Thanks in no small part to soaring traffic on YouTube, Google for the first time took the top slot in American consumer reach in April 2008, besting Yahoo.

But it took that top slot just barely, reaching 141 million Americans in April. Yahoo ranked second with 140.6 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 121.2 million visitors.

With its sites being unavailable for barely one hour over four months, MySpace has the best uptime of any major social networking site and Twitter (more than 37 hours of downtime during the same period) has the worst. Those stats come courtesy of Pingdom’s periodic uptime surveys, which tracked some 16 social networking sites from January 1 through April 30 of this year.

Not only was Twitter’s 37 hours and 16 minutes of downtime the worst in the group, it was almost double the amount of downtime from the second worst-performing site (Reunion.com, with 18 hours and 55 minutes of downtime). But even Twitter’s numbers amounted to an uptime that sounded good: 98.72 percent. Pingdom’s Peter Alguacil said those percentages can be misleading. Read more.

Like it or not (place this father defiantly in the “not” category), children are using the Internet’s social network sites at a younger age, with retail marketers hovering close by. How young?

New stats show 17 percent of boys aged 10-12 used such sites last year, which is more than double the 8 percent who used social sites in 2006, according to the Harris Poll. For 10-12-year-old girls, the figure is 27 percent, more than 2-and-a-half times the prior year’s 11 percent. In the 13-15-year category, boys jump to 46 percent and girls jump to 54 percent. Oddly enough, that 54 percent for 13-to-15-year-old girls actually dropped three percent from 2006.

Microsoft is “leaning toward going hostile in its pursuit of Yahoo,” with an announcement “likely” on May 2, according to a report in that day’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Although such a move would not likely have a direct impact on the IT side of E-Commerce with major retailers, it could sharply impact tens of thousands of smaller merchants that rely on Yahoo to sell their wares.

Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to “see” what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text.

This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images. The details were discussed by Google last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, where two Google scientists described Visual Rank as “an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” according to this New York Times story.

Pizza Hut is taking the “other people who bought also liked” approach mastered by Amazon.com and is trying to apply it to pizza and breadsticks and their Web site.

The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on “technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers’ orders.” But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested. Read more.

We’ve been seeing a bizarre trend this national recession. It seems to be hitting hard the companies that expected to be hit, the ones that cut back spending in anticipation of the downturn. Lo and behold, after cutting back on customer service and marketing programs, they see revenues fall. Did they correctly predict the sales drop or did they unintentionally cause the sales drop?

This question comes to mind when looking at some recent earnings reports. Wal-Mart’s been faring well, but it points to increased grocery and other low-cost items, suggesting that they may be taking sales away from higher priced grocery rivals. That might be a recession sign. But this week’s Amazon figures raise questions about such analysis. Read more.

When North Face—a unit of the $7.2 billion VF Corp. and a major manufacturer of athletic gear and clothing—officials started looking at the tidal wave of consumer-generated Web videos being created, they saw consumer passion. It’s the same kind of passion that exists in sports enthusiasts, which is who the retailer needs to reach.

Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more.

In case there are two or three of you who are still skeptical about whether Web video will have an impact, consider these new figures. In February, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos, which represents a 3 percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66 percent gain versus February 2007, according to ComScore.

Google/YouTube was overwhelmingly the top source (at 35.4 percent), following by Fox (5.8 percent), Yahoo (2.9 percent), Microsoft (also 2.9 percent), Viacom (2.2 percent), Time Warner non-AOL (1.3 percent), Disney (1.3 percent), AOL (1.1 percent), ABC (1.0 percent) and Comcast (0.9 percent).

One more stat: Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.

Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.

“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.”

The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.

The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.

The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.

ISPs have been quietly expanding their use of deep-packet inspection. They are capturing everything a user does–to the point where “at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection,” said a new report in The Washington Post.

The service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet–”for fear of customer revolt,” according to one executive involved who was quoted in the Post story. Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents.

Microsoft’s board has given Yahoo’s board three weeks to either agree to a takeover deal or Microsoft threatens it will go hostile.

