So long, Cyber Monday?

Need a lift? Online retailers continue to rely on Cyber Monday to give holiday sales a boost. Credit: Dan Hontz via Flickr.

As long as there has been e-commerce, there has been Cyber Monday. But is that old gem of the new economy endangered?

Online retailers for the last decade have counted on the Monday after Thanksgiving to deliver for Web merchants what Black Friday does for bricks-and-mortar stores -- a turbo boost into the holiday shopping season. Back then, many people hopped onto their employers' fast Internet connections to do some quick holiday shopping when they returned to work after Thanksgiving.

But with more than 60% of U.S. homes now sporting high-speed Internet, more people are now flipping through those online catalogs at home, said Ken Cassar, vice president of Nielsen Co.'s online research division.

As a result, more online stores aren't waiting until Monday to get the party going. They're throwing their own Black Friday events. Some, including Amazon.com, are doing deals every day this week.

That doesn't mean Cyber Monday will evaporate, however. That's because some people still shop at work, away from the prying eyes of family members. "Mondays still tend to be busier shopping days," Cassar said.

It's also a good marketing hook that retailers want to keep alive.

"Retailers liked the marketing focus," Cassar said. "It remains a big shopping day, but it's now fueled more by retailer marketing and promotion."

That means online merchants will be out in force trumpeting Cyber Monday specials.

More merchants say they plan to offer some type of promotion such as free shipping or extra discounts on Monday, 87% compared with 83% last year, according to a survey by Shop.org, the online division of the National Retail Federation. Check out Shop.org's Web page listing Cyber Monday specials offered by 650 of its member merchants.

The shipping promotions are likely to come with fewer...

U.S.' $7.2-billion broadband stimulus program risks waste and fraud, GAO says

A.J. Bowen of Schupp's Line Construction works on fiber-optic installation in Norton, Vt. Credit:  Toby Talbot / Associated Press.

Federal programs to bring broadband Internet service to areas without it lack basic information and adequate safeguards to ensure that the money isn’t wasted, a new government report said.

The Commerce and Agriculture departments were given $7.2 billion to expand U.S. broadband availability as part of last February’s federal stimulus package.

But they have been scrambling to review a crush of grant and loan applications while facing tight deadlines to distribute the money, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Monday.

The first allocation of funds, originally set for Nov. 7, has been delayed until December.

The agencies have had just two months to review 2,200 applications for the first round of funding alone, the report said.

By comparison, the California Public Utilities Commission took four to six months to review just 54 applications in a $100-million broadband program.

Under Congress’ mandate, all $7.2 billion must be distributed by Sept. 30, 2010.

The programs “present risks of waste, fraud and abuse,” the GAO said, due to the compressed timetable for distributing the money and because of inadequate data on what areas actually lack broadband service.

Officials “will be awarding loans and grants before the national broadband plan or broadband mapping is complete,” the report said.

Program funds are intended to be spent on expanding broadband network wiring, developing public computer centers in places such as libraries or schools, and “innovative projects to stimulate demand for, and adoption of, broadband.”

To prevent waste and fraud, the GAO urged the two entities responsible for distributing the money – the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service – to develop a way to review and measure the effectiveness of fund recipients beyond the year 2010.

The full report can be viewed here.

-- Scott J. Wilson

Windows 7: Can Microsoft reboot reputation and give the tech sector a jolt?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking at CeBit in March. Credit: Kay Nietfeld / European Press Photo Agency.

With more than 8 million "beta testers" using Windows 7 since January and dozens of reviews already published, virtually every aspect of Microsoft's new operating system is already public knowledge prior to this morning's "launch" -- except one.

Can Windows 7 repair Microsoft's reputation and trigger enough sales to pull the technology sector out of the economic funk?

Steve Ballmer certainly hopes so. The Microsoft chief executive and impresario known for his highly energetic speaking style this morning kicked off the launch of its latest computer operating system by saying, "Today is an important day for the computer industry, certainly for Microsoft and I hope perhaps even most importantly for all of the customers around the world."

