Last year’s holiday season wasn’t so cheery for online retailers. The devastating economic recession hit people’s wallets, forcing them to cut back and save whatever they could. Now with the markets recovering, are consumers shopping again?

Data released today by marketing optimization firm Coremetrics reveals that Black Friday, the traditional start to the holiday shopping season, turned out to be a good day (and a welcomed relief) for online retailers. Consumers spent more, ordered more, and did it all more efficiently than compared to Black Friday last year.

Stats Point to a Recovery

According to the Coremetrics data, the average online order on Black Friday jumped to $170.19, an increase of 35 percent. Last year, consumers only spent $126.04 per order on the websites Coremetrics tracks. In addition, there was an 18% increase in the average number of items purchased per order. Last year, it was 4.56 items per order, but this year it rose to 5.40 items.

Coremetrics had some interesting data on how users behaved on retail websites as well. The average bounce rate rose by nearly 40% and browsing sessions decreased by 5%, suggesting that consumers were focused less on “window shopping” and more focused on specific items and deals. If they couldn’t find them on a specific website, they left.

The biggest winners seem to be apparel and jewelry retailers. The data says that the amount spent per order for these websites increased by about 25%. Part of it is department store websites, which had a flood of new customers visiting their websites this Black Friday.

Black Friday has always been an important barometer for the health of the holiday shopping season and the economy. These numbers are reassuring and encouraging, although it’s still just data from a single day. We’ll have to see what the final numbers are for this holiday season to really know if we’re through the worst of the global economic downturn.

Tags: black friday, online retailers, shopping, stats

An app developer has found the identifier for an as-yet unreleased iPhone in its usage records, providing evidence that a new iPhone is under testing by Apple.

iPhone development company Pandav, which makes the iBart app, spotted the phone this month in stats provided to it by analytics firm Pinch Media. The usage logs for the first time showed a phone identified as “iPhone3,1″, even though the last iPhone, the 3GS, identifies itself as “iPhone2,1″.

The first mention of “iPhone3,1″ showed up in iPhone firmware in August, but this new development suggests this next generation of the phone is now in testing.

Don’t get your hopes up though: MacRumors, which broke the story, reminds us that the iPhone 3GS first showed up in usage records 8 months before launch. That suggests we might see a new iPhone in the middle of next year.

Tags: apple, iphone, trending

At this time of year every web site and its dog is offering pages and pages of “for her” or “for him” gift guides, but for the seriously challenged shopper you want the ability to input data and get a neat list of suggestions tailored exactly to who you need to buy for. After all, where have we got to in 2009 if we can’t expect the Internet to do the hard work for us?

While we’d hope most of you will be fairly sorted in terms of buying the perfect something for your nearest and dearest, it’s those once-a-year gifts for in-laws and more distant family members that can be a struggle. With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 10 of best sites and mobile apps that offer gift suggestion generators, so you can click, tick or input, and then put your feet up, sitting pretty with the knowledge a difficult decision has been made for you by a clever algorithm.

1. Gifts.com

Far and away the most fun gift finder visually, Gifts.com offers a clickable family line-up and differentiates between babies, children, teens, and college age kids, while grown-ups are categorized as young adults, 35-plus, or seniors. Those that appreciate attention to detail will be happy to note the family graphic changes as you make your selection.

After that stage the site offers around six sets of two different options, such as getting you to state whether a female recipient would prefer jewelry from a well-known designer, or a talented local artisan, to build up a profile of the person. At the end of the process the site does throw up a huge list of potential presents that you have to trawl through, but they are at least highly relevant, thanks to the clever profiling process.

2. Barnes & Noble

The gift of a good book is always welcome and Barnes & Noble has made it easy with its “Gift Suggestions” widget. One of the more simple options out there, it none-the-less returns decent results, meaning you could be a few clicks and a flash of the plastic away from sorting out Uncle Herbert’s present. The widget lets you select “kid” or “adult,” with the kid option then giving you a choice of age range, whilst hitting adult will let you select by price. There’s then a list of interests to choose from. Adult options are the usual, and kid interests encompass things like, “cars, trains, planes,” “animal and dinosaurs,” and “dolls and plush,” and returns toy, game, and DVD results in addition to books.

