Overall, it was a very appy holiday season for the mobile industry, according to Flurry, which is known for producing reports based on the information it gathers through the thousands of developers who use its analytics tools.

In its report today, Flurry said that more than 50 million iOS and Android tablets and smartphones were activated from Christmas to New Year’s Eve, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded worldwide during that period. That’s a huge jump from last year’s figures.

In comparison, Flurry estimated last year that 1.2 billion apps were downloaded worldwide across both Android and iOS.

Here is a chart comparing the holiday week to the same number of days earlier in December:

The year-over-year progress shows just how commonplace app downloading is around the globe.

In fact, this year Flurry said that a number of weeks since late November delivered more than a billion downloads, which just last year was considered record-shattering. This year, it is forecasting that a billion weekly downloads could become a regular occurrence.

“Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4,” wrote Flurry marketing VP Peter Farago in a blog post.

Most of these downloads are still occurring in the U.S., where there is widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets. During the week, the U.S. downloaded 604 million applications, or 34.3 percent of the total. China is not exactly a close second with 183 million downloads, and the U.K., Germany and France are much further behind.

Based on Flurry’s previous reports, one of the most popular app categories is games. And based on evidence from at least two game companies, that continued to be the case this holiday season, as people picked up their phones and tablets for entertainment during their time off.

Disney Mobile said game downloads jumped 98 percent year over year to more than 15 million in 2012, from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28. It benefited from new titles such as Where’s My Holiday? and Nemo’s Reef and Monsters climbing the charts. Separately, Storm8, which publishes such titles as Dragon Story, City Story and Jewel Mania, reported that it had two million game downloads on Christmas Day, an increase of four times compared to an average Tuesday.

Photo: Kitch Bain / Shutterstock.com; Illustration: AllThingsD

According to analytics firm Flurry, at least 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, up from the average of 4 million devices that Flurry saw between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20 and from 6.8 million device activations on Christmas 2011.

What’s more, while smartphones make up 80 percent of activations on a typical day, Christmas saw a roughly even split between tablets and phones.

“On this Christmas Day 2012, more iPhones, iPads, Galaxys, Kindle Fires, and more, were activated than on any other day in history,” Flurry said in a blog post.

Overall, a record number of devices were activated on Christmas, and a record number of apps downloaded as well. Flurry estimated that 328 million apps were downloaded, up from an average of 155 million per day earlier in the month and more than 250 million last Christmas.

The massive newsgathering operation that is All Things Digital is winding down for the holiday, as staffers head off to the comforts of home, family and friends. Here’s hoping all of you are headed in the same direction. News willing, the site will be quiet for Christmas, but back in action on Boxing Day. Until then, enjoy some festive downtime.

And we mean, of course, Festivus, the fantastic holiday created by George Costanza’s father on “Seinfeld,” which actually takes place on December 23 (but we are claiming it anyway).

Here’s a video explainer:

’Twas the night before Christmas,
And Santa’s online.
He’s emailing and calling,
And all just in time.
With holiday cheer,
And a techie assist,
He’s using the Web
To re-check his list.

It won’t fit under the Christmas tree, but there might be one last-minute gift to make the geekiest of little ones happy: A personalized email, video message or phone call from jolly old St. Nicholas.

Previously, parents had to take their children to the mall to meet Kris Kringle, but he’s updated his act with the times and across a long list of Web sites.

Here are just a couple:

• My favorite of the bunch is Google’s “Santa Tracker,” which starts off by walking you through a surprisingly detailed faux-instant-message chat with Santa. After you say you’ve read and agreed to Santa’s Terms and Privacy Policy (no, really, but they are a lot better than Instagram’s), he interviews you about a friend, co-worker or loved one you want him to contact. Then he offers to give them a phone call (but only between 8 am and 9 pm), an email or a Google+ message. (I wonder if Santa puts the naughty and nice kids in different Circles on Google+.)
• Portable North Pole (pictured at top) takes it one step further, letting you send a video message from Santa. And in PNP’s questionnaire, you can tell Santa to cater his message specifically to an adult, or to someone (adult or child) who shouldn’t be on the “nice” list. Since it’s a video call, Santa optionally asks for a photo of the recipient or of you that he can use, or you can just have him use a picture of a gift.
• It’s just one of many, many similar smaller services, but Christmas Dialer layers a business on top of the Christmas-y concept. It gives you one free call from Santa, then charges at least 57 cents for each additional call to your eBay PayPal account. Unlike the other two listed above, though, it asks less information upfront and, as a result, offers far fewer choices of what sort of message the recipient will get.

Not an overt one, anyway. Enjoy:

If so, you’re in luck. There are a handful of options for getting packages delivered in time for Christmas, especially if you live in one of the markets where retailers are testing same-day delivery services.

In case you didn’t already know, today was pretty much the deadline for consumers to place orders online and to reasonably expect their packages to arrive on time. For example, Sears, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Walmart and even Amazon stopped offering rush shipping this afternoon on most orders.