In a Saturday letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to the Yahoo board, Ballmer strongly hinted that if the deal goes hostile, the original $44.6 billion offer would be reduced. “During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!’s search and page view shares have declined,” the letter said. Yahoo responded Monday, countering that Microsoft’s stock drop could make their offer less valuable. Read more.

Amazon.com on Wednesday rolled out a new service called TextBuyIt, which allows consumers to comparison shop online working solely with fast text messages. But the move may not sit well with other retailers, who could see this making it easier to find better deals elsewhere, especially in bookstores.

The service can also support Web searches—but that’s hardly new—and is being positioned by Amazon as an easier way for consumers to make Amazon purchases. The transactions can be almost solely done via text, with an old-fashioned phonecall used to verify the purchase. Read more.

Social networking giant Facebook suffered a major privacy glitch this week, where strangers were able to download members’ supposedly private restricted photos.
The Associated Press broke the story this week. “The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip from a Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada computer technician. Ng began looking for security weaknesses last week after Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles,” the story reported. “But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent Ng from pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few.”

Saks is seeing how far it can take Web multimedia, by trying to morph its online catalogue with live video and creating a live model runway show.

The test focuses on Saks’ three best-selling departments: Contemporary ready-to-wear, handbags, and shoes, according to this MediaPost story. “Since Saks knows that about 99 percent of its shoppers have broadband access, ‘it’s been great for us,’” said Denise Incandela, president of Saks Direct. “You can have movement, voice-over, music and information, with narrators talking about what’s important in each look.”

When Starbucks used its shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday to roll out several new initiatives, the new coffee makers and blends got much of the attention. But two of the new plans—a revised CRM program and a new Web site—illustrate nicely how well Starbucks understands customer service and how it still hasn’t figured out the Web.

The change to the Starbucks Card Rewards program shows not just an understanding of customer service, but a realization that the best way to make a CRM program successful is to focus on benefits—true benefits—for both the customer and the retailer. Instead of merely tracking purchases and offering small discounts (adjusting the price of a cup of flavored coffee down from ludicrously overpriced to merely absurdly overpriced. Buy one more croissant and tomorrow you can enjoy a cup of Joe that is only insultingly overpriced), Starbucks is getting creative about rewards. Read more.

Among the retailers that are referenced as most intelligently embracing merged channels–the true channel-agnostic merchant–is Borders, whether it’s with their new concept stores or their breakup with Amazon.com.

It’s therefore an especially troubling note that they are having financial difficulties, as detailed in this New York Times piece. It’s an age-old business belief that few chains truly buy into and adopt major strategic changes until it’s too late. I hope that Borders turns out to be the exception.

The European Union has given the greenlight to Google’s multi-billion dollar takeover of Doubleclick, saying that there will still be plenty of online ad competition.

The European go-ahead followed a similar decision by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission late last year. “Google is hoping to offer a fuller set of online-advertising offerings and capitalize on DoubleClick’s relationships with Web publishers and advertisers to sell ads on behalf of more sites, with Google taking a commission,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

With so many companies today relying on the Internet as the guts of their communication strategy–a reliance that is only getting more intense as VoIP deployments soar–another Internet vulnerability came to light this week, when a Pakistani telecom firm unintentionally blocked some two-thirds of the world’s access to YouTube.

This move comes on top of an incident earlier this month when an undersea cable was cut near Dubai, also wreaking havoc with global Internet traffic. Are more robust safeguards needed? Is these kinds of disruptions can be happen so easily by accidents, how vulnerable would they be to deliberate terrorist efforts? Read more.

When Borders unveiled its first “concept store” this month in Ann Arbor, Mich., it offered a handful of new digital features, all intended to set up the chain’s rollout of a merged channel Web site (expected to go live sometime before the end of April). But what was interesting were their choices and some of the rationale behind it.

For example, one of the digital services for their in-store kiosk was from an E-Commerce site called Shutterfly.com. That decision went beyond the attraction of digital photos, said Kevin Ertell, Borders’ E-commerce chief. Read more.