Much rides on the success of Windows 7. Microsoft is counting on it to lift its sales, which fell last fiscal year for the first time since the company went public in 1986. Computer makers and software companies are praying that Windows 7 will set off a wave of demand for their products, which have been dampened by the recession as buyers postponed PC purchases or opted for ultra-cheap netbooks over full-fledged computers.

Even consumer electronics companies see Windows 7-based computers as a way to make their devices sexier as gateways for entertainment programs on-demand.

"Windows needs to be an incredible opportunity innovation for hardware companies and software companies," Ballmer said at the company's kick-off event in New York. "Windows 7 takes us a step closer to the vision we articulated ... around the three screens -- the PC, the phone and the TV, all communicating across the cloud, the Internet backbone."

Ballmer tried to nail the point home by ...

KaChing aims to shake up the mutual fund industry

Venture capitalists love to use the Internet to disrupt traditional businesses. But surely by now no business is left undisturbed.

Not so, says Andy Rachleff, a founder of Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital. He thinks he’s found a big one, what he says is “a $10-trillion market that has not had any innovation in the last 25 years and has not been affected by the Internet.”

It’s the mutual fund industry. And some valley heavyweights have joined Rachleff in his bid to rock that world: Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Hewlett-Packard executive Ben Horowitz, Open Table CEO Jeff Jordan, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner Kevin Compton.

This team believes that mutual funds take investors’ money, but only tell them what their holdings are on a quarterly basis. The funds also charge all sorts of hidden fees. The Internet is famous for bringing transparency to a variety of businesses, but mutual funds, Rachleff says, are as opaque as ever.

Enter kaChing, a start-up that Rachleff has not only backed but has joined as its chief executive. KaChing has been around for about 18 months, accumulating 400,000 users with a Facebook application, but is now ready to unveil its business model.

The company offers up a website that any investor can use for free. The investors – some professional, some amateur – state their philosophy and show their stock picks. KaChing will then rate those investors, using a formula akin to the one that Ivy League universities use to evaluate their institutional fund managers, and anyone with a rating of 140 or more will be tabbed as a “genius.”

Any other investor can log onto the site and see what the geniuses are picking. But if you decide you like one of them, you can plunk your money down – minimum $3,000, which Rachleff says is far less than the institutional level typically required for such services – and invest like the genius of your choosing. Every time the genius makes a trade, you make the same trade at the same time, and get an e-mail alerting you to it.

To be sure, other companies out there have similar ideas. Other so-called social investing firms include Covestor, Cake Financial and PersonalRIA. Plenty of people have an eye on that mutual fund disruption.

And success is far from guaranteed. KaChing will have to persuade people to put their money behind stock-pickers who, while the site may call them geniuses, don't have the backing, brand names or Morningstar ratings of Fidelity, Pimco, Vanguard or other big funds.

-- Dan Fost

Huffington Post wants to help

 

anna Huffington. Credit: Huffington Post.

UPDATE: The section will go live at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Tuesday (not 12:01 a.m. as originally reported below.)

You've got to love the left. Even when they're running capitalist enterprises, they want to find some way to help the downtrodden.

Arianna Huffington is adding a new section to her eponymous A-list blog site the Huffington Post, and calling it Impact. She's partnered with Causecast, a Santa Monica venture that has both nonprofit and for-profit arms, and which will provide both articles and, more important, technology to make the section work.

The section will go live at 12:01  8 a.m. Tuesday, and will feature stories on a variety of subjects, including gay issues, helping the homeless,  stopping bullying in schools and flooding in the Philippines. Each story will come with a Causecast "widget" that will help a reader plot a course of action.

"We want to document the hardships and to provide the means and the tools for direct action, money and service," Huffington said.

Ultimately, every article -- not just those in the Impact section -- could feature a Causecast widget. A sample of the widget, seen at right, shows how it could be used with a story on this past weekend's National Equality March in Washington, D.C., for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. The widget is just a small box that runs with the stories containing buttons a reader could click to take them to a Causecast page that promotes other websites, such as the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that helps prevent LGBT youth suicide. 

