Web, Internet, Social Media, Technology

Missed out on the Black Friday discounts? Never fear, Cyber Monday is here! Even though more and more online retailers are starting to get in on the Black Friday sales bonanza, the tradition of Cyber Monday — where we shop online from work and save big — continues to flourish.

We scoured through the deals and collected five can’t-miss favorites for this savings happy work day. From Blu-ray players to Netbooks and designer-jeans to HDTVs, there are deals to be had across the board.

LG-BD270 Blu-ray Player $98 — Newegg.com has the LG-BD270 BLu-ray player for just $98. This player doesn’t do BD-Live or playback Netflix content like some of its more expensive siblings, but it’s one of the best under $100 Blu-ray players we’ve seen.

Samsung 32″ HDTV $400 — Amazon.com has the Samsung LN3A450 720p HDTV for just $400. With free shipping, this is a great bargain. The TV has 3 HDMI inputs and great picture quality. If you need an HDTV with a built-in tuner, check out the Samsung LN32B460, it’s the 2009 model of this TV but with a built-in tuner. It’s $484.99.

$250 Asus Eee PC — Best Buy has the Asus Eee 1005HAB Netbook for just $249.99. With free shipping, that’s one of the best deals going. The 10.1″ LED backlit netbook has pretty standard specs, 1 GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, but this netbook includes Wireless-N and comes with Windows XP Home SP 3.

Acer Aspire One Netbook $279.99 — If the Asus doesn’t strike your fancy, Buy.com has an Acer Aspire One Ultra Thin for $279.99. The specs are practically identical to the Asus, although Acer tends to be a bit more accessible if you want to do any kind of upgrades in the future.

Major Clothing Sales — If you’re into being geek chic (or just want to buy gifts for your significant other), be sure to check the 30% off sales at both Armani Exchange and Lucky Brand Jeans. Lucky offers 30% off the entire site today, with free shipping! A|X has 30% off all order over $150 and free shipping.

What are your favorite Cyber Monday deals so far?

Tags: cyber monday, sales

Amazon killed their brick and mortar competition when it came to Black Friday Twitter buzz, and when all was said and done they were also the most visited website on Black Friday as well.

The deals, however, are just getting started as today kicks off Amazon’s Cyber Monday discount extravaganza. So, while you can poke around their website and find deeply discounted products, we think you’ll be best served by paying extra close attention to their @AmazonDeals Twitter account.

Savvy Twitter users have noticed that as of early this morning AmazonDeals, which is officially managed by the online retailer, started posting Cyber Monday Deal Alerts in addition to their ongoing Lightning Deals. So far deals include Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for $29.99, an Archos Tablet for $199.99, and The Office: Season Four for $19.49. Definitely keep your eyes on this hot Twitter account today.

Thanks to Steve Eisenberg [@northlight] for the heads up. If you have any tips on Twitter accounts to follow today, we’d love for you to share them in the comments.

Tags: amazon, cyber monday

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen lots of Twitter applications push out upgrades in an effort to keep pace with Twitter’s newest capabilities, like native retweets, geolocation, and Twitter Lists.

Noticeably absent from the onslaught has been TweetDeck, which is still the most popular Twitter client on the desktop. Today, TweetDeck has answered big time, introducing support for all of these features and more.

TweetDeck has the full details on their blog, but here’s the overview:

TweetDeck’s Groups are going to turn into Twitter Lists. You can export your current Groups into Lists.

TweetDeck supports both the new and old retweet style. From their post: “Each time you retweet you can choose to “Retweet now” using the new-style, or “Edit then Retweet” which will give you an old-style retweet.”

TweetDeck’s LinkedIn integration is live.

TweetDeck’s integrated geolocation. From their post: “geo-coded tweets are identified by a red pin at the bottom of the tweet. Clicking on this pin will reveal an inline map showing the location that the tweet was sent from.”

TweetDeck demos the new features in the video below:

We’ll have more on the TweetDeck upgrades in a bit, but for now, download the latest and let us know what you think in the comments.

