Archive for the ‘holiday shopping’ Category
Happy Thanksgiving Black Friday
Well, it’s that time of year here in the U.S.
Time for giving thanks…briefly…before the real fun begins, shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and all points in between.
I’m only partially joking. For many retailers, this several day period can also be a time for giving thanks and making up for other soft periods throughout the year.
The good news, consumer confidence is high, the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and the Walmarts and Targets and Amazons and Apples and all the other retailers are ready to rock n roll for the full stop start of this year’s holiday shopping season.
My predictions for this year: I’ve learned not to get too far out over my skis on predictions, but I will say I believe mobile shopping (via tablets and smartphones) will continue to grow, more omnichannel opportunities will be taken advantage of so consumers don’t have to fight their way through crowded stores (i.e., buy online only to pick up at the store later), and based on my own personal experience these past few days, Roku and Amazon Fire streaming devices are in high demand.
As for my own shopping proclivities, I don’t have anything tech-related that’s trying to burn a hole in my pocket. I bought a used iPhone 7 Plus off Gazelle earlier this year, and a Google Pixelbook earlier in the year which I really, really like (yes, you can consider that an endorsement). And I’ve had my Air Pods for over a year now, and don’t know how I lived without them (another endorsement).
But if YOU are looking for some help with the holiday shopping onslaught, particularly as it relates to tech, I found the Wall Street Journal “Best Tech Gifts 2018” list helpful. I’ve also become a big fan of The New York Times Wirecutter reviews, and they, too, have a helpful shopping list for electronics and a whole host of other retail categories.
But for today, let us give thanks. For good friends, for family, for great food and abundance, and for each other. Sure, all this stuff can bring some joy to our lives, and I’m also thankful for the benefits technology provides.
Yet as we’ve surely witnessed over the past few years, any technology — including digital technology and social media — can be used for both good and ill.
On this day, the day of giving thanks, I’m going to choose to celebrate the good of those technologies and be thankful for how they keep me closer to my friends and family and enrich my life and theirs.
For despite all the negativity and division, we should step back and realize we live in amazing and wondrous times, with great possibilities and promise ahead, technologically and otherwise.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. And try not to stampede your fellow shoppers at the Walmart this year!
Droning On A Bad Santa
Trying to get ready for the holidays?
You’re not the only ones.
United Parcel Service and FedEx Corp. are having a hard time keeping up with holiday shipping volumes that have “blown past expectations,” writes The Wall Street Journal. And the delayed delivery of millions of orders could rapidly become the Cyber Grinch that stole this Christmas.
Meanwhile, back at the Santa’s workshop located in Cambridge, U.K., Amazon has apparently made its first customer delivery by drone. It’s cargo? Some popcorn and — of course — a Fire TV video-streaming device.
Also according to the Journal, the drone made the trip in about 13 minutes, well ahead of the promised 30 minute windows for its “Prime Air” drone delivery service.
“But can it keep the pizza warm for that duration?” we ask.
If you’re tired of waiting for the drones to arrive, perhaps you’d like to learn more about our coming machine overlords?
The New York Times Magazine goes deep and long on the “Google Brain,” and the advances the company has made with its neural network capabilities for human language translation.
Before you get too excited about all these machines doing all this learning, however, you might want to take a second look at your vendor’s privacy policy.
As an example, Evernote is slated to announce a new policy on January 23, writes TechCrunch, one that is expected to “let its machine learning algorithms crunch your data” and also “let some of its employees read your notes so it can ensure that the machine learning is functioning properly.”
But worry not, Evernote responds, they’ve got someone watching the watchers: “Evernote claims that only a limited number of employees who have undergone background checks will be able to access user data and that users can encrypt notes they consider sensitive to prevent employees from reading them.”
How reassuring! If only I had my smart Amazon drone that I could hire out to keep an eye out on all those Evernote monitors?!!!
Cyber Monday: Online Shopping Reaches An All-Time High
For this year’s “Cyber Monday,” the average order value was $185.12 and shopping peaked at 11:25 EST. Department store sales online were up 43.1% over 2011.