"Every article has a cause behind it," said Ryan Scott, the founder and CEO of Causecast. "We’re going to show the actions that people can take to effect change on whatever that is. Say it’s a flood or a tsunami. Can they donate? Volunteer? Make calls? Make personal fundraising pages?"

Huffington said ads will run on the site, and the Huffington Post and Causecast will split the ad revenue. Any money donated to any cause goes directly to the cause, with nothing coming out of it. 

Her site continues to expand, reinvesting its proceeds in the product. "We’ve had a very, very good advertising year," she said. "We would be in the black if we were not expanding. Whether you are profitable or not depends whether you're standing still or expanding. This is a window we need to take advantage of."

In addition to Impact, the HuffPost started a Technology section and regional coverage in Denver in September, a Books section earlier this month, and new sections on Sports and Giving planned for November and December. Local news in Los Angeles is also planned for November, and a San Francisco Bay Area section could start before the end of the year, although it's more likely to hold off until early 2010.

Huffington said her audience is highly engaged, with 27 million people visiting the site each month and leaving 2 million comments. "We want to tap into that longing out there to give back," she said. "That was a big part of the success of the Obama campaign, when Obama promised to make service central. That has been slightly derailed with all the problems in the economy but we want to make it central. This is not the icing on the cake. It has to be baked into the cake."

-- Dan Fost

Internet ad spending continues slide

The recession continued to cut into companies’ resources as Internet advertising spending in the U.S. fell more than 5% in the second quarter, according to a report released today.

It is the second consecutive quarterly drop in online advertising, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers quarterly report. This is the first time since the dot-com bust in 2002 that online ad spending has dipped for two consecutive quarters compared with the same quarters of the previous year.

From April to June this year, 5.4 billion was spent on online ads -- down 5.3% from a year earlier, when advertisers spent $5.8 billion.

Despite the drop in numbers, online advertising is doing well considering the economic climate, said Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

“We are in one of the most difficult economic slumps in decades. Interactive is one of the advertising sectors that has been least affected,” Rothenberg said. “As the economy improves, we’re confident that brands will devote an even greater share of their budgets to reaching consumers as they make interactive media a larger part of their lives.”

-- W.J. Hennigan

TechCrunch50: SeatGeek advises you when to buy tickets to the big game

It's the ticket-scalping conundrum: Will it be cheaper to buy seats in advance of the event or will prices drop as it gets closer to game time and the sellers want to unload their wares?

SeatGeek, a new company that showed its stuff at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, aims to take the guesswork out of that decision.

"We have an algorithm that can forecast ticket prices," said Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of the company. He compared it to Bing's FareCast, which does something similar with airline tickets.

SeatGeek aggregates tickets on sale from most of the major re-sellers, like StubHub, RazorGator, TicketsNow and others.

Say you're interested in getting tickets to Oct. 4's showdown between the Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies. (See the screen grab at right.)  SeatGeek searches available seats, and says you can get cheap seats for below face value, but you should wait -- the price will probably go even lower. But if you want the medium or expensive seats, buy them now, as those prices will probably rise. (Perhaps the conclusion is that if Dodger fans can't get close to the action, they'd rather stay home.)

Groetzinger, 25, and co-founder Russ D'Souza, 24, sold their earlier company, Scribnia (which D'Souza called "Yelp for authors and bloggers") four months ago, and immediately started SeatGeek. They were living in Boston at the time, where Red Sox tickets are hard to come by and only available on the secondary market.

"We see this as a huge opportunity for a change-the-world type of business," D'Souza said.

-- Dan Fost

TechCrunch50: Mint makes a mint

Investors worried about the lack of payoffs in this recession can take heart from the deal confirmed on stage at this morning's TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco: Personal finance software giant Intuit will buy the upstart start-up Mint.com for $170 million.

It was only in February of this year that Intuit lawyers sent Mint a threatening letter, questioning the company's claims of how rapidly it was adding new users. But the two sides must have found some common ground as well, as Aaron Patzer was all aglow in talking about how he'll continue to run Mint while it becomes a part of Intuit.

