales of Mac and the iPhone for ten hours in five Apple stores on Friday and reported the sales were up to the expectations. The report stated the sales for Mac averaged 13 per hour while those of iPhone averaged 3.4 pieces per hour. With sales not falling prey to the current crisis Apple joins the ranks of Walmart and Amazon for seeing the slumping holidays sales through, successfully.

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What are some of your favorite Windows Mobile applications? Let us know in the comments!

Games

Death Drive - Who doesn’t love a little vehicular combat?  Death Drive brings Carmageddon like combat to your Windows Mobile powered device.

Kevtris - What is mobile gaming without at least one version of Tetris?

Pocket Heroes - Pocket Heroes is a Heroes of Might and Magic game clone for Pocket PC.  It may be a bit simple for some, but still a lot of fun.

Realms - A space based shooting game that might remind you a bit of the old Asteroids arcade game, but only in concept.  Multiple ships to choose from and numerous levels to explore.

Internet Tools

Fring - Fring brings their instant messaging services to more than just the iPhone and iPod Touch with a Windows Mobile version.  Allows you to instant message with AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, SIP, Skype, Twitter and Yahoo.

Opera Mobile - The popular Opera browser comes to the mobile format with a full set of features.

Slick - Allows you to instant message with AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo. Also has text messaging, emoticons, message history and more.

TwitToday - A plugin for your Today screen that allows you to post to your Twitter account.

Web Viewer - Web Viewer is an expansion to the web browsing ability with a tabbed browser that allows you to save open tabs and more.

Media Players

MPlayer for Windows Mobile - Part of the MPlayer suite for Linux, MPlayer for Windows Mobile will let you play Flash videos as well as videos in the RV40, RV30, R20, sipro, cook and atrac codecs.

RealPlayer - An official mobile release for the famous Real One Player.

The Core Pocket Media Player - TCPMP, as it is known, supports a dizzying array of video and audio formats from DivX to Ogg Vorbis.

YouTubePlayer - Just as the name implies, YouTubePlayer lets you to search YouTube for videos and then plays them in their native FLV format.

Phone Applications

Call Firewall - Call Firewall does exactly what you would think it might in that it helps you create blacklists and whitelists for your Windows Mobile powered cell phone.  One of the coolest features is that it will send an SMS to a blocked call telling them why they were blocked.

iDialer - iDialer, pictured above, gives you a new dialing interface that feels similar to another popular phone’s dialing system.  It does offer compatibility with popular Internet phone services such as Grand Central and JaJah.

Skype - The well known Skype service is available for Windows Mobile, enabling you to make Skype calls from your mobile, saving you a lot of money on calls.

Utilities

CapSure - You can capture your screen in BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG and then add captions, obscure sensitive information and more.

Dashwire - Allows you to sync your phone at all times including pictures, files, contacts, messages and more.  Cool feature that lets you see texts on your computer as they arrive at your phone.

GSync - As you can probably guess by the name, GSync allows you to synchronize your Google Calendar with your Windows Mobile powered phone.  The app is available in Dutch, English and Italian.

iContact - iContact changes your contact interface to more of an iPhone style system that allows you to browse through your contacts with just a flick of your finger.

Pocket RAR - An official version of the RAR archive manager that you can use on your mobile device.

SoftKey Manager - This app allows you to edit the soft keys on your Today screen.

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Free iPhone Apps!

Traffic on various retail sites (Online-stores) took a plunge this Thanksgiving and Black Friday and out of the five hundred sites under survey Walmart remained top visited on Thanksgiving Day while Amazon registered most traffic on Black Friday. The stats provided showed Walmart received 13.72% of U.S visitors while Amazon followed with 9.56% on Thanksgiving Day. There was change on Black Friday as Amazon took the lead with 11.06% of total visitors followed by Walmart with 9.88%. Given the economic downturn and with online shopping seeing a drop, Walmart and Amazon appear to have sailed clear of the storm (for the present at least).

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In spite of the general economic downturn, ‘Black Friday’ sales of Apple computers were “better than expected,” analysts told investors Monday.