Greetings. I’m back from celebrating my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary on the high seas of the Gulf of Mexico.
Alas, due to my shipbound nature, I wasn’t able to participate in the annual cyber holiday shopping extravaganza. Internet access on the high seas is both expensive and slow, and hey, this was a semi vacation for me, so being online would have been too much like work.
I did make some local economic contributions in port, in both Progreso and Cozumel, by shopping with the local vendors and in the duty free shops, so I can come out of the initial holiday shopping festivities without much guilt.
But if you missed the press coverage earlier in the week, I did want to share results from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative and an excellent view into the behaviors and trends of holiday cyber shoppers.
The headline, of course, was the size of the market, with holiday shoppers turning the 2012 “Cyber Monday” into the biggest spending day ever, with growth coming in at 30.3 percent over the same period last year.
With an increase in online sales across multiple channels, the digital consumer took center stage.
Retailers, marketing departments and chief marketing officers (CMO) delivered a consistent customer experience across multiple channels from mobile devices, to online and to the show floor leading to the record shopping day.
Some of the other trends that were revealed:
- Shopping Peaks at 11:25am EST: Consumers flocked online, with shopping momentum hitting its highest peak at 11:25am EST. As in 2011, consumer shopping also maintained strong momentum after commuting hours on both the east and west coast.
- Mobile Shopping and Mobile Traffic Increase: On Cyber Monday more than 18 percent of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, an increase of more than 70 percent over 2011. Mobile sales reached close to 13 percent, an increase of more than 96 percent over 2011.
- The iPad Factor: The iPad continued to generate more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, driving more than 7 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 6.9 percent and Android 4.5 percent. The iPad also continued to dominate tablet traffic reaching a holiday high of 90.5 percent. Amazon Kindle leapt into second at 2.6 percent followed by the Samsung Galaxy at 2 percent and the Barnes and Noble Nook at 0.6 percent.
- Multiscreen Shopping: Consumers shopped in store, online and on mobile devices simultaneously to get the best bargains. Overall 58.1 percent of consumers used smartphones compared to 41.9 percent who used tablets to surf for bargains on Cyber Monday.
- The Savvy Shopper: While consumers continued to spend more, they once again shopped with greater frequency to take advantage of retailer deals as well as free shipping. This led to a drop in average order value by 6.6 percent to $185.12. However, the average number of items per order increased 14.1 percent to 8.34 compared to Black Friday.
- Social Sales: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube generated 0.41 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday, a decrease of more than 26 percent from 2011.
Sales on mobile devices accounted for 12.9% of all Cyber Monday sales this year, with the iPad continuing to lead the tablet shopping pack at 90.5 percent share.
Here’s what my colleage Jay Henderson, strategy director for IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, had to say about this year’s Cyber Monday:
“Cyber Monday was not only the pinnacle of the Thanksgiving shopping weekend but when the cash register closed it officially became the biggest online shopping day ever. Retailers that adopted a smarter marketing approach to commerce were able to adjust to the shifting shopping habits of their customers, whether in-store, online or via their mobile device of choice, and fully benefit from this day and the entire holiday weekend.”
Cyber Monday sales growth was led by several industries which include:
- Department stores continued to offer compelling deals and promotions that drove sales to grow by 43.1 percent over Cyber Monday 2011.
- Health and Beauty sales increased 25.1 percent year over year with consumers once again choosing to pamper themselves this holiday.
- Home goods maintained its momentum this year, reporting a 26.8 percent increase in sales from Cyber Monday 2011.
- Apparel sales were also strong this holiday with Cyber Monday numbers showing an increase of 25.3 percent over 2011.
These trends were based on findings from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, the industry’s only cloud-based Web analytics platform that tracks more than a million e-commerce transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers nationwide.
Analysis of public social media content came from the IBM Social Sentiment Index, an advanced analytics and natural language processing tool that analyzes large volumes of social media data to assess public opinions.
