November 2007 Archives

Many Apple retail stores are madhouses on ordinary weekends, so it's no surprise they were crowded on Black Friday. But according to analysts, some of whom are studying the company's holiday traffic for the first time, Apple's performance is worth paying attention to.

According to Piper Jaffray, Apple stores exert "what can best be described as a gravitational pull" on mall shoppers. A shopper walking within 25 feet of an entrance has a 27% chance of going in, said analyst Gene Munster, whose firm spent six hours monitoring foot traffic at Apple stores this weekend. Most of them don't buy anything, he added, and Apple stores are often in high-traffic parts of shopping centers, but this signals a possible shift in buying intentions to Macs from PCs.

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Amazon.com Inc.'s new e-book reader, Kindle, has only been on sale for a few hours, but the blogosphere already has a lot to say about it.

Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo are buzzing about the device's free wireless capability and odd design. Media and publishing bloggers, some responding to Newsweek's nearly 5,000-word advance look, are discussing what Kindle means for the e-books industry and reading itself. Other tech bloggers are hashing out its price tag ($399) and the notion of having to pay for blog feeds.

And everyone has an opinion, mostly negative, about how it looks. A sample description: "like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick."

Amazon customers have weighed in, too, with more than 100 reviews already online. Kindle, so far, is rated 2.5 stars out of 5.

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When a group of college students launched the document-sharing Web site Scribd.com, they envisioned it as a place where they and others could publish term papers online.

Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik's Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach's "Ave Maria." Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.

But rivaling Scribd's growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned -- from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh -- keeping the site "clean" while not alienating users is a central challenge.

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Google, RIM and Other Highfliers Lead the Retreat

The Nasdaq Composite Index sank 7% in three days and ended the week down 6.5%, as highfliers like Google and Apple reversed course midweek and dropped sharply for three straight sessions.

The Nasdaq Composite fell 68.06 points, or 2.5%, to close Friday at 2627.94. It was the Nasdaq's biggest three-day drop in more than five years, as investors fled large tech stocks that had surged in recent months.

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"The Midwest Teen Sex Show," a new video podcast that has drawn thousands of viewers, aims to teach teens about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators.

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