Like past Black Friday sales, Apple offered discounts on seven products with an 8 percent discount.

However, Mac sales we more than six times what they were in November, according to Piper Jaffray. Analyst Gene Munster said an average of 13 Macs per hour were sold Friday compared to two computers per hour in November. Munster based his numbers on 10 hours of monitoring five Apple retail stores.

Friday, Apple cut its “unibody” MacBooks by $101 and $51 discounts on the $999 white plastic entry-level MacBook. One-day price reductions of $51 on the entry-level 2.4GHz iMac and $101 for the 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz aluminum all-in-ones were also unveiled.

iPhones did not share in the same level of consumer enthusiasm. Munster said iPhone sales averaged 3.4 per hour compared to 1.3 per hour in November.

Although the analyst expects the iPhone will receive a boost in holiday sales, the impact will be “minimal.”

In a wider review of Black Friday Apple sales, Deutsche Bank said “demand for Apple was solid considering the macro backdrop.” Both Mac and iPod sales for the day likely were “modestly above” Deutsche Bank’s estimates. The firm, which reviewed retail and online sales at more than 125 storefronts, expects Apple to report 5 million iPhone sales for the quarter.

Deutsche found the new MacBooks were popular Black Friday offerings with 2GHz and 2.4GHz MacBooks outselling the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

Best Buy locations reported strong demand for the iPhone and shoppers at AT&T stores preferred the lower-priced 8GB iPhone. The reverse was true for iPod shoppers: the 16GB nanos were outselling the 8GB nanos, according to Deutesche.

Twitter Classification Script for Greasemonkey

One of the most effective ways of quickly gauging the quality of someone you discover on Twitter (maybe you got a notice that they were following you, for instance), is their follower count.  Now almost every account grows its followers over time, so the ratio of following to followers can be a nice metric.  Michael Klier of Splitbrain created a really neat script for Greasemonkey that displays the ratio above each profile you visit.

There is a scale to determine just how good each user is in terms of their “crowdsourced” quality.  If a user is following a lot of other users and has very few followers, the label at the top will tell you that they are a spammer.  If the converse is true, they are a “twittercaster.”  You can use the script to set goals for yourself or simply add a little more information to the profiles of those you are following.

Twuffer - The Twitter Buffer

Sometimes you’re sitting at your computer and think “Man, I need to send some tweets out today, but this is the only time I’ll be at the terminal.”  Well if you don’t want to spam out your entire day’s tweets in a single burst, try Twuffer.  Twuffer provides a kind of buffer for your tweets so you can spread out your updates.

Also, it can be programmed to send out tweets hourly, weekly, or on any date in the future.  The interface is slick and Ajaxy so it’s a nice user experience.  It stores your personal preferences in a cookie (I believe), so keep that in mind.  You will be asked for your password, by the way, so if that freaks you out, Twuffer might not be the one for you.  It is required for the API though, so it’s not their fault.

I love how one of the suggested uses is “appear to never sleep.”

iTweet

I really like iTweet.  Talk about slick interfaces, this Twitter rehash has it ALL.  The standard tweeting functions are all there, but they are based on an Ajax system so everything flows smooth as silk.  Links and @replies are linkified, but so are hash codes, for easy searching.  In fact, the search feature is very well done.  It doesn’t even require a page-load.  Retweeting, favoriting, and @replying all have their own buttons.  Another nice feature is a feed of all your followers, so you can catch up with some of the people you may not want to follow full-time.

One word of caution.  Each time you “do” something on iTweet, the server has to call Twitter’s servers and it uses up one of your API requests.  There is a handy counter on the front panel to keep track, but you’ll be amazed how a little bit of hardcore twittering will use up all your calls.  Don’t worry too much though, they reset at a regular interval (every 30 minutes at the moment).

Twitt(url)y

With the advent of URL shorteners like TinyURL, a lot of links are obscured in Twitter until you click them.  This unique service seeks to alleviate some of the irritation shortened URLs cause.

Simply enter any user’s name onto the end of this address (my own address, “loyaleagle,” is a placeholder and a preview) and you’ll see a reworked list of everything they have EVER linked to.  The page layout is superb and there each link’s title has been retrieved from the page it goes to.