3. Knickers

“Be very wary when buying lingerie for your girlfriend,” is accepted wisdom in the Western world. That’s all about to change though with the launch of Knickers’ quiz that helps hapless bra buyers with simple online questions that narrows down just what kind of undies your lovely lady would like.

Getting the thong question out of the way first, the quiz offers images that help the quiz taker determine what type of bits she already has. Ten questions and a cheeky peek in her knicker drawer for sizing insight and before you know it there’ll be a classy gift box under the tree, ready to open when the children/parents are out of the room…

4. Wicked Uncle

Not wicked in the call-child-services-sense but wicked in the cool sense – this particular Internet uncle may well help you out of a present jam. It’s a UK site, so a few of the branded toy suggestions may have cultural irrelevance for users elsewhere, but for gift idea generation highly specific to age, it’s a cracker. UK users can take up the life-saving options to gift wrap, get a hand-written Christmas card, and have the present sent direct, while all users can create an account on the site to send you email reminders – not that you’ll need them for the Holidays (we’d hope), but useful to avoid missing little Jimmy’s birthday in May.

5. GiftGen

GiftGen a great gift finding service offering the rare “either gender” and even more rare “couple” category, so you’re not forced to choose to go one way or the other in terms of gender if you are buying for two. There’s also the nice option to spend “nothing” which generates ideas and links along the lines of; get a library book; visit a gallery; make a meal; issue a novelty voucher; create a mask, etc, depending on your input data. As well as a web site, GiftGen offers an embeddable widget and iPhone and BlackBerry apps.

6. Macy’s Fragrance Finder

Macy’s online Fragrance Finder is the next best thing to trawling to the cosmetics counters at your local department store. No wait, it’s better because you don’t have to actually trawl the cosmetics counters at your local department store. Armed with a little bit of knowledge about your giftee (as you have to put yourself in their shoes to answer the quiz) there’s a few simple questions to field before you’re presented with a handful of fragrances to suit. Help someone out of a fragrance rut this Holiday season by selecting a new scent based on their personality and preferences.

7. MusicPlasma

Unless you know someone really well, music is a hard gift to get right, but when you do it’s kudos all the way. If you want to try and impress a certain someone, be it a audiophile colleague, teenage nephew, or difficult dad, then the MusicPlasma site can help. Simply enter in the name of a band or artist you know the person does like and the site will bring up a visual bubble map of similar or related artists. From there you’re a few clicks away from snapping up a CD or download, and hopefully impressing giftee with your eerily accurate understanding of their complex music taste.

8. Toys R Us

Frankly the best advice we could give on buying gifts for tykes is talk to the parents to make sure said spoiled kid does not already have the gift — oh, and don’t assume because they loved Dora the Explorer last Christmas that they still do. Kids are faddy and grow up fast, something that can catch an unwary uncle/aunt off guard.

But Toys R Us can help, with a gift suggestion guide that separates girls from boys, then by age, then interests, with categories such as techie, smarty pants, as well as creative, before showing a list of hot toys that you can be sure will cause November’s salary to rapidly vanish.

9. RandomGifts

RandomGifts offers another fairly simple user interface with drop down boxes getting you to narrow down its frightening 1,000-plus product list to a more manageable size. We like it because the recipient list has a bit of thought about it, with “colleague,” “male/female friend,” and even “pet” as options. Occasion is next, then personality options, which are light-hearted including “miserable,” “bling,” and “has it all.” Suggestions range from clothes to furniture to food and drink presents.