Yahoo is looking to restart merger talks with AOL, as a white knight to head off Microsoft’s $45 billion overtures, the Times of London is reporting. This weekend, Yahoo decided to reject the Microsoft offer as too low.

Tie-ups with Disney and Google are also being considered, as Microsoft says that Yahoo reneged on an earlier deal to cooperate with Microsoft to fight Google. Read more.

Customers who seek coupons and who say are interested in sales and promotions are actually 13 percent less likely to make a purchase than those customers who say they want content, such as author interviews or book excerpts. That courtesy of some research that Borders did as it prepares to relaunch its Web site.

That conclusion came out of a Borders analysis of a weekly newsletter it has been sending to most of its loyalty program members. Although newsletters drove people into the stores, those consumers who wanted coupons were 31 percent less satisfied—and were 13 percent less likely to make a purchase—than those who sought content. Read more.

Yahoo’s board of directors on Monday will officially reject Microsoft’s $45 billion bid to takeover the Web portal leader, concluding that the offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo, according to a store in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

Not only is the $31/share bid too low, but it “also doesn’t account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators,” the story said, adding that a board source said the board would be “unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share.” Whether this turns into a hostile takeover situation is up to Microsoft, but the move was expected as few boards would accept such an offer without trying to negotiate for more. Microsoft would be equally unlikely to have opened bidding with its top price.

Leveraging plummeting memory prices and the “monstrous scale” with which Yahoo buys, the Web portal player introduced Wednesday a $12/month Web hosting plan that promises “unlimited” disk space, data transfers and E-mail storage space, a Yahoo executive said.

The Yahoo deal suffers from the same shortcoming that hangs over so many “unlimited” offerings, namely that there truly is some kind of a limit but that customers won’t learn what those limits are until after they’ve bought and started using the service. Read more.

Microsoft’s $42 billion bid to takeover Yahoo—still being considered by Yahoo’s board—would threaten the “underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation,” a Google executive said in a Sunday blog posting.

Drummond referred to the move as a “hostile bid,” which is a premature characterization. Yahoo’s board hasn’t yet rejected the bid, meaning this move could easily become friendly. But there’s little question that a merger of Yahoo and Microsoft would shake up the world of Google, which has enjoyed Microsoft’s inability to move MSN beyond a weak third-place position. Read more.

Wal-Mart is pursuing a “globally scaleable” system that would essentially act as a kit of online parts – with elements such as data mining and customer analysis – that could be readily deployed in different markets, according to this report in the Financial Times.

The globalization effort is hardly new for Wal-Mart. In the UK, Wal-Mart’s Asda unit delivers groceries, general goods and financial services. In Mexico, the re-tailer’s 63 upmarket Superama neighbourhood stores also offer an online delivery service that includes groceries. But the retailer is now recruiting software architects and engineers at its San Francisco web headquarters to make a concerted effort, the FT reported.

Sears is tapping talent from Wal-Mart and Microsoft to try and resurrect its online operations Sears is tapping talent from Wal-Mart and Microsoft to try and resurrect its online operations, as it also replaces its CEO with its senior supply-chain executive. That move is because, as the Sears Chairman said in a Monday statement, “We are entering a new phase in Sears’ evolution as a multi-channel retailer.”

The new interim CEO, Bruce Johnson, came up through the KMart side of the business and he had gone to KMart from French retail empire Carrefour, where he had been director, organization and systems and a member of the management board. Before that, he spent 16 years at Colgate-Palmolive and had worked as a management consultant at Booz Allen & Hamilton and Arthur Andersen & Company. Read more.

At NRF last week, StorefrontBacktalk did indeed moderate our panel on Merged Channel and topics discussed—OK, argued—included the place of mobile in-store (panel wasn’t a huge fan of it), customer expectations, supply-chain and shared resource hurdles, inventory strategies, compensation options and kiosk tactics.

The panel included Google’s head of retail, John McAteer, Borders’ E-Commerce chief, Kevin Ertell, the corporate development VP at Bill Me Later, Mark Lavelle, Ursula Milan, an E-Commerce manager at the Museum of Modern Art, and the dean of the E-Commerce analytics corp, Jupiter Research’s Patti Freeman Evans. Read more.