As I previously reported, last week was the peak for e-commerce spending, and this year that shouldn’t be any different. But there are a number of ways to still get deliveries sent to your home if you don’t feel like fighting the crowds at the mall.

Amazon is promising on-time deliveries for some orders placed on Saturday and Sunday for some items in select cities. But it won’t be free. For those with Amazon Prime, it will cost $4 and up — on top of the $79 you pay every year to be a member.

Then there’s same-day delivery. Though the services are being characterized as tests, these merchants are trying to see if it can be economical to deliver items that are kept locally at stores (and not at distant warehouses) to homes within a few hours. It’s clearly another strategy for brick-and-mortar retailers to try to compete with e-tailers that offer the convenience of delivery.

Two of the major trials are being conducted by eBay and Walmart.

EBay’s service is called eBay Now. Consumers can place orders from a mobile app that will deliver goods to you at your home, in a park, even at a bar, within about an hour. The company is working with a number of local retailers on the service, including Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Toys “R” Us and Bloomingdales.

According to an eBay spokeswoman, eBay Now will be available from 9 am to 6 pm (local time) on Christmas Eve, but closed on Christmas Day. The service is currently being tested in San Francisco and parts of New York City.

Walmart is another retailer that is testing same-day delivery. The “Walmart to Go” service allows customers in a handful of markets to buy and receive items on the same day for $10. Inventory is limited to popular items, including toys, electronics, sporting goods and other gifts. The service is in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, the San Jose-San Francisco Bay Area and Denver.

Walmart will be offering same-day delivery until Dec. 23, but will be closed on Dec. 24 and 25. It will resume on Dec. 26.

There are smaller alternatives, too.

For example, TaskRabbit is a marketplace where you can find people who are willing to complete small projects or services for a fee. The service operates in a number of major markets around the country, and due to its independent nature, a spokesman claims, “The Web site and iPhone app are never closed.”

In fact, once a “rabbit” has received a background check and activated, “they can work when they want, and not when they don’t.” Popular tasks this month include holiday shopping, which is averaging $57; gift wrapping, $38; and hanging lights, $85. If that sounds exorbitant, remember that consumers should expect to pay a premium on holidays.

Finally, another service in San Francisco is Postmates, which is offering same-day delivery by dispatching a nearby courier to run an errand. A spokeswoman confirmed that it is operating on Christmas Eve from 8 am to 6 pm, and on Christmas Day from 11 am to midnight.

Additionally, as part of the iPhone app, Postmates is creating a shopping guide that lists major retailers where last-minute purchases can be made, including the likes of Apple, Tiffany, Uniqlo and Nordstrom.

While there seem to be a lot of last-minute options, Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said that this year is no different from other years in at least one sense. Retailers, and especially e-commerce companies, are always trying to push the limits when it comes to how late orders can be placed.

“It does drive a spike in sales as you approach the shipping deadline. I’d estimate a 20 percent lift on that day over an average holiday day, but by no means would it eclipse the Thanksgiving weekend or Cyber Monday,” she said.

Of course, if you miss all of these options, there are always gift cards. And there’s still the local mall.

Image by mbortolino

Amazon, which is known for being the king of fulfillment, says orders placed through Tuesday will arrive by Christmas Eve, and for its Prime members, orders can be made as late as Friday.

Deadlines for other retailers are scattershot during the rest of the week — Wednesday for Walmart and Thursday for Sears — but nearly all of the big retailers are willing to push delivery times even later for consumers willing to pay for expedited shipping. Some will accept orders as late as Dec. 20 and 21.

As of right now, online retailers should be pretty thrilled with what Santa has delivered this year.

For the first 44 days of the holiday season, sales have totaled $33.8 billion, a 13 percent jump over the same period last year, according to comScore, which measures purchases made online through broadband connections.

“With this most recent week in the books, the peak spending period may now be in our rear-view mirror — but the online holiday shopping season is not over yet,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Last week, four days surpassed the $1 billion threshold, making it the heaviest five-day online shopping period on record, comScore reports. So far, 11 days have exceeded $1 billion in spending, compared to 10 last year. It’s important to note that the results do not include sales that occur over mobile phones and tablets.

ComScore expects tomorrow to be another heavy shopping day as procrastinators scramble to order gifts in time. Years ago, Monday was coined “Free Shipping Day,” and that continues to be the case, but enthusiasm over the offer seems to have mellowed as free shipping has become standard for many retailers.

That’s according to new data from research firm Parks Associates, which recently surveyed 2,500 adults in the U.S. to measure consumer tech purchasing intent for the holidays.

Fifty-three percent of consumers planning to purchase a smartphone this season intend to buy an iPhone, Parks says — up from the 33 percent who said the same thing in the third quarter of this year, and up from 24 percent a year ago.

And when it comes to tablets, most of those surveyed said they’d prefer an iPad. Following the iPad at 44 percent was Kindle Fire, with 24 percent of consumers expressing interest in Amazon’s touchscreen tablet.