10. A Perfect Gift, Christmas 09 Edition

Finally, we have an iPhone app for you, ideal for those “I’m standing in the middle of a mall and I’ve just realized I don’t have a clue what to buy” moments. For $1.99, “A Perfect Gift, Christmas 09 Edition” offers help with finding that perfect gift using your relationship with the person (12 options), your spend budget, and the interests of the person you’re shopping for (25 options). The app offers around 200 gift ideas in total, so it’s not as comprehensive as some of the sites we’ve mentioned here, but for some quick on-the-go inspiration it might well sort you out.

What other gift suggestion guides out there would you recommend to hapless Holiday shoppers? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Acik

Tags: gift suggestion, Gifts, holiday shopping, Holidays, List, Lists, shopping

Last week, we witnessed a shocker in our weekly Web Faceoff series, where we pit two tech companies or web apps against each other and let you choose the victor. To our surprise, Google Android easily trounced the popular iPhone by over 1800 votes.

This week, we decided to jump from mobile to carrier. On Monday, we asked you to vote in our Network Faceoff between the #1 and #2 carriers in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T. The two have been have been at war, firing off lawsuits, statements, and … Luke Wilson commercials.

Has this war over the commercial airwaves helped AT&T regain some of the luster it has lost from its inability to support iPhone web traffic? With 64% of the vote …

Verizon has emerged victorious again. The nation’s largest wireless provider was able to secure a clean victory with 1161 votes (64%) compared to AT&T’s 538 votes (30%). Only 118 of you (6%) couldn’t/didn’t decide between the two carriers and called it a tie.

Next Monday, we’ll have another edition of our Web Faceoff, so be on the lookout! In the meantime, let us know what you think of these faceoff results in the comments.

Web Faceoff: Overall Results

Week 2:
- Tumblr vs. Posterous
- WINNER: Tumblr, 1809 votes (Posterous: 1496 votes, Tie: 256 votes)

Week 3:
- Pandora vs. Last.fm
- WINNER: Last.fm, 1187 votes (Pandora: 1156 votes, Tie: 122 votes)

Week 4:
- Twitter vs. Facebook
- WINNER: Facebook, 2484 votes (Twitter: 2061 votes, Tie: 588 votes)

Week 5:
- WordPress vs. Typepad
- WINNER: WordPress, 2714 votes (Typepad: 267 votes, Tie: 357 votes)

Week 6:
- Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard
- WINNER: Windows 7, 3632 votes (Snow Leopard: 3278 votes, Tie: 121 votes)

Week 7:
- TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop
- WINNER: TweetDeck, 3294 votes (Seesmic Desktop: 1055 votes, Tie: 260 votes)

Week 8:
- Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs
- WINNER: Microsoft Office, 1365 votes (Google Docs: 994 votes, Tie: 315 votes)

Week 9:
- Apple iPhone vs. Google Android
- WINNER: Google Android, 3323 votes (Apple iPhone: 1494 votes, Tie: 228 votes)

Week 10:
- AT&T vs. Verizon
- WINNER: Verizon, 1161 votes (AT&T: 538 votes, Tie: 118 votes)

Tags: att, trending, verizon, web faceoff

Extensions are coming to Google Chrome in the near future. The current developer build supports them, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the implementation -, you don’t have to restart the browser to use an extension you’ve just installed like you do in Firefox, for example.

On the other hand, the group of brave folks using the developer build don’t have nearly as many extensions to pick from yet. Firefox has the best lineup in the browser biz, so let’s play a wishing game; here are some Firefox extensions we’d love to see pop up in Chrome’s gallery, too. Some of our favorites are already in the works, but we haven’t yet heard a peep about any of the ones on this list.

If you’ve already thought of at least one plugin without which you just can’t make the switch from Firefox to Chrome, feel free to add to our list in the comments.

1. Tree Style Tabs

The proponents of Tree Style Tabs are not the majority, but they make two excellent points. Their extension of choice sorts tabs vertically along the left side of the website you’re viewing instead of at the top of the browser. This makes more efficient use of screen real estate on widescreen displays — which means most displays nowadays.