E-tailers trying to focus on distinctive value-add while using as much industry standard functionality as possible have another hurdle, courtesy of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

The USPTO has issued a patent—to be effective Jan. 29—for a method for “real-time calculations of shipping costs for items purchased online using a zip code as a destination location indicator.” Read more.

A favorite of marketers and retailers for years in smartphone-embracing parts of Europe and Asia, the 2-D is going to make its U.S. debut this April in some New York City consumer electronic and cosmetic retailers, according to the president of a Microsoft-backed company who says he has cut the first U.S. 2-D deal.

Although the initial retailer for this trial wasn’t identified, the company has been talking with Best Buy, the Gap, Nordstrom and Target. And for a fee ranging from $250K to 450K, they can leverage the trial to compete against online alternatives. Read more.

For those of you attending the NRF Big Show in NYC next week (The Big Show? With that name, I half-expect Ed Sullivan to do the keynote), I am guessing many of you will be bored with the same old fact-based intelligent panel discussions. Fear not. For a panel packed with emotional outbursts and insights disguised as innuendos, please ….

No, that won’t work. As much I try, it’s hard to pretty up a retail technology/E-Commerce panel as an exciting outing. But for a tech-biz discussion, we’ve got two decent offerings. On Wednesday morning (9:45-10:45 AM, at the Javits, Concurrent Hall A 1A21/22), StorefrontBacktalk will be moderating a look at The Road To Merged Channel. Read more.

About 40 percent of American consumers wanted to leave stores after not getting store associate this holiday season, according to survey results released this week from Motorola.

And among those who actually left the stores, 90 percent of them never returned, according to Scott Drobner, Motorola’s director for market intelligence programs. Read more.

On the heels of admitting this week that it was using spyware on one of its E-Commerce sites, Sears on Friday said that it was temporarily shutting down part of another Sears E-Commerce site after admitting that it allowed consumers to see explicit details about the purchases of other consumers.

The Sears move came hours after Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Benjamin Edelman published details on how consumers using Sears’ ManageMyHome site could find detailed purchase histories about other Sears shoppers merely by typing in their name, phone number and street address into the site. Read more.

Retailers aggressively support the idea of merged channel, but have a lot of difficulty in the implementation phase.

One $200 million retail chain—1800mattress.com—is taking a baby step toward merged channel, by sending copies of online chat transcripts to the local brick-and-mortar. “Having the complete transcript of what the customer is looking for onscreen in the store facilitates the sale,” EVP Joe Vicens said. Read more.

Did Sears conclude that the only accurate way to see what consumers were truly doing online was to track customers who didn’t know they were being tracked? The $53 billion retailer isn’t disputing that it did distribute spyware, but merely that consumers knew that they were agreeing to spyware.

But the chain is also learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen captures—is fairly unforgiving when it comes to marketing excesses. Read more.

As small groups of Web thinkers sketch out what Web 3.0–the so-called Semantic Web–may look like, how much attention should E-Commerce execs be paying?

In an interesting RetailWire story and discussion, questions are raised about whether this will be a broad transition or merely a niche enhancement for those who bother. But if major e-tailers want to change, the sad reality is that they need to get involved early or surrender the ability to complain later. Given how much E-Commerce execs love to complain, that latter option seems unrealistic.

When Amazon.com releases its holiday sales stats on Wednesday, there wasn’t anything truly newsworthy in it. Still, the volume of sales being churned out by the world’s largest E-Commerce outfit is worth a brief look.

For example, on one day (Dec. 10), Amazon sold more than 5.4 million items and shipped more 3.9 million units. An Amazon statement calculated that it sold 62.5 items every second on Dec. 10.

The latest developer fad spreading through the Web—allowing consumers to drag and drop their personal photos onto virtual models—is now moving into E-Commerce.

My Virtual Model is working with Sears, Best Buy and Lands’ End to move products and catalogues into 2D and 3D. But the ability to personalize models so that the clothing choices can factor in the person’s face-shape and eye-color and those over-sized Dumbo ears is intriguing. The problem is that the photo choice is done by the consumer, which often leads to some humorously mismatched sizes, with the virtual model looking less like something out of Vogue and more like a cartoon in Mad Magazine.