Twenty-one percent of those surveyed said they’d go with the Microsoft surface tablet — down from the 45 percent who just a few months ago said they wanted the Surface — and the Google Nexus tablet came in last at 12 percent.

Lastly, Parks writes, “When presented with the iPad Mini as a tablet alternative, many of those planning on purchasing other tablet brands opt for the iPad Mini.” So did many of those planning on buying an iPad: 40 percent, in fact, said they would opt for an iPad mini instead.

But it’s worth noting a few things about this report, the first being that the smartphone-lust portion of the survey only covers entire brands, not specific models. So Parks isn’t offering a breakdown of how many consumers say they’re enticed by the new iPhone 5 — and what percentage want the much cheaper, earlier-generation models of iPhone available now.

And the tablet data above is based on consumer sentiment when participants were presented with just those four options. Responses varied slightly when all tablet brands and models were considered.

Lastly, iPad cannibalization isn’t a new theory, nor is it a proven one yet. Prior to the mini’s launch, AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski reported on analysts’ predictions that the iPad mini would cut into sales of the regular ol’ iPad, but more recent data suggested the mini wasn’t immediately impacting sales as much as some thought it would.

In a memo to investors, Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer wrote that, for the first time in years, Amazon is giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off this holiday. Nemer hypothesizes that there are two logical explanations for the promotion: Either the e-commerce giant is trying to get customers active again or holiday sales are tracking below expectations.

Yesterday, comScore, which tracks online spending from computers using landline broadband connections, reported that so far this holiday, spending is up 13 percent year over year, which is below its 2012 prediction of 17 percent.

Nemer also offers a plausible explanation for why sales are slow: Procrastination. “As Amazon’s base of Prime users continues to grow, customers will be more likely to delay purchases,” he wrote.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Amazon gave customers even more reasons to wait. It announced that orders can be placed through Dec. 18 and still get free delivery in time for Christmas. In particular, Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day delivery, can wait even longer. They can place orders until 7 pm ET on Dec. 21 to receive deliveries by Dec. 24. In some cases, Amazon will offer one-, two-, or even same-day delivery for a small fee.

ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said there is perhaps less urgency than there once was to make those final purchases. “What we’ve seen over the past few years is a tendency for heavy spending to continue late into the week of Green Monday (Dec. 10) and right up until Free Shipping Day, which this year falls on December 17,” he said in a release.

Quirky names have been given to several days around the holidays.

“Free Shipping Day” tends to be a widely celebrated event, with dozens of e-tailers offering to cover postage during a 24-hour period. However, the prominence of the day is wearing off as more online retailers offer free shipping year-round. On “Green Monday,” which is the second Monday of December, sales reached $1.275 billion, up 13 percent over last year, according to comScore. At that level, the day ranks as the third heaviest online spending day in 2012. So far this year, spending has totaled $29.3 billion during the first 40 days of the holiday shopping season, representing a 13 percent jump over last year.

At San Francisco’s Westfield mall, PayPal tells customers that is now accepted at a handful of retailers.

While that’s lower than what comScore was originally predicting, Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of Global Product, said he’s seeing no indication that sales are falling below expectations.

In general, he said, the trend is for shopping to start earlier and end later, with the peak shopping days being closer to Christmas, rather than the more prominent heavy days, like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) or Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving).

He attributes that shift, in part, to consumers shopping on their mobile devices. ”So much of shopping is generated by promotions, but with mobile you can make a purchase whenever or wherever you are, so people are willing to wait and not change their lives around what retailers are offering,” he said.

For instance, on Dec. 2, PayPal reported its global mobile payment volume hit a new high, exceeding its record set only six days earlier on Cyber Monday. PayPal’s parent company, eBay, saw its biggest mobile shopping day on Dec. 9.

Here’s a snapshot of the weekly trends for the past four years, showing how spending ramps up as we get closer to Christmas:

So Google is the last company that needs to engage in holiday promotions to goose sales, right?

Maybe not. Here’s an email Google’s AdWords unit sent me earlier in the week, promising to give me up to two months of free advertising — up to $250 total — if I signed up for “AdWords Express” by Dec. 16, and spent money on it this month. If I did, I would get ad credits in January.

And just to be sure I didn’t miss out on the sale, Google sent me another email an hour and five minutes later. Same offer, slightly different language at the top: “We hope you’ve been having a restful holiday season. Recently, we sent you a message inviting you to try AdWords Express and wanted to remind you that it’s not too late to sign up and get our special holiday offer …”

AdWords Express is a dumbed-down/simplified version of the core AdWords system that still accounts for the vast majority of  Google’s revenue and profits.

An AdWords lite seems like a smart thing for Google to promote to small businesses (or people it thinks might run one, like me), since figuring out how to use regular AdWords can still stump lots of people.