With this data IBM helps chief marketing officers (CMOs) better understand and respond to the needs of each individual customer, improving sourcing, inventory management, marketing, sales and services programs.
So What Does It All Mean?
First of all, e-commerce is alive and well, with the 30+ percent increase in online sales suggesting more people than ever are not only comfortable with e-commerce, they’re confident in the economy and willing to open up their pocketbooks, even as they aggressively looked for deals online and off.
The mobile juggernaut continues, with Apple enjoying the most notable e-shopping platform in the form of the iPad, but retailers have to continue to strive for synergy between the online and brick-and-mortar experience, as customers are still coming into stores, but only once they’ve first done research via their PCs or mobile devices. We are definitely in an age of the Informed Consumer.
Though the social referrals number may seem somewhat low, and despite the decrease in social referrals year over year, Facebook and other platforms continue to play a vital and instrumental role in providing word-of-mouth recommendations about products and services. Retailers ignore those social presences at their peril.
Apparel shopping online has moved increasingly into the mainstream, with more customers than ever comfortable with the idea of buying clothing and other apparel accessories “sight unseen.”
And finally, and probably most importantly for retailers trying to understand consumer behavior in the grander scheme of things — and as the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark itself observes — there’s a lot to be learned in the aggregate analysis of all these transactions.
Big data is here, and it looks as though it’s here to stay, particularly in the retail industry.
Whether it’s trying to better understanding “day parts” (the time of day people were most active shopping online), or the device footprint (Have you created an enhanced experience for all those millions of iPad shoppers??), sifting through and analyzing all this cyber shopping data presents both challenge and opportunity, and those retail clients who synthesize, then optimize, their online shopping experiences based on these changing behaviors will be the ultimate holiday shopping season victors.
(Not) Home For The Holidays
I’m pretty happy I don’t have to travel today. I’m going to wait until tomorrow, when all the turkeys have gotten off the road.
Of course, watch out for Wal-Mart and other big retail parking lots. The consternation about having to work on Thanksgiving is pervasive, and I wouldn’t want to see any customers attempt to play Frogger in those big parking lots. It’s dangerous enough just trying to get through the doors and into the store!
As always, my wise counsel is to shop from the comfort of your couch.
Walt Mossberg, the ever-dependable tech journalist with The Wall Street Journal, has written an article about “Making Sense of All the New Laptop Flavors.”
He goes on about the various flavors of Windows 8 PCs and tablets, before concluding that the “least costly Mac laptop” is the 11-inch MacBook Air, for $999.
I bought one just about a year ago, and I maintain it’s still the best, fastest, lightest, most dependable computer I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned plenty.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have splurged for more SSD, but that’s it.
If you want to make sure your personal shopping engine is fully revved before Black Friday, Gizmodo’s providing its Ultimate Black Friday guide for geeks, grouping deals by category, and offering a list of when every retailer is slated to be open on Black Friday, just in case you prefer shopping in a mosh pit.
As for an update on my new Apple Mini-me “mini,” otherwise known as the 5th generation iPod touch, I can only say I have no buyer’s remorse, even now after having seen the iPad mini in the flesh.
The retina screen and the small form factor on the newest touch are working perfectly for me thus far. I bought a new “Need for Speed” racing game just to be able to check out the graphics in full force, and the retina screen is simply stunning (as are movies and Netflix streams). I’ve always read what a great gaming platform the touch is, but playing that racing game has cemented it.
Over the next several days, if you want to keep pace with IBM’s annual holiday campaign “Digital Analytics” benchmark, just follow IBM’s e-shopping analytics guru, @jay_henderson (a fellow Texan!).
Jay and his team will be working and posting reports throughout the weekend and into next week to keep us all informed how the holiday e-retail season is going. Jay’s already indicated we can expect to see growing numbers on the mobile and tablet shopping footprint this year. You can read Jay’s holiday set up piece here.