In a move with significant potential impact for online marketing, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has cleared Google’s $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick.

Saying the deal is “unlikely to substantially lessen competition,” the commission voted 4-to-1 to approve. But the transaction still faces substantial antitrust scrutiny in Europe and Google has said that it won’t close the deal before it has clearance from European regulators,” said this Wall Street Journal story. The European Commission has set a deadline of April 2, 2008, to complete its review, the Journal said.

In a creative approach to address consumer search engine privacy concerns, Ask.com Tuesday unveiled a way for consumers to delete identifiable remnants from their searches.

The service—which the Web site has dubbed AskEraser—”deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries,” the company said. It’s an interesting move, but it’s unclear that it will much of an impact unless larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo adopt it.

It’s certainly not unexpected that traffic is increasing to shopping comparison sites around the holiday season, according to the latest stats from Hitwise. But what is more intriguing is the Hitwise suggestion that younger consumers are abandoning the top comparison sites, to instead use much lesser-known sites.

“The composition of those visitors is changing markedly, becoming significantly older,” said an Internet Retailer story. “Hitwise finds that 51 percent of the visitors to those dozen sites were 45 and older, compared with 38 percent last year. Among web users 55 and older, the market share of the 12 top comparison shopping sites was up 56 percent, but it was down 27 percent among web users aged 25 to 34.” Does this suggest a change in consumer preference or merely that this segment is especially fickle? Or perhaps merely that they get bored much more quickly?

With the surge of U.S. E-Commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday, the so-called Black Friday apparently caught several E-Commerce giants by surprise, with Lowe’s, Macys and Victoria’s Secret especially hard hit, according to statistics released this weekend from Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

But those three sites were far from alone, said Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations. “Almost a third of the thirty leading retail sites we monitor for our holiday shopping index experienced significant slow-downs that impacted the product search and check-out processes – and presumably will impact online sales,” White said. Read more.

Much has been written this week that’s critical of Google’s Smartphone Consortium effort. What those critics don’t see is the sorry state of today’s cellphone market.

For years, American technology leaders have gotten used to seeing the U.S. no longer globally technologically dominant. But nowhere is that lack-of-dominance more pronounced than with cellphone technology. That’s why I saw this week’s Google Android news as something that was exciting in its potential to shake the industry up. Trust me: this is one sector that truly needs a lot of shaking up. Read more.

Second Life experimentation aside, major retail chain Tweeter is wondering if 3D E-Commerce might prove to be practical and a major advance for shoppers.

A consumer shopping for a home entertainment system accesses a 3-D CADCAM representation of his home and drags it to an entertainment E-Commerce site. This large digital file, however, is much more than a mere architectural depiction of the consumer’s home.

It includes window placement and the times of day—during different months—that the sun shines through various windows and at roughly what intensity and for how long. Someone has entered the style of thickness of the rug and wall-coverings and a database lookup has associated those with their likely sound-dampening characteristics. Read more.

Waiting for EBay’s long-awaited AdContext program? Pull up a chair, as you may have a very long wait. Indeed, this is one of the lenghtiest public betas I’ve ever seen. In the early summer of 2006, EBay announced that its program to scan news stories for references to products that they have on auction, to be called AdContext.

It was supposed to ship by the end of the year. In November, that “end of year” became “January.” In December, “January” became “first quarter 2007.” In March, no timing was mentioned at all.

On Thursday, an EBay senior manager said the product was still in beta and he couldn’t even guess at a new target for launch. Guess this kind of functionality is more difficult than it seemed. At least more difficult for EBay.

When a federal court judge issued rulings on Tuesday that the $60 billion retailer needed to stand trial on charges that it’s Web site is not sufficiently accessible to visually-impaired shoppers, it sent a strong signal to much of the E-Commerce space.

Target has long been the most prominent opponent of forcing E-Commerce site executives to adhere to accessibility rules designed for their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Read more.