This isn’t the first time Google has pushed AdWords Express hard. Earlier this year it even paid people to pick up the phone and cold-call prospective clients. Now it’s selling the ads as a sort of Christmas stocking-stuffer.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Kiselev Andrey Valerevich)

In the physical retail world, it’s the equivalent of putting up Christmas displays and piping in carols over the sound system before Thanksgiving, maybe even before Halloween.

This year, e-tailers are jumping the gun in an effort to get a bigger share of your wallet by announcing sales as much as a week before such traditionally heavy online shopping days as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday following Thanksgiving, respectively).

Two of the biggest retailers in the U.S. are exemplifying this trend with rival releases this morning:

Walmart said today that it is kicking off Cyber Week this year on Saturday, Nov. 24, and lasting through Sunday, Dec. 2. Specials will be available online and refreshed daily, with customers enjoying free shipping on more than 100,000 items. Meanwhile, Amazon said its Black Friday deals are starting today and running through Saturday. “We’re offering customers our widest selection of Black Friday Lightning Deals ever and we’re bringing doorbuster deals to shoppers earlier this year,” said Ben Hartman, Amazon’s VP of consumer electronics.

There are signs that consumers are responding to the early offers:

• PayPal, which claims to process nearly one-fifth of global e-commerce, said today that the official U.S. shopping season started as early as Sept. 30.
• Fab.com said today that sales from its 2012 holiday shopping are up 400 percent versus its holiday business this time a year ago.
• Chase Holiday Pulse data, which tracks data from 50 large e-commerce retailers, is finding that year-over-year sales volume is up 12.3 percent over 2011. Some days, like Nov. 11, were up more than 50 percent.

But many of the busiest days are yet to come. UPS is preparing for Thursday, Dec. 20, when the logistics company estimates it will deliver 28 million packages around the world, compared to its average day of 15.8 million packages. This holiday is expected to be a record-breaking year for UPS, which is forecasting that it will deliver 527 million packages between Thanksgiving and Christmas, surpassing last year’s total of 480 million.

In an interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning, Jeff Bezos said, “It will be a record season for us, knock on wood.”

Amazon is hiring 50,000 seasonal workers to help pick up the pace in its dozens of warehouses worldwide, which will be humming at full capacity with employees packing and shipping oodles of boxes to homes in time for Christmas.

This year, physical retailers have lined up a fairly broad defensive strategy against the online behemoth. Many retailers are promising to match online prices, or even taking it a step further by offering same-day shipping in some markets (which is a day faster than Amazon can usually offer).

Still, Bezos was upbeat about the company’s holiday prospects, and likely for good reason. Last year, Amazon’s revenue grew 35 percent in Q4 compared to the same period in 2010 — double the rate of the overall e-commerce market. “We’ve always been in a hyper-competitive industry. That’s a good thing. It’s good for customers, and it’s good for the companies who are forced to innovate,” he told Lauer. “We have to evolve, and we are providing better customer service today than we ever have.”

Bezos appeared on “Today” freshly named as Fortune’s 2012 Businessperson of the Year for his role as the “ultimate disrupter.” Here’s the interview, which is worth watching to hear Lauer botching the name of Amazon’s best-selling Kindle Paperwhite (a.k.a. the Paperweight):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is now starting to unveil the flip side of free lunches and smartphones, with two employee-focused moves that are a little more tough love in nature.

According to several sources close to the situation, she has officially ended a longtime practice at the Silicon Valley Internet giant of giving most of the company the week off between Christmas and New Year’s.

While many Internet companies slow down in that holiday period and many are much looser about employees taking time off, Yahoo is one of the few that closes down the company, except for essential staff. (LinkedIn also currently offers a rest week to employees.)

Eliminating the rest week is probably a long time in coming and many at the company have long thought it should be eliminated, since it has been paid time off for Yahoo’s 12,000 employees.

“Yahoo has a lot of work to do, so there’s no time to rest,” said one staffer in a common sentiment.

That said, from a financial point of view, the rest week practice does have positive implications for Yahoo. Besides compelling staff to burn off a week of vacation in the current quarter and not carrying over those costs into the new year, there are also cost savings in terms of keeping its facilities going.

No rest week aside, employees are also about to experience an even bigger change soon, as Yahoo’s HR department prepares a new plan to evaluate the efficacy of its staff.

Under Mayer’s plan, sources said, there will be new measurements of performance instituted, based on a variety of benchmarks and evaluations, in order to better understand who the best employees at Yahoo are.

Once that is complete, the company is likely to begin cutbacks on compensation for the bottom 20 percent, including moving them out of Yahoo entirely. The company has suffered many rounds of layoffs over the years, which hurt morale badly due to the often haphazard nature of the cuts.

Mayer is aiming to make the process more organized; she talked about this performance-based system in a company meeting in September. At the time, she noted that employees would be judged on four “Cs” — culture, company goals, calibration and compensation.