Tags: tweetdeck, twitter

One of the most anticipated films of the year is James Cameron’s “Avatar.” Last week, we wrote about the film’s interactive trailer (awesome) and now that the release date is just a few weeks away, Fox has really started to amp up the publicity campaign, including new social media outreach.

Variety reports that Fox is teaming up with MTV.com and Facebook to bring a live webcast roundtable of the film to fans on Thursday, December 3 and 3 PM ET.

Although live webcasts are becoming an increasingly common way for movie studios to promote themselves using social media (see “This Is It” and “New Moon”), the MTV/Facebook webcast is going to be a little bit different.

Director James Cameron, producer Jon Landau, and stars Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington will be interviewed by MTV News’ managing editor Josh Horowitz about the film and the experience making the nearly $500 million sci-fi epic. However, fans can start submitting their own questions to the cast and crew now via the official Avatar Facebook Page.

Although having fans send in questions — whether it’s through YouTube or Facebook or something else — isn’t exactly new, we rarely see such high profile films (and especially directors of high profile films) interacting with social media and taking part in live webcasts. The webcast will last 30 minutes and portions of it will then become part of an upcoming MTV “Behind the Scenes” special that airs on December 16. Avatar comes to theaters worldwide on December 18, 2009.

What do you think of how movie marketing is adapting to the age of social media?

Tags: avatar, facebook, Movies, mtv.com

People lose their inhibitions behind the anonymity of the Internet? No way! While this will come as a shock to no one that’s spent much time on social media sites and blogs, new stats published today by eMarketer demonstrate just how much of an impact that the Web is having on people speaking their mind.

According to the research, originally conducted by by Euro RSCG Worldwide, about 31% of adults feel empowered to do something they’ve been wanting to do thanks to social media, while 20% have used the medium to lash out at companies and brands they feel wronged by. The Internet is also a big help when it comes to trying to meet new people.

Interestingly, social media seems to have more of an impact on men’s inhibitions than women’s. As you can see in the chart from eMarketer, men appear to do more with the anonymity that social media and the Web provide:

How as the Internet changed your behaviors and inhibitions? Share your own experience in the comments.

[img via markhillary on flickr]

Tags: social media

Even though November is not over yet – today is Cyber Monday, typically a great day for gadget sales – Amazon has announced that it was the best sales month ever for Kindle.

We can’t say how much of this can be attributed to the recent international launch of Kindle, but it definitely helped – along with the price cuts. Despite the competition, Kindle is certainly doing great, being the most wished for, the most gifted, and number one bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon.

“Kindle is a great gift for anyone who loves to read and it’s flying off the shelves faster than any other product Amazon sells,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “We’re seeing lots of people buying from one to a handful of Kindles as gifts for friends or family, as well as many businesses and other organizations buying Kindles in large quantities for their employees or customers.”

Tags: amazon, Kindle

According to Reuters, not only is Nokia not abandoning Symbian as its smartphone platform of choice, but the Finnish mobile giant plans only one (1!) Linux-based device for the entire next year.

Nokia refused to officially confirm this information, which comes from a “source with direct knowledge of Nokia’s product roadmap,” saying that they “remain firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice.”

Personally, I’m not sure whether this is good or bad news. I’ve had the chance to try out the only Maemo-based device currently on offer, the Nokia N900, and it left me disappointed. Not in the terms of what it can do, mind you, as it’s packing some powerful hardware; but the UI and the touchscreen responsiveness if you try to use your fingers (there’s a stylus included, too) need to undergo a lot of improving to be anywhere near the iPhone-levels of usability and fluidity.

On the other hand, Symbian as a smartphone platform feels old and unable to compete with the iPhone OS, Android and Palm’s webOS, and Nokia can definitely benefit from starting over with a new OS. Let’s just hope that one Linux-based device that gets released in 2010 will be a game changer.

Tags: Linux, Maemo, Nokia

We’ve written on numerous occasions about Apple’s app approval policy, which has so far been inconsistent, often unfair and sometimes just plain strange.

