Grappling with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, US online shoppers tend to spend more on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday for better prices. Yesterday, comScore reported that, for the holiday season-to-date, shoppers has spent $10.41 billion online, 4% decline in comparison to the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1%. Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, commented: Early reports suggest that Black Friday sales in retail stores were slightly better than anticipated in ...

Socked and angry! Over ten hours ago terrorists attacked Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, killing at least 80 civilians, police officers and many people including US citizens are being taken hostage. Mumbai is at war! Interestingly, the first news came to the world was not from CNN or from any other news agency but from Twitter's magical 140-character text messages. TechCrunch, leading tech blog, could capture picture of the first news updated on Twitter here. "Forget CNN, which so far has ...

Like the evil force in "Lord of The Rings" famous story, spam which was once defeated now has gathered its strength and is on the rise again! Two weeks ago when the command center of spam called McColo, a Web-hosting company that ran sites for several chief spammers, was forced to shut down the world had enjoyed a short moment of victorious air seeing spam sent over the Internet down to 80%. There were lucky days when many people on Earth ...

Chris Evans, Google's Information Security Engineer and Tech Lead, has rejected the Gmail vulnerability rumored widely that would cause domain thieves recently. After investigation, it is found that the cause was a rather simple phishing scheme that fooled domain's owners to visit fake websites such as "google-hosts.com" and collected usernames/passwords of Gmail accounts. After gaining the user credentials, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers and consequently gain the controls of the domains. There ...

The first sign of the downsizing fever was seen last week when Google announced to shut down 5-month old service: Lively. Now it is said that Google may be preparing to cut thousands of jobs. Probably as much as 10,000 workers (and counting) will no longer enjoy the air of Googleplex. In fact, according to internal source, Google has been quietly fired hundreds of employees in the past few months without reporting to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or publicizing the ...

Struggling with less than 10% search share, Microsoft plans to rebrand Windows Live Search next year, according to an internal source. It is reported by LiveSide that Microsoft has taken over the Kumo.com domain and has started redirecting some of its servers to it (accessible to some internal employees only). Kumo means "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese, you can see the traditional men's kimono pictured below for a "Kumo" look-and-feel. [caption id="attachment_152" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Japanese man in traditional kimono named "Kumo""][/caption] So, does it ...

Responding to recent losses, Palm announced to trim its workforce of 1050 employees. Lynn Fox, Palm Inc's spokeswoman, said the layoffs began this week, but she declined to specify how many jobs would be cut. "The goal (of the layoffs) is to consolidate resources and focus our efforts more effectively," said Fox while it is reported that the move comes as Palm focuses on its Linux-based "Nova" operating system, as well as a device on which the platform will run. Palm, maker ...

Long Term Evolution (LTE) describes the latest standardization work by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in the mobile network technology tree that promises to deliver a better user experience with ultra fast broadband and very low latency with lowest cost per bit for data services. Motorola claimed it has completed the first over-the-air Long-Term Evolution (LTE) data transfers in 700-MHz spectrum. The demonstration used its LTE Radio Access Test Network and LTE eNode-B platform along with a prototype LTE device. The ...

Some users have reported that they found a new feature integrated into Gmail's settings which allows them to change default Gmail interface to over 30 different themes. Google itself announced they will be rolling out the feature to all users in the next couple of days. Before users had to depend on Greasemonkey scripts or Firefox plugins that could bring some more pleasure to the standard Gmail theme. Gmail's help center provides an interesting piece about the new themes: In some cases, ...

In response to aggressive competition from rivals like Yelp, Citysearch -- the popular local events and review site owned by IAC (InterActiveCorp) -- has gotten a full makeover. There's a more streamlined and Ajaxified UI and some other important features have been tweaked as well. The company said this is about a year and a half in the making. At the start, the new features will be available on a separate beta site. The beta site is expanding to become more ...