In a follow-up memo and meeting, Mayer told staff about this process:

“Moving forward, we will have both annual goals and quarterly goals that we will all commit to, track, and grade ourselves based on … We will then cascade the goals down through the company at the department, team, and individual level …”

What she was talking about is similar to an employee evaluation method used at Google — where Mayer spent her entire career before becoming Yahoo’s latest leader — using an elaborate series of data points to judge how individual employees are doing.

In other words, Yahoos are about to get graded on a very clear curve.

The Chicago daily deals company, which once focused solely on selling coupons for restaurants and spas, has quickly morphed into an online retailer, selling physical goods that are shipped to your front door. In about a year’s time, the side business has grown to account for 11.4 percent of the company’s North American revenue, totaling $193.7 million in the first nine months of the year.

Yesterday, on Groupon’s quarterly conference call, CEO Andrew Mason defended the decision to expand into products, even though it means lower margins and going up against some mighty competitors, like Amazon.

“We built something that fits squarely into our core customer value proposition of the discovery of curated offers and carves out a unique space in the retail e-commerce sandbox,” said Mason, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call. “We neither need to nor do we want to try to out-Amazon Amazon. We’ll never be about comprehensive product selection, but our skills at curating unbeatable offers are clearly resonating with our customers.”

The public markets did not respond favorably to the company’s enthusiasm.

In after-hours trading yesterday, Groupon’s stock plunged 15 percent, or 59 cents a share, and in the morning the news was still bothering investors. Shares fell nearly 30 percent today, or $1.16, to trade at $2.77 a share, way below the company’s last 52-week low of $3.68 a share.

The company’s market value now totals $1.82 billion, regrettably far below Google’s $6 billion buyout offer.

Groupon Goods offers a handful of products daily, making it similar to Amazon-owned Woot, which offers discounted merchandise for a limited time. Some of the electronics are priced in the hundreds of dollars, but most products fall between $10 and $40, filling a deal-seeker’s sweet spot. For instance, as of today, only 190 refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets had been sold for $229, but more than 1,000 Netgear wireless routers had been sold for $32; and more than 1,000 packs of men’s underwear had sold for $12. In particular, Mason illustrated Groupon’s reach by saying it was able to help Garmin sell nearly 30,000 GPS units in 24 hours.

Add to that free shipping and free returns on any purchases over $15 and the offer appears even better. Groupon will also be opening special “stores” for the holidays, including Thanksgiving- and Christmas-themed events. This will expand consumer interest in Groupon this year, compared to last year, when the company’s holiday focus was on resolution-type offers, like weight loss or gym memberships.

So, will Goods be less profitable than its original deals business, and what can investors expect to happen to the company’s original business?

On the call yesterday, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child addressed the topic of profitability.

He said the two businesses are reported differently, according to standard accounting practices. But if they were to be compared on an apples-to-apples basis, a local deal’s operating margin is roughly 10 percent to 12 percent vs. the Goods business, where he hopes margins will end up in the high-single digit percentages. “It should be actually quite similar,” he reasoned.

Mason addressed how the two businesses will work together. Going forward, he said less of the real estate in the emails Groupon sends out will be dedicated to local offers, which will mean coming up with new ways for customers to find them. Two possibilities, he said, are to focus more on Google and Bing search and discoverability on the mobile phone.

“Goods has been the primary driver of our growth over the last two quarters and is now at an annual billings run rate of nearly $1.5 billion,” Mason said. “This begs the question, what does this mean for our local business? Has it reached the limit? To be clear, we continue to believe in the size of the local e-commerce opportunity in front of us.”

cdrin / Shutterstock.com

The drawn-out process is particularly troubling for some that are hoping to launch games or other applications in time for the holidays to take advantage of higher-than-usual phone and tablet sales. “It’s been a nightmare. It’s worse than it’s ever been,” said one developer, who spoke to AllThingsD on the condition of anonymity.

The same developer said Apple has been warning app makers over the phone that based on expected volumes, it could take up to three weeks to get an app approved. Additionally, if developers want to ensure that apps are approved before the New Year, it’s recommended that they submit them by Thanksgiving — only two weeks away.

Apple sent out a letter to developers today, reminding them that the company will not be processing any requests for one week this winter as part of its practice to shut down operations during the winter holidays. The shutdown this year will run from Dec. 21 to Dec. 28. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

While it is hard to gauge exactly what is normal since the approval process largely depends on the publisher’s circumstances, a rule of thumb is that Apple approves apps within 10 to 14 days. The new timelines being shared with some developers are likely presenting the worst-case scenario, with some occurring much faster. According to Apple’s developer portal, 84 percent of new apps and 95 percent of updates have been reviewed in the past eight business days (although those numbers have not been updated since Oct. 15).

A third-party service, called Shiny Development, attempts to track the wait times independently and is reporting an average wait time of nine days. It’s unclear how accurate that data is since it is based on developers self-reporting their times on Twitter. In the meantime, Shiny Development also reports that the Mac App Store wait times are an average of 19 days. Many believe that Apple has shifted resources from the Mac store to the iOS store to help with increased demand on the mobile front, resulting in longer delays for the Mac.