That said, don’t ignore those retail emails piling up in your in-box — email continues to be the e-retail Trojan Horse, with lots of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals already being distributed. From Amazon to Golfsmith, I’ve received a number of holiday email deals, and it’s all I can do to keep my credit card filed away in my anti-scanning wallet!
If you’re looking for gainful employment this pre-Thanksgiving Wednesday, you might want to try somewhere other than LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Website had a “service unavailable” message this morning, and TechCrunch has been reporting a LinkedIn site outage.
As for me, I’ll be (mostly) disappearing from the cyber maze over the course of the next week. It’s my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, and I’m taking them on a cruise in the Caribbean to celebrate. I may send a post or two via email if I’m so inspired, but mostly I’ll be spending some quality time with my parents and some extended family, and gazing out at the Gulf of Mexico in a pina colada-induced haze (virgin pina coladas, of course).
For all of my readers here in the United States, I wish you a very happy and restful holiday weekend. For those of you outside the U.S., enjoy the email and conference call silence from your U.S. colleagues…it won’t last long!
Holiday Shopping Chatter
If you’re interested in gaining some insights into the upcoming holiday retail madness, you need to mark your calendar.
This coming Monday, November 19th, the IBM Smarter Commerce team, in partnership with Direct Marketing News, will host a Twitter chat.
Featuring IBM’s holiday retail analytics prognosticator, Jay Henderson, IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management Global Strategy Program Director, and Richard Feinberg, Purdue University’s Professor of Consumer Sciences and Retailing, the Twitter Chat will be held Monday from 1:00-2:00 PM EST via the #smartershopping hash tag.
Allison Schiff, web editor for Direct Marketing news, will moderate from the @DMNews handle.
The topic? Key retail holiday trends, ranging from online sales to mobile and social trends, which Jay has already predicted will become even more dominant this holiday shopping season.
No need to line up outside your Apple store, or navigate the mobs at your local Wal-Mart.
Just open up your favorite Twitter client and follow the online retail mob into the far reaches of all things holiday shopping.
Jay’s already pulled out and dusted off his holiday shopping crystal ball in a post for the IBM “Building a Smarter Planet” blog.
In it, Jay posed some key questions we might just expect to get some answers for in the coming chat, such as whether or not mobile shoppers will continue take the lead this holiday season, and whether or not they’ll expand their use of social media.
Jay also mentioned that the latest IBM Retail Online Index for Q3 showed renewed growth with overall online sales increasing by 3.1 percent over the second quarter.
But to keep those numbers growing, Jay writes that consumers will expect personalized shopping and tailored promotions this holiday season, and those retailers “who can deliver an easy, integrated and personalized shopping experience both in-store and online” will be the ones who cash in on holiday cheer this year.
Follow the conversation Monday starting at 1:00 PM EST at #smartershopping
As a prelude, check out my interview with Jay at IBM’s recent Smarter Commerce Summit in Orlando, Florida, where Jay explained how marketing is in chaos and some of the course corrections retailers can make to adapt to this rapidly-changing consumer-centric world.
Showrooming With Santa
ON the topic of Smarter Commerce, I’ve seen two stories today….count ’em, TWO…about the intent for numerous retailers promising to match online retail prices at brick-n-mortar stores during the coming holiday season.
Found that Tickle Me Elmo for ten whole cents cheaper at Amazon???…just step right on up the Target cash register, because the Price is Right!
One of the stories was in The Wall Street Journal, and claimed that over the past few days, Best Buy and Target both had said they would match the prices offered by the online sites of some rivals, including Wal-Mart and Amazon.
This in an effort to combat “showrooming” (bet you didn’t even know there was such a word!), whereby shoppers checking products in stores then buy them on competitor’s websites, presumably for lower prices.
But, as the story goes on to observe, there soon could be trouble at the register, as these new policies require shoppers to both ask for and PROVE the existence of lowered prices.
“Mommy, Mommy, I just found the latest Furby on Amazon.com for a whole fifty cents less!”