You can also see which links have got a lot of attention recently and who linked to them.  It’s almost (dare I say it?) the Digg of Twitter!  I mean there is an obvous social bookmarking aspect to it, you can tweet any link with the click of a button, and each link has a very comprehensive history of it’s use throughout the entire history of Twitter.  Don’t underestimate this one!

Mr.Tweet

This last webapp is a new one to me.  I stuck it on here because it has a nice, clean interface (in fact this whole list faired pretty well in that respect) and a simple function.

Mr. Tweet is a Twitter bot that follows you after you follow it.  Once you do so, it begins to analyze your history and followers.  Once it is ready, it messages you.  Mr. Tweet offers up a list of people in your extended network that you might consider following as well as people who are following you that deserve a second look (assuming you gave them a first one).

What I really like about Mr. Tweet is the added data about each user.  It shows not only their follower count and such, but also if they are likely to reply to non-followers and if they typically follow people who follow them.  When you are trying to grow your account, these are excellent statistics to know.  Better yet, Mr. Tweet will show you quite a few posts from their feed so that you can preview their content without having to click through (which can become quite tedious).  Try it out and if it doesn’t do much for you, unfollow and you’re done with it.  So simple!

There are so many new Twitter applications popping up every day, it can be hard to keep on top of them.  Recently we’ve got a few people saying we talk about Twitter apps too much.  If you like lists like this one, let us know (in the comments)!  We’ll probably be scaling them back a bit otherwise. We really do listen to you guys, we swear.

Oh one last thing, if you can spare a follow (don’t want to mess up your ratio!), here is MakeUseOf’s Twitter account and here is my lowly Twitter account. Follow the rest of the MakeUseOf authors as well if you like!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

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Bloomberg: Dell Inc., the world's second-largest personal-computer maker, lost the Black Friday retail battle against Hewlett-Packard Co. in Best Buy Co. stores, Thomas Weisel Partners said in a report.

Customers preferred Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) PCs 5-to-1 over Dell's during the three-day weekend, according to a survey of 35 stores conducted by Doug Reid, an analyst at Thomas Weisel. Best Buy is the largest U.S. electronics retailer.

Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell ditched the company's direct-sales-only model in an attempt to win back the PC sales lead held by Hewlett-Packard for more than two years. He put Dell products in 20,000 stores worldwide, starting with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Best Buy in the U.S.

``Dell has significant work to do,'' New York-based Reid wrote today in the report. ``The only negative comments in our survey with respect to brand were aimed at Dell, with survey respondents noting potential quality issues.''

The survey focused on the U.S. consumer market, which Reid estimated accounts for 13 percent of Dell's revenue. Consumer sales represent about 20 percent of total revenue worldwide.

See Also:
Dell: We Told You Things Were Lousy, And They Are. Look Out Below
Dell Sales Miss By A Billion, Profit Good, No Guidance
Sorry State Of PC Industry Getting Worse

Photo: phil_g

Apple met or beat analyst expectations for sales over the weekend, selling 13 Macs and 3.4 iPhones every hour, according to one Piper Jaffray estimate.

Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu said that Apple's Black Friday promotions helped drive retail store traffic, according to reports from distributors. Wu also noted that the iPod touch is sold out at Amazon.com, which leads him to believe that Apple could sell $10 billion worth of products this quarter.

Thomas Weisel Partners' Doug Reid got the impression that Apple sales were up from last year. He was less optimistic about Dell's retail performance at Best Buy locations, noting that salespeople there were not strongly recommending Dell models at 35 stores they checked.

Weisel analysts expect Apple to sell 2.4 million Macs during the fourth quarter.

Deutsche Bank analysts also conducted their own checks over the weekend, and found demand to be "solid," considering the current global economic woes. They expect Apple to sell 5 million iPhones this quarter, and reiterated their "buy" rating and price target of $150 per share.

AAPL was down slightly in morning trading.

TUAWAnalyst Roundup: Black Friday pretty good for Apple originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.