Apple’s week-long vacation always leads to longer approval processes around the holidays, but this year a number of developers are saying that timeframes increased earlier than normal — for obvious reasons. Developers have been busy creating new applications for the iPhone 5, which has a larger display. The iPad mini may also increase submissions as developers choose to tailor their iPad apps for a smaller display. Finally, developers must also update their apps to support new features in iOS 6, including Passbook, Apple’s new maps and Facebook integration.

Apple has been criticized for a slow approval process before, and many delight in the fact that Google’s Android has none at all. To be sure, it seems that the times once promised by Apple have slipped in recent years. In June 2010, Steve Jobs told developers that 95 percent of all apps submitted were being approved within seven days.

Now it’s not only consumers who are willing to stand in line to get their hands on the latest hardware; developers are eager to get their turn, too.

“In the next 12 to 24 months, I think to survive and to compete against Amazon, they will have to leverage the store in a way that they thought they never could,” said Chris Saridakis, the president of GSI Commerce.

The eBay-owned company powers Web sites for such retailers as Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Sports Authority and Radio Shack. It does everything from taking pictures of the company’s inventory to coming up with marketing strategies to shipping the orders.

Saridakis said one of the big trends this holiday season is to use technology to tie together both the virtual and physical shopping experiences — something that is increasingly being referred to as “bricks and clicks.”

“One of the biggest trends this year is how do we help our clients take the inventory in the stores and connect it digitally,” he said. “What’s the best way for that local store to ship out the item instead of the distribution center? Or the best way for a consumer to pick it up, so they potentially buy more items? We are leveraging the physical store by using technology that was meant for the online site.”

Last year, he said, Toys “R” Us experimented with connecting the two channels, and more retailers, like Dick’s Sporting Goods, are implementing it this year. The efforts will be supported by advertising campaigns that will send people to buy online or have items shipped to the home from the store. Shipping from the store — and not the distribution center — has a number of benefits: It’s cheaper because the merchandise will be sent through fewer zones, but also it leverages retail employees who can put downtime to use packing and shipping items. “Thirdly, you’ve actually increased satisfaction because a customer will receive the package in a day, or two days, at the latest,” he said.

This holiday season, Chase Paymentech says, retailers are expecting 51 percent of their holiday sales to come from online, and 45 percent of the retailers are expecting to see a lift in e-commerce sales over last year. The study surveyed 178 retailers in September.

The retailers’ efforts to create a cross-channel approach come a year after Amazon launched a controversial one-day promotion that gave consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compared prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store. The idea was to encourage consumers to treat local stores as showrooms.

Saridakis said that it showed that Amazon was going to try and come up with something that will challenge the industry, and that retailers should be on alert. “It awoke a giant, and not one, but many giants,” he said. GSI mostly works with very large retailers, but in conjunction with eBay, it is trying to provide tools to small- and medium-size retailers, too. “I’m not sure how the numbers worked for [Amazon's promotion],” he said, adding that it was “a warning shot across the bow to everyone.”

Clearly, the online channel is worth fighting for. Even though it still makes up only about 10 percent of overall sales, Saridakis said, it spikes during the holidays. For most of its clients, a normal day means that 8 percent to 10 percent of revenues occur online, but on peak holidays, it will hit 16 percent to 20 percent. “Many clients do more business online on Cyber Monday or Black Friday than they do across all of their physical stores combined. Last year, we had two to three clients cross over the line, but this year we’ll have a lot more.”

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

The 30-second spot shows a day in the life of a woman who uses products she discovered on OpenSky, including a meat and cheese platter recommended by Bobby Flay, an iPhone case from Alicia Silverstone and perfume from actress Mariel Hemingway.

As the company gets ready for its second-ever Christmas season, OpenSky founder and CEO John Caplan calls the TV commercial a “modest test” to tell the world about the emerging commerce company. The commercial, created by ad agency dw+h, officially begins airing today on Bravo, the Food Network and HGTV.

Since its start in 2011, the company has been focused on connections-based e-commerce, meaning that consumers “follow” people on their network to receive product recommendations. The end result is that consumers can find new items serendipitously, much like scrolling through Pinterest or Facebook, rather than entering terms into a search bar. “In traditional e-commerce, consumers suffer from the paradox of choice,” Caplan said. “And in connections-driven commerce, everything they’ve seen is relevant to who you are. It’s entertaining and it’s engaging.”

A year ago, the company raised $30 million in capital; today, it has two million members who have made more than 30 million connections. In six words, he boldly calls it, “Pinterest with a universal shopping cart.”

Some of the company’s other metrics are also trending in the right direction: The average repeat buyer makes seven purchases a year and places an order size of around $85. Caplan declined to provide the company’s annual revenue, but said sales jumped almost 50 percent between August and September. During a recent week, sales topped $700,000.