Even more notably, Tree Style Tabs displays your tabs in a tree (Surprise!), with each tab appearing one level beneath the tab from which you opened it. If you have 50 tabs going, that visual certainly makes them easier to manage.

2. IE Tab

There are some web applications that still only work properly and with all features intact in Internet Explorer — Microsoft Sharepoint, for example. Firefox’s IE Tab extension opens a native IE tab within the Firefox interface. It looks like any other Firefox tab for the most part, but under the hood it’s all IE. This feature is supported in the spinoff browser ChromePlus, but the original still lacks it. The extension is also great for developers who want to test sites cross browser without actually having to open two separate browsers.

Hey, while you’re at it, can we have a Firefox Tab too?

3. TwitterBar

It’s neat that Chrome will do Google searches from its address bar, but with Firefox’s TwitterBar you can type and send tweets there too. Jumping over to TweetDeck or your Twitter.com tab would use up two or three more clicks or key presses. You’ll hear no complaints here if you accidentally tweet “http://www.mashable.com” but be warned that it’s a possibility with this extension installed.

4. ScribeFire

You can use ScribeFire to write blog posts and publish them to WordPress, Movable Type, and a number of other platforms without browsing away from the site you’re blogging about. It pops up at the bottom of your Firefox window, and you can drag items from the site in front of you to the body of your post.

Chrome’s speed and stability make it attractive to bloggers, so ScribeFire or something like it would be right at home.

5. StumbleUpon

Delicious was among the first extensions to make its way to Chrome, and we like it, but we’re still hoping for an easy StumbleUpon solution to add to our social bookmarking options. Admittedly, there is a functional web-based workaround out there for Chrome, but it demands some URL tweaking, so it doesn’t match the Firefox extension’s ease of use by a longshot. That’s why we want a legit Chrome extension.

6. FaviconizeTab

This extension adds an option to reduce tabs to the size of a favicon (the tiny website icons seen in the address bar), removing the accompanying title text. It’s useful in the eternal battle to keep as many tabs visible as possible. You probably don’t need all that text; for example, Twitter and Facebook tabs should be recognizable by their iconic (pun only sort of intended) lower-case “t” and “f” logos, respectively. Chrome’s tabs are already more conservative with pixels than Firefox’s tabs are, but every little bit helps.

7. AutoCopy

AutoCopy sends text to the clipboard as soon as you select it, no keyboard shortcut necessary. You’ll never need to hit Control or Command + C to copy text, and if you have an application like CopyPaste Pro you can recover any clipboard items you might accidentally replace.

Many Linux distributions with out-of-the-now-proverbial-box clipboard history functionality ditched Control + C ages ago, and so have many Firefox users thanks to this extension. Chrome should be next.

8. LeechBlock

Never let it be said that Chrome users are not as productive as Firefox users. LeechBlock helps you manage your time with up to six groups of websites by blocking them when you know you shouldn’t be visiting them. You can limit your time with each group to specific hours of the day — like only being able to visit Facebook after you clock out of work at 5:00 PM — or you can tell the plugin to only let you access certain sites for so many minutes out of each hour.

9. Taboo

The self-described cure for “tabitis,” Taboo adds a button to save tabs for later (scrollbar location, form data, and all) instead of leaving them open to eat up memory and clutter the top of your browser. It also takes a snapshot of each saved tab so you can browse thumbnails when you’re ready to revisit the stuff you didn’t have the time to finish before. The usefulness of this extension is platform-agnostic, so the extension should be too. Let’s hope we see a Chrome clone soon.

10. Stylish

Google has run ads promoting Chrome’s many aesthetic themes, but with Stylish you can re-theme not just your browser but each website you visit.

It’s similar in principle to Greasemonkey; you download geek-made tweaks to the CSS of existing websites, and the plugin interprets those tweaks and displays the sites differently as a result. We’ve already pointed out some of the best examples of what this extension can do for Firefox users, and we’d love to see it on Chrome in the near future.

What other Firefox extensions would you love to see on Chrome? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: chrome, extensions, Firefox, List, Lists

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