scoring

The 2009 holiday season thus far is revealing much stronger online sales figures than what was witnessed in 2008, market-research firm ComScore announced late Wednesday.

According to the company, which has monitored spending for the first 30 days of the November-December shopping season, sales are up 3 percent to $12.26 billion, compared to the same period in 2008. Cyber Monday sales hit $887 million in online spending, tallying a 5 percent gain over the same day last year. That amount also matched "the biggest spending day on record, December 9, 2008."

"We've seen an encouraging … Read more

Market research firm ComScore reported on Tuesday that touch-screen mobile-phone adoption is not only on the rise, it's growing at a rapid rate.

Touch-screen phone adoption grew by 159 percent between August 2008 and August 2009, according to ComScore. The firm also found that by the end of August 2009, there were 23.8 million users with touch-screen mobile phones in the United States alone. In August 2008, just over 9.2 million people were using touch-screen phones.

But it's not just the touch screen that's enjoying strong growth. ComScore also found that smartphones are gaining traction … Read more

Cosmic Ball is an enjoyable space-themed game in which users must break bricks by bouncing a ball off the hull of their spacecraft. There's not a whole lot to it, but it has enough different challenges to keep it interesting through many levels of play.

The game's interface is basic and arcade-style, with the player's spaceship capable of moving back and forth but not up or down. Users launch a meteor (ball) from their ship in order to destroy a formation of bricks in front of them. Some of the bricks contain helpful features that users must … Read more

Convention has a handshake like the Mafia.

Even when we resign from a job, even when we truly feel the people we worked with were weasels of the worst order, our idea of "the done thing" means we invite everyone for a painful beer in a local bar. We even buy them doughnuts.

Now one brave soul has perhaps not merely flouted convention, but, with one heartfelt e-mail, drop-kicked it to Hades.

According to The Chive.com, the e-mail was written by a senior media planner at a Chicago ad agency (I have a feeling I just might … Read more

NFL Office Pool offers a way to manage a pick 'em style football pool. While the program looks basic enough to operate, the manual input required will make users seek out simpler solutions online.

Initially, we were pleased to find that this program's interface looked simple and easy to manage. However, after looking closer at some of the functions, we needed to consult the tutorials in the Help file. The program sets up betting leagues for College, CFL, and even NFL Europe games, but an NFL pool was easiest. This was because the NFL's 2009 schedule was fully … Read more

Golf Tracker for Excel provides golfers with ways to track their statistics over many courses and matches. While the layout looked familiar and simple, its trial limitations kept us from fully testing it.

We were so instantly comfortable with the program's interface that we skipped the instructional Help file. The program is based around Excel spreadsheets, looks the part, and was a cinch to navigate. We were surprised by how professionally the entire program was designed, especially since it was built from spreadsheets, but its areas to enter golfer information, courses and scores looked great. The Scores section was … Read more

We have a very special guest this week, Mr. Jeff Sparkman. Jeff gained notoriety previously by being named CNET's nerdiest employee. Soon after, it was a fast life of drugs, women, and comic books. We discuss at least one of those subjects with him.

Also in this episode, we talk about fighting with the Vulcan nerve pinch, Dong getting beat up by a girl, and Eric crying like a baby while watching "The Lord of the Rings."

Tech this week, we take a look at Lucid's soon-to-be-released tech. Also, Dong schools us on using Windows Media … Read more

Omniture and ComScore, two Web-tracking powerhouses, are combining forces to launch a new system for measuring online audiences, the companies said Monday.

Teasing out online traffic figures has been a constant challenge for both advertisers and publishers. The two companies' goal is better analyze online audiences by teaming Omniture's reliance on Web site analytics with ComScore's approach of following patterns of Internet users.

Web sites tend to rely on either analytics or audience measurement to determine traffic patterns, which can often lead to conflicting results. By merging the two methods, Omniture and ComScore hope to give customers a … Read more

MagicScore School provides users with a program to write, edit, and listen to their score. With a utilitarian layout and a variety of options, this program will appeal to musicians.

We felt a little overwhelmed by the program's interface, not having much technical musical knowledge beforehand. But the Help file's breakdown of the commands and a swift online tutorial made navigation much easier. We began creating our score immediately, as we had the option to click and drag notes from a bank and place them on a music scale or to play a virtual piano that also populated … Read more