Now, excuse Mommy while she fumbles around in her purse for her smartphone! Oh, never mind that line of people waiting around the store to pay full price for their Furbys!
You get the picture.
According to the Journal story, Best Buy’s going to go them one better, and provide their sales reps some discretion — if the SKU’s price is too low, you don’t get to go!…out the store with your Furby, that is.
All the more reason, I say, to stay in this holiday season, tablet or laptop in hand, with a nice warm cup of Egg Nog, and do ALL your holiday shopping from the comfort of your own home!
Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Orlando: IBM’s Jay Henderson On The IBM Holiday Benchmark Online Shopping Analysis
Jay leads product strategy within IBM’s Cross-Channel Marketing team. His team is responsible for market analysis, customer insight, and industry marketing functions. He came to IBM through its acquisition of Unica, and has over fifteen years’experience in multi-channel marketing and customer analytics. Previously, he served in various marketing roles at predictive analytics leader SPSS (also part of IBM), web analytics pioneer NetGenesis, and management consulting firm Cambridge Technology Group. Jay holds degrees from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Sorbonne (Paris IV).
Jay Henderson has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt when it comes to marketing analytics…one he probably bought online.
Currently the strategy program director at IBM Cross-Channel Marketing, Jay’s team is responsible for market analysis, customer insight, and industry marketing functions, and I had the privilege of sitting down with Jay last week at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit to talk many things analytics.
Jay’s heritage pre-dates his tenure at IBM, joining Big Blue through its acquisition of Unica.
Jay has over fifteen years’ experience in multi-channel marketing and customer analytics, and prior to joining Unica, he ran marketing for text mining pioneer ClearForest, the technology from which was later acquired by Thomson Reuters.
Jay’s most recent claim to fame has been the preparation of the IBM “Holiday Benchmark,” a near real-time analysis of the e-commerce retail activity during the annual holiday shopping season.
If you want the inside skinny on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other key shopping inflection points, the IBM Holiday Benchmark provides some excellent benchmark statistics. During our chat, Jay also made some news when he revealed that IBM is also going to be issuing soon some new reports, including a “back to school” retail analysis.
So, wanna know about major trends in the e-commerce realm? Watch the interview with Jay and find out!
Santa’s E-Commerce Play
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!
IBM Benchmark data revealed that online shopping jumped 16.4 percent on Christmas Day, compared to last year, and the dollar amount of those purchases that were made using mobile devices leaped 172.9 percent!
And apparently, it was.
I didn’t try to track Santa via Santa Norad, but apparently Santa didn’t need nearly the help he might have.
According to some more IBM Benchmark e-commerce tracking numbers from the holiday shopping season, lots of folks were ready for more virtual commerce even on Christmas Day.
I count myself among the guilty.
The IBM data discovered that online shopping jumped 16.4 percent on Christmas Day, compared to last year, and the dollar amount of those purchases that were made using mobile devices leaped 172.9 percent.
IBM tracks shopping at more than 500 websites (other than Amazon.com, which is where *I* was shopping!).
It also found a huge increase in the number of shoppers making their purchases via iPhones, iPads and Android-powered mobile devices. In fact, nearly 7 percent of all online purchases were made using iPads, just 18 months after the tablet computers were released by Apple Inc..
The online shopping increase continued on Monday. As of 3 p.m. Eastern time, shopping was up 10 percent over Dec. 26, 2010, and the expectation was that the pace of buying would increase as the day wore on and consumers clicked on sales at various retailers.
The data did not show what portion of purchases was made using gift cards, which typically see a big bump just after holidays as folks start cashing those gift cards in and make purchases (online and off).
Speaking of online gifts, IBM has been making some pretty heavy duty investments in Santa’s e-commerce play, what we’re calling “smarter commerce.” Between the numerous acquisitions and continued organic investment, IBM’s smarter commerce effort recognizes that the final sale is just one aspect of the overall commerce experience.