When it comes to global downtime, Google doesn’t seem to play favorites. Among 32 key countries Google plays in locally, its home country of the U.S. came in near the bottom, in position 26 of 32 with 31 minutes of downtime, according to Web performance survey results released Thursday by Pingdom.

“Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil,” said the report. Read more.

Consider: In the early days of E-Commerce, a typical retailer and manufacturer might have between eight and 12 products that it is actually marketing, especially with search engine links. Today, that same company would typically be doing the same kind of Web marketing with some 12,000 products, said Tim Armstrong, who serves Google as its president of advertising and commerce for North America.

Armstrong argues that this is morphing ad budgets into operational budgets. Is a Google ad akin to a traditional piece of advertising—something that an ad budget should fund—or closer to the cost of a car dealer building a new showroom and dealership? Read more.

The good news is that major companies are now actively pushing mobile. The bad news is that they’re pushing in different directions. The mobile phone e-commerce activities you’re seeing today are going to fall victim to the same amnesia fog that envelopes all of those early Web searches done on text-based browsers.

Although the Web had been around for years, it was the graphical browser that got the industry to agree on one way to create Web pages that could fire the imagination of businesses and consumers. That defining moment has yet to hit mobile commerce. Forget design and programming issues. There hasn’t yet even been broad agreement on how m-commerce is supposed to work. Let’s start with simple payment. Read more.

Sometimes, it’s good to be the king, even if it’s the king of online search. Google’s founders have landed a great new parking space for Boeing 767-200: an airport run by NASA that is typically closed to private aircraft, according to this New York Times piece.

The deal is certainly unusual, but it’s not especially one-sided. While Google brass gets their nearby mammoth parking, they are paying $1.3 million a year plus NASA officials have “signed a unique agreement last month that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders. NASA gets to collect scientific data on some flights of those jets, which in addition to the Boeing 767-200 includes two Gulfstream Vs,” the Times story reported.

For e-tailers that use their in-store inventory also as their online inventory, they are discovering a problem with the supply-chain blackhole: which products invisibly enter when they leave the shelf and don’t re-emerge until they are paid for.

This is particularly an issue with retailers trying to make shop-online-pickup-instore work. Without item-level tracking, the concept of a realtime inventory is almost impossible to deliver. This problem is only going to get worse during the holiday onslaught, especially when online purchasers are trying to get the hottest and most popular gift. Read more.

U.S. consumers lost more than $7 billion over the last two years to viruses, spyware, and phishing schemes, according to a report issued this week by Consumer Reports.

The magazine survey “showed that consumers face a 1 in 4 chance of succumbing to an online threat and becoming a cybervictim, a number that has slightly decreased since last year,” the story said. “The number of consumers responding to e-mail phishing scams has remained constant at eight percent. Consumer Reports projects that one million U.S. consumers lost billions of dollars over the past two years to such scams.”

The most interesting part is that the percent of consumers being scammed–at least via Phishing–has stayed roughly constant, suggesting that cyberthieves are ratcheting up their tactics at the exact same rate that consumers are becoming to their old ways. Not one of the more encouraging stats.

The E-Commerce spend in the U.S. for this year’s second quarter jumped 19 percent, to $47.5 billion, compared with last year’s identical quarter, according to a statement released this week from ComScore.

In a different E-Commerce report this week, Keynote Systems found Amazon and BestBuy as the strongest in online customer experience while CircuitCity took the top slot for site reliability and Staples got kudos for site responsiveness.

Keynote traditionally doesn’t release the names of the sites that fared the worst, but the sites that were examined but not mentioned in the top slots were Buy.com, Costco, Office Depot, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart. Read more.

Are recent Google incidents with an EBay party and Sicko blog comments a pattern or anomalies?

When red-hot startups grow very quickly, lead by intelligent founders with a clear vision, they tend to grow quickly until they get into the danger zone. This is that awkward stage where strange decisions start getting made, a stage that quite a few companies haven’t lived through. Burn rate is the ability for these companies to go through tons of money very quickly. This isn’t Burn Rate. Let’s call this Burn Up And Implode Rate. Read more.