Mint was shaping up as a classic disruptor, bringing easy-to-use Web 2.0 technology to the intimidating world of personal finance. Such online applications have often confounded traditional software companies like Intuit, which sells the popular Quicken line of products. For now, at least, Intuit will continue to run Quicken.com alongside Mint.com, but it's clear Intuit is looking to acquire more than new customers. It also hopes to get some of Mint's innovative mojo.  

Mint launched two years ago at the same TechCrunch conference, taking a $50,000 prize as a promising start-up. It raised $32 million in three rounds of venture capital. 

-- Dan Fost

Photo: Aaron Patzer of Mint getting his prize from angel investor Ron Conway two years ago.  Credit: Mint.com.

 

MacBooks vs. netbooks: Guess which one wins with students

Netbooks such as the HP Mini shown here have been gaining popularity. Credit: Hewlett-Packard.

Money talks. Especially when you don't have much of it.

Cash-strapped students returning to school may be looking toward less pricey computers called netbooks and shunning premium-priced products from Apple. Priced as low as $170, these minis have become popular among road warriors who want lightweight laptops with longer battery lives.

Now students may be taking a page out of the business traveler's handbook, according to a survey of 300 Americans released this morning by Retrevo, a technology review website based in Sunnyvale, Calif. A third of those polled said they planned to buy a netbook for school. About half said they would buy a desktop. A majority of students said they would not be buying a Mac.

“While Apple has done well historically in the education market, 2009 marks the dawn of the netbook,” says Vipin Jain, Retrevo's chief executive. “Students told us they wanted longer battery life, smaller size and a lighter laptop."

More than half of those polled, 58%, said they planned to spend less than $750 on their computer, while 18% had a budget over $1,000. Apple laptops start at $949.

"At a time when many people are experiencing economic hardship, having a new Apple laptop isn’t a necessity,” Jain said.

Of course, Apple has never counted on having a majority of computer users to be profitable. Apple has rarely claimed more than 10% of the market for computers. Big players such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard own much larger shares of the PC market, but nevertheless walk a financial tightrope as aggressive pricing slices away their margins. Meanwhile, Apple has been perfectly content to charge a premium to the minority of buyers willing to fork over the extra cash, even in hard times.

Would Apple follow the same premium pricing path for future products such as a tablet computer, for example? 

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Mark Madsen: Clipper, ex-Laker and domain name speculator

Clippers forward Mark Madsen. Credit: AP

In a strange series of events befitting the shady world of domain name speculation, New Jersey state police arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the rights to p2p.com and selling them to Los Angeles Clipper forward Mark Madsen.

Daniel Gonclave, 25, of Union, N.J., is suspected of hacking into the GoDaddy.com account of p2p.com's previous owner, transferring ownership to himself and then selling it to Madsen on eBay for $111,000.  Although the domain name may have been illegally acquired, Madsen reportedly still owns it.

What ever would the "Mad Dog" want with a website associated with peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing? 

It turns out, surprisingly, that Madsen is an active domain name speculator. That's the rather odd subculture of people who buy domain names like beer.com and yeti.tv, hoping to resell them down the road at awesome profit.

Several blogs have linked Madsen to account names on EBay and various message boards, where he looks to have sold or tried to sell dozens of low-, middle- and high-dollar domain names. Those included Internetdating.com, denial.com, carbohydrates.com and even registeredsexoffender.com.

Tom Ziller at Fanhouse has quite a bit more. He writes:

Madsen's activity on DNForum, as well as the big-dollar purchase of P2P.com, indicates the player was in deep in this industry ... A year ago, he offloaded dozens of Canadian domain names-- including lovelies like chocolatecandy.ca, accordians.ca, schooners.ca and the epic menstrualperiods.ca -- for $21,000. On eBay, he sold two domains in June for a total of $7,000.

A person sounding very much like Madsen answered a phone number listed in one of the forum posts, but declined to comment on the New Jersey case, saying he and his attorneys planned to put out a statement about the situation Tuesday.

Madsen is an active Twitterer and maintains a blog where he (irregularly) posts thoughts about the basketball world.  But neither his Twitter stream not his blog yields any evidence of Madsen's low-profile second career as a speculator.

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech and culture-related musings at @dsarno

-- David Sarno