Last year, IBM researchers surveyed more than 500 economists worldwide and estimated that our planet’s system of systems carries inefficiencies totaling nearly $15 trillion, or 28 percent of worldwide GDP.
Much of this waste is found in our systems of commerce — in inventory backlogs, failed product launches, wasted materials and ineffective marketing campaigns.
Today’s customers have no patience for this kind of waste. They will not remain loyal to products or brands while the cost of inefficiency is passed along to the buyer. And it will not take them long to find the same product or service from a competitor.
These customers are empowered by technology, transparency, and an abundance of information. They expect to engage with companies when and how they want, through physical, digital and mobile means.
They want a consistent experience across all channels. They compare notes. And they can champion a brand or sully a reputation with the click of a mouse.
Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the retail industry, where companies are rapidly adapting to this new reality, integrating their marketing efforts and using analytics to better understand their new, more fickle customers.
But retail is only the beginning. It is merely the front line of a customer revolution that will eventually reshape the entire value chain, from the way raw materials are sourced to the way they are manufactured, distributed and serviced.
Keeping up with today’s customer will take more than an email marketing campaign and a Facebook page.
It’s going to take a better system of doing business. It’s going to take smarter commerce.
Just as with traditional commerce, the customer is at the center of all operations, and smarter commerce turns customer insight into action, enabling new business processes that help companies buy, market, sell and service their products and services and, in the process, make for happier customers.
Smarter commerce reaches deep within the businessto-business supply chain, integrating business partners, suppliers, and vendors, enabling the entire value chain to anticipate customer needs, not react to them.
And it identifies and addresses the unsustainable inefficiencies of our global systems of commerce.
Visit here if you’d like to learn more about IBM’s smarter commerce strategy.
In the meantime, we’ll be sure to keep an eye on Santa’s post Christmas holiday sales!
Turbo’s Crazy Christmas Gifts
Now that things are slowing down a bit here in IBM-land, but recognizing there are still a few shopping days left before Christmas, I thought it might be constructive for you, and psychologically assuaging to me, for me to sit down and make a list for Santa.
You know, a kind of “Technology Gifts For The Geek Who Already Has (Almost) Everything.”
In so doing, I decided to identify those gadgets, thingamabobs, widgets, and other tech wizardry that, were I not to have to worry about price constraints, would inevitably wind their way into my gadget portfolio.
Which, being nicknamed “Turbo,” I can assure you, is already vast and expansive. I could also open a small personal technology history museum with devices gathering dust in my various closets, but hey, this is about the future, not the past! Stop dwelling on dollars spent previously in the great expense of being an early adopter and look into the holiday electronics abyss for the next new thing!
1) Video glasses. I’m not yet sold on which brand or SKU, as there’s still some controversy, it seems, in the area of video glasses, as to whether they’re worth the investment or not.
iTV Googles new WideViewXL model provides a 72" virtual display, so while all the other suckers in coach are watching that runty TV, you're back in the exit row watching "Avatar" in full steroscopical, HD bliss -- and looking like the geek you truly are while you're watching it!
But, remembering this is a wish list of stuff I don’t necessarily need but would like to have, and assuming the moolah’s not coming from my pocket, it seems to me no self-respecting technology geek in the 2010s should be without a good pair of video glasses so that I can ignore people on airplanes while I watch the latest version of “Jackass” in 3D or play “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” all up close and personal.
And I mean REALLY up close. So for now, I’m going with the ITG-WideView XL Edition. Amazon cost: $369.99
2) Kindle Fire. Let’s face it: I don’t need anything else to read. I subscribe to more print magazines than I care to admit to (yes, me, “Dr. Digital,” still traffics in parchment), I have an iPad with more books I’ve downloaded than I can read, and my MacBook Air serves in a pinch for watching content on the road as well.
But hey, you can’t ignore how big that frickin’ Amazon Cloud is, and there’s a reason they’re selling the Fire for a mere $199 (and apparently at a loss).