If you need more proof that many developers are unhappy with the way Apple is treating them, check out a new site called Apple Rejected Me, where everyone can come and vent about their (unjustly) rejected iPhone app.

Of course, the entries on the site being anonymous doesn’t exactly make it a good source of reliable information; furthermore, most of the entries are jokes. From the site:

“I made a time machine app, but apparently Flux_Capacitor is a private API. ARM”

“I made an app that caused AT&T to drop a call randomly based on a 50/50 chance. Because of duplicate functionality, ARM.”

“I tried to “Think Different” but ARM.”

However, the sheer fact that such a site exists shows that something is wrong in Apple’s app approval policy, and that it needs to be fixed, fast.

Tags: apple, applications, iphone

While Twitter may have taken second place in Bing’s 10 most searched topics of 2009, we’ve now learned that it has become top dog in something far bigger: the entire English language.

The Global Language Monitor, which tracks language trends, has once again compiled and released its yearly list of the most popular words and phrases within the English language. In 2008, the #1 most popular word was “change” (referring to the mantra of the top name of 2008, Barack Obama). However, Obama has been supplanted this year by the 140 character sensation that is Twitter.

GLM’s list of top words and phrases for 2009 isn’t surprising, once you factor out words like “the” out of the equation. Twitter’s constant media attention and mainstream ascent has vaulted it into the English lexicon, so much so that it beat out the words Obama (#2), H1N1 (#3), Stimulus (#4), and Vampire (#5). The top phrase of 2009 however was “King of Pop,” referring to the late Michael Jackson. This mirrors Bing’s top 10 searched topics. However, Barack Obama was once again the top name of 2009, just beating out Michael Jackson.

With Twitter declared English’s most popular word and unfriend taking the title of Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year, what else does social media have to conquer? Please tell us in the comments, because we’re stumped.

Tags: english, trending, twitter

It isn’t even December yet, but Microsoft’s Bing search engine is already announcing its top ten most searched topics of 2009, as well as the two celebrities that were binged more than actress Megan Fox.

The new Microsoft “decision engine” has only been in service since June, but Bing has apparently analyzed billions of search queries in order to create a list of the ten most searched topics of the year, Bing’s version of “trending topics.” Six of the top ten searches referred to specific individuals while only one search term referred to a website or company.

As you’ve probably guessed, we’re talking about Twitter, whose rapid ascent into the mainstream garnered it the honor of being the #2 most searched topic on Bing.

So who or what was #1? Here are the top ten Bing searches of 2009, in reverse order:

The Top 10

10. Jaycee Dugard (kidnapped in 1991 and finally found in August of this year, the story was national news)

9. Billy Mays (famous pitchman who passed away in June)

8. Jon and Kate Gosselin (former stars of Jon and Kate Plus 8, the public destruction of their marriage was a big topic of interest)

7. Cash for Clunkers (a U.S. government program to replace less fuel efficient vehicles with newer, more fuel-economic cars)

6. Patrick Swayze (famous actor who passed away in September)

5. Farrah Fawcett (famous actress and pop culture icon who passed away in June)

4. Stock Market

3. Swine Flu

2. Twitter

And the number one searched term of 2009:

1. Michael Jackson

Social Media Has Captured the Public’s Attention

It’s not a shocker that any of these topics made the top ten Bing searches of 2009. There was an outpouring of interest in each and every one of these people or things. Still, Twitter being more searched than the stock market, Swine Flu, and every major public icon except Michael Jackson is an impressive feat that speaks to the mainstream reach Twitter now enjoys.

Bing also decided to release the top three most search living celebrities. While the inclusion of Transformers actress Megan Fox (#3) and Twilight actor Robert Pattinson (#2) didn’t surprise us, we were a bit shocked to find that celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was the most searched living celebrity on Bing in 2009. No matter what you think of Perez, he proves that blogs have acquired incredible reach and captured the attention of the world.

What do you think of Bing’s top ten searches of 2009? Does anything about this list surprise you? Are you shocked something didn’t make the list? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: bing, microsoft, Search