The company provides plenty of incentive for experts to become product endorsers since they receive a share of the gross profit from each item sold. Shaquille O’Neal, who recently joined, already has 180,000 connections and has adopted the theme of doing “the shopping for the kid in all of us.” In a video, he recommends a turntable that plugs into your computer and converts vinyl to digital, while telling folks to follow him at OpenSky.com/shaq. Honestly, it’s more entertaining to watch than OpenSky’s commercial, but here’s that anyway:

Data from the popular photo-sharing service shows the number of mobile photo app users who use the apps at least once a day doubled to 42 percent, up from 20 percent midyear in 2011.

Meanwhile, only 64 percent reported using digital cameras to capture the majority of their images throughout the season, down from 82 percent a year ago.

Anecdotally, this means more bad news for camera makers, as they become increasingly threatened by smartphones with decent image-taking capabilities.

The Photobucket report also points out that pets were, shall we say, very present in this year’s holiday cards. Some 41 percent of respondents used an image for their holiday cards; among pet owners, 58 percent included Fido/Rudolph in the photo.

The surge in smartphone use didn’t apply to just pictures: Capturing videos on mobile devices also saw a jump during the holidays. A full 80 percent of survey respondents took video using a mobile device at least once throughout the season, up from 59 percent in Photobucket’s summer sampling, while 50 percent of respondents used a mobile device to record video daily or multiple times a day.

While already-avid users of mobile photo apps increased their usage this past holiday season, a substantial 43 percent of respondents indicated they have yet to try a mobile app for taking photos.

Photobucket says it gathered responses from more than 2,200 survey participants, and culled data from Photobucket’s more than nine billion image uploads for the report.

(Photo courtesy of HollyLovesArt/Flickr)

In November and December, the number of online transactions increased by 37 percent, and overall sales jumped by 25 percent. But the average ticket size declined by 9 percent, according to Chase Paymentech, which analyzes information across the top 50 e-commerce retailers.

As it turns out, more consumers are turning to e-commerce for more of their everyday spending, rather than reserving online purchases for big-ticket items.

Here are Chase’s three reasons for the decline:

• More consumers are purchasing digital media, which has a lower price point than most physical goods — MP3s cost less than CDs, e-books cost less than paperbacks, and apps cost less than game cartridges.
• Prices for popular electronics, such as tablets, e-readers and TVs, are falling.
• More retailers are offering free shipping, which eliminates the incentive to fill carts to reach a free-shipping threshold.

EBay, which is the first major e-commerce provider to report Q4 results, confirmed it was also seeing the trend. The company’s payments division, PayPal, reported smaller transactions during the fourth quarter across the merchants it serves.

John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, explained in an interview that the biggest driver of that trend was eBay’s acquisition of Zong, a mobile payments provider that powers the sale of digital goods. In addition, Donahoe said retailers, including eBay, heavily discounted products in order to drive more purchases this holiday.

Amazon, which is the leading e-commerce provider, also said that it is selling a lot of low-priced digital goods, ranging from e-books to MP3s.

Historically, the company has said that Christmas is the largest day of digital sales on Amazon.com, followed by Dec. 26. In 2010, from Christmas Eve through Dec. 30, Amazon customers purchased three times more digital content — including Kindle books, magazines, movies, TV shows, music and digital games — compared to the weekly average for the year.

Despite transactions declining overall, Chase identified two exceptions: Apparel and footwear rose 6 percent; toys rose 10 percent year over year.

(Amazon photo courtesy of thisisbossi)

According to NPD data released today, about $6.7 billion, or 40 percent of consumer retail spending, was spent on the Xbox, breaking down into two categories: $2.1 billion on consoles and $4.6 billion on games.

The figures take into account U.S. retail sales of new physical videogame content, including portable and console hardware, games and accessories.

In all, those sectors generated revenue of $17.02 billion in 2011, an 8 percent decline over the $18.6 billion generated last year. (Yes, I repeat, Microsoft got 40 percent of that in 2011.)

The initial report does not take into account sales from digital formats such as downloadable content on the console, social and mobile games, or other categories, including used and rentals.

Those so-called “newer” categories generated $7.24 billion in revenues last year, an increase of 7 percent over the prior year.

The increase in spending on alternative formats, however, wasn’t enough to offset declines in physical retail. All told, consumer spending across both categories totaled between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion, falling 2 percent over last year.

Separating physical and digital sales is quickly becoming an outdated concept, since the two are so intertwined. Consumers have the choice of purchasing many of the games over the Internet via a digital download versus buying them at Wal-Mart or Target.

NPD acknowledged today that it needs “deeper visibility” into digital distribution to get a complete picture of the industry, which will be its focus in 2012.

Still, the report can still be used as a litmus test to see what is performing well.

Overall, a surprisingly disappointing December is what dragged down results for the whole year, NPD discovered.