What they lose in volume they expect to make up in razor blade margins — content razor blades, I mean to say. And with 19 million movies, TV shows, magazines, and books, with the Kindle Fire, the flames won’t go out in Amazon’s content cloud anytime soon! Amazon cost: $199
According to Panasonic "the VIERA ST Series Full HD 3D Plasmas create an all new viewing experience by putting you inside the action and creating a new world of TV viewing realism." The really cool fish are sold separately.
3) An Internet-Ready TV. It’s pretty obvious to me where TV-land is headed: Straight for an interstellar crash with all things IP. Which means the more Internet-ready my next TV is, the more TV-ready I’ll be for the coming Internet content wars.
Not that I need a new big TV, mind you: My 6-year old Sony Bravia 55”-inch is still working just fine, and with the recent addition of a Roku box, combined with an Apple TV, a WII, cable, and a Sony Playstation hooked to the thing, I’ve got more content than I can keep up with. But this is about conspicuous-consumption, and the next big thing is Internet-ready TV, and I’m simply not ready!
So, enter the Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 50-inch 1080p plasma HDTV. When I get bored with that Kindle Fire small fry screen, I can rev the Viera up on the Panasonic and grab me a content smorgasbord, built-in, including Amazon Prime, Netflix, Pandora, Napster, and Facebook integration.
Could the Panasonic be my next new computer?? At $799.99, it could be the TV-top deal of the century! Amazon cost: $799.99
4) A Portable Hard Drive. I cannot tell a lie: I have too much digital stuff. And it’s all over the place. On multiple computers. Multiple clouds. In multiple universes. Or was that meta-verses?
In any case, I’m well into digital overload, particularly now that I’ve learned how to make iMovies on my MacBook Air. I need an overflow valve, so-to-speak. And the Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive could be a step in the right storage direction for helping me pack away all those exciting skateboarding bulldog videos.
The upside: It has up to 3X transfer rates via USB 3.0 The downside: It’s saying it only supports USB 2.0 on Snow Leopard (nothing about Lion!). And that’s assuming the floods in Thailand haven’t put a damper on supply. Amazon cost: $169.00
5) A Gaming Laptop. Let’s face it, with a nickname like “Turbo,” I can’t ever have TOO much processing power in any of my computing devices. The more horsepower, the better, I say.
The Battalion 101 X7200 from iBuypower says it will "give you an absolutely amazing gaming experience every time. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M graphics card, 6GB of DDR3 memory and Intel Core i7 760QM processor give this computer plenty of power to handle even the most demanding games on the market. " Yes, I know, you're just waiting to ask: It will handle any variety of "Angry Birds" just fine!
And now that I’m trying to learn to fly via my computer, just any old laptop won’t do. My poor Dell laptop is chugging along, and I fear I may crash into somebody else’s airplane in virtual space due to limited computing horsepower. I did a little checking, and the Battaliion 101 X7200 seems to be a very highly rated, and somewhat affordable (remembering we don’t care about money in this list!) portable gaming maachine.
It comes with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M graphics card, 6GB of DDR3 memory, and an Intel Core i7 760QM processor — all of which ought to get me off the ground from the virtual Austin Bergstrom International and off to Charles DeGaulle for evening cocktails at Harry’s New York Bar in no time at all. iBuypower cost: $1,959
Of course, it took some serious restraint not for this list to go on and on and on and on. There are so many gadgets across so many galaxies far, far away that I could have included, and yet, so little time. And, even affording myself the luxury of no cap on spending for my gift list, it still feels wrong, like we’re having ourselves a very merry but still austere holiday season.
So, Mr. Klaus, I hereby respectfully request that you deliver my coal this year in the form of some multi-carat eco-diamonds — manmade, no labor issues, easy to transact. If I’m going to take my coal, I’m going to take it in style, thank you very much.
But I also wouldn’t argue if you just dropped me off an iPad 2, Santa. I’ll even sit on your lap, if I must.
I’m already a generation behind with this first run iPad and I’m starting to get paranoid that I won’t be able to keep up with the virtual Joneses!
turbotodd
Turbotodd 