“Because of the great slate of content that came to market during the fourth quarter, I had expected December sales to represent a larger portion of total year sales than what occurred,” said NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier, in a release.

Frazier added that December sales accounted for just 23 percent of the annual total, compared to the past 10 years, when December, on average, represented 28 percent of the total.

In addition to Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation also performed well, with both witnessing a 5 percent increase across all game categories for 2011. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Wii, which cannot display HD content, saw a decline year over year.

In a separate statement, Microsoft said that it outsold the PlayStation, the second-place console, by 2.7 million units, and that in all, it has now sold 66 million Xboxes and 18 million Kinect accessories. On a global basis, Sony said in a statement that it sold more than 6.5 million units worldwide this holiday season.

Here are the Top 10 best-selling games in December, according to NPD:

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 by Activision Blizzard
2. Just Dance 3 by Ubisoft
3. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bethesda Softworks
4. Mario Kart 7 for 3DS by Nintendo
5. Battlefield 3 by Electronic Arts
6. Madden NFL by Electronic Arts
7. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations by Ubisoft
8. NBA 2k12 by Take Two Interactive
9. Super Mario 3D Land for 3DS by Nintendo
10. Batman: Arkham City by Warner Bros. Interactive

Although the season kicked off with a bang, there were fears that consumer confidence would fall as the end of the year approached. That did not happen, with people continuing to fill their virtual shopping carts until the very last minute; 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending.

According to comScore, the final tally for online spending for the months of November and December was $37.2 billion, representing a 15 percent increase over last year.

ComScore tracks purchases made on Web sites from a fixed Internet connection, excluding spending done via mobile phones and tablets, so presumably the numbers could be higher.

While the numbers being reported sound positive, some analysts worry if they were enough to give giants like Amazon the growth rates needed to hit expectations. Wall Street analysts are expecting Amazon to post a fourth-quarter growth rate of 38 percent, which would mean it would have to be growing twice as fast as the average market.

But Chase Paymentech’s annual Cyber Holiday Pulse Index painted a rosier picture of the holiday season. Based on tracking 50 of the leading online merchants in the U.S., the report found that during the final two months of the year, transactions were up 37 percent and sales rose 25 percent.

One of the reasons for the huge gains, it said, was because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, allowing merchants to guarantee shipping much later into the week and giving consumers more time to make online transactions.

To be sure, the increase in online shopping is coming from somewhere — most likely at the expense of traditional retail, which is expected to report a less impressive 4 percent growth rate this year.

“It’s clear that e-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Consumers were especially attracted to the deals and discounts available through digital channels -– particularly free shipping, which occurred on well over half of transactions this season.”

The most impressive finding of the season was that 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending, compared to only one day in 2010.

Here is a list of the 10 biggest online shopping days in 2011, led by Cyber Monday:

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Daily deal industry tracking firm Yipit reports that the daily deal industry in North America experienced marginal growth in November, as the major sites were adversely affected by the Thanksgiving holiday.

The number of deals offered increased only 1 percent while total industry gross billings grew by 2 percent during the month.

The largest provider, Groupon, saw the biggest decline.

Groupon grew 6 percent in November, but experienced a double-digit decline during the Thanksgiving holiday week.

Yipit bases its estimates on the sales of vouchers, which it tracks closely. Although Groupon no longer reveals exact sales data on its site, Yipit maintains that it is still able to make fair predictions based on historical data and industry insights.

The daily-deal declines were in stark contrast to the Black Friday experience of online retailers, which saw sales increase to $816 million on the day after Thanksgiving. ComScore said it was the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011, representing a 26 percent increase over the same day in 2010.

The holiday declines occurred despite ambitious programs by both Groupon and LivingSocial, which tried to take advantage of the heavy retail season.

Groupon stepped up its marketing efforts through “Grouponicus,” a holiday shop selling local gifts, deals and travel getaways.

LivingSocial’s Black Friday efforts included offering deals for 20 national brands, including gift cards from Electronic Arts, OfficeMax, Verizon Wireless, Skype and BlueNile.com. LivingSocial even launched a national TV campaign and radio spots to promote the deals.

But Yipit says those efforts didn’t pay off.

For the seven-day period ended Nov. 28, LivingSocial’s gross billings were down 30 percent and 19 percent compared to the two previous periods. And, because of the lower-priced national deals, the average size of its deal price fell to $28 in November from $32 a month earlier.

Yipit did not try to explain why the drops occurred around the holidays, except that they are similar to other periods, such as the Fourth of July.

But the patterns could be compared to social gaming space, which saw its usage sink during the holidays because people were not at work.

A secondary factor may be that more traditional retailers are known for Black Friday offers for others, while daily deals have historically been looked at as items you buy for yourself, and are not necessarily thought of as gifts.

Finally, Yipit said following Groupon and LivingSocial, Travelzoo, AmazonLocal and Google Offers ranked as the third, fourth and fifth largest national providers in November.

No word yet on how daily deals performed in the lead-up to Christmas in December.