The Daily, the iPad newspaper News Corp. was supposed to unveil a few weeks ago, has a new launch date and a new venue for its debut: Feb. 2 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will preside over the event, which was originally to be held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But he won’t be accompanied by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently took another medical leave of absence. Instead, he’ll be joined Eddy Cue, Apple vice president of Internet services–the guy who runs the the iTunes Store.

The Daily, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka previously reported, is expected to use a new “push” subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers’ iPads every morning. Tweaks to that feature are reportedly the cause of the delayed launch.

News Corp., which owns this Web site, reports earnings this afternoon.

All of the device sales appear to be ahead of Wall Street expectations, with Mac sales at the low end of the range of what analysts were looking for.

On the Mac side, laptop sales continued to outpace desktops. Apple sold 2.6 million portables, up 37 percent from a year earlier, as compared with desktop sales of 1.2 million units, a 1 percent drop from a year ago. As for iPods, while total units were down 7 percent from the prior year’s holiday quarter, revenue was actually up 1 percent, indicating users were opting for pricier models, such as the iPod touch.

On the earnings conference call, which just started, CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed strong iPod touch sales, saying that the product’s sales were up 27 percent and accounted for more than half of all iPods sold in the quarter.

After Yahoo and Microsoft finally integrated their massive search technology and advertising partnership, comScore is reporting that Yahoo’s explicit core search share in the U.S. had declined in December.

Yahoo’s 16 percent share was down from 16.4 percent in November, which was actually down from 16.5 percent from October.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s aggressive Bing search service rose from 11.5 percent in October to 11.8 percent in November to 12 percent in December.

And big-guns Google more than regained a small loss from October (66.3 percent) to November (66.2 percent) in December, with a 66.6 percent share. (Yes, all you conspiracy theorists: 6, 6, 6.)

Yahoo’s decline in explicit core search–which comScore noted “excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results”–is, of course, a key metric to watch at the company, which needs to improve its revenue growth.

Here are some lovely tables to peruse:

And if you guessed it was from all of those people putting up their unwanted presents on eBay, you are completely, 100 percent…wrong. Dec. 25 and 26 saw record mobile traffic to Zillow.

In general, mobile traffic to the real-estate site surges whenever people are out of the office. During the average weekday, Zillow says that only about 15 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. On a typical weekend, anywhere from one-fifth to one quarter of Zillow’s traffic is from phones. On Thanksgiving, that figure reached 30 percent, while Christmas Day saw a record number of visits to the mobile site, with phones accounting for a third of all Zillow’s traffic.

As for eBay, it said Dec. 12 was its busiest mobile sales day ever, with the number of transactions well more than double that of the busiest day of 2009. That marked two years in a row that the second Sunday in December was the busiest eBay shopping day.

For those who want to slice eBay’s mobile business in all sorts of ways, the company has posted an interactive graphic with all sorts of fun facts. For instance, auto parts represented 15 percent of mobile sales in Germany as compared with only 8 percent in the U.S.

The retail industry coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” to represent the Monday immediately following Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). Presumably everyone was returning to work and continuing their shopping online.

However, the term ended up a misnomer because there was always a day closer to Christmas that exceeded it in sales, as procrastinators waited until the last minute to shop online.

Well, that may change this year, says comScore, which measures such stuff.

“At this late juncture in the online holiday season, we have likely already witnessed the peak spending day of the year, which means that Cyber Monday should emerge as the season’s heaviest online spending day for the first time in history,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a release.

That’s not to say other days didn’t come close.

Overall, online spending this year is up 12 percent, when looking at the 47 days between Nov. 1 and Dec. 17, and this past week’s numbers were even higher. Online shopping reached $5.15 billion in the week ended Dec. 17, jumping 14 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

Both Monday and Friday were abnormally strong, coming in at $943 million and $942 million, respectively.

But for the first time ever, neither of those day was able to outperform Cyber Monday, which hit an all-time record of $1.03 billion.

Historically, two days in the past week have particularly stood out. Monday is named “Green Monday” after the color of money, and Friday is called “Free Shipping Day,” because a number of physical and e-commerce retailers teamed up to promote online shopping by giving away free postage for a 24-hour period. Monday was up 12 percent over last year, and Friday was up 61 percent.

Based on historical patterns, comScore had reasoned that one or more days would exceed $1 billion in the past week. Now with Christmas six days away, it’s likely too late to see that kind of volume again. Although Amazon’s cutoff for fee shipping ends tonight, and Wal-Mart’s free shipping (with guaranteed arrival by Dec. 24) ends tomorrow night, and department stores like Macy’s is offering free shipping until Monday for items $99 or more.

In all, the shopping season to date stands at $27.46 billion.

Happy holidays, indeed.

News Corp. plans to launch the publication the week of January 17, multiple sources tell me.

The caveat here is that launch plans have moved around a couple of times in the past few months; until recently, lots of folks expected to see this thing in December. But this latest date looks like a much safer bet. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Given that News Corp. has hired dozens of blabby journalists for the Daily, and interviewed many more, lots of other details about the app/service have leaked out already: It will come out daily, it will sell for 99 cents a week, it will use lots of video and it will have cool multimedia bells and whistles, including some kind of 3-D effect that lots of people are very excited about. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs may or may not participate in a launch event.

Most important for other media companies: The Daily is supposed to use a new “push” subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers’ iPads every morning.

If we do see that on the Daily next month, expect to see several other new iPad apps using the same feature shortly afterward.

That offering won’t resolve Apple’s dispute with conventional publishers, who want to be able to control their subscriptions–or at least get access to subscriber data–for iTunes app versions of their print products. But for new, digital-only products like the Daily, that data isn’t as crucial, and the ability to set up a recurring subscription would be a big step forward.

The latest domestic sales data from NPD shows Apple on pace to sell between 4.1 million and 4.3 million Macs in the December quarter. Which would make for another record breaker in an ever-lengthening string of them. After all, Apple’s U.S. Mac sales are up 20 percent year-over-year for the first two months of the current quarter. And with international sales growing faster than domestic, the company will likely see between 22 percent and 28 percent year-over-year growth.

If that trend continues–and with the recent refresh of the iMac and MacBook Air lines, there’s no reason to think it won’t–2011 could end up being the “Year of the Mac” as well.

“We believe the iPhone should see continued solid growth into the December quarter with support from improved inventory in the US,” Barclay’s analyst Ben Reitzes said in a note to clients today. “Apple has now expanded distribution to Target (Target also sells the iPad) to join others including Apple stores, AT&T, Best Buy, Radio Shack and Wal-Mart. Perhaps more importantly, we believe availability is improving overseas, with the iPhone 4 set to ship for its first full quarter in China. International demand seems strong into calendar year-end.”

For the quarter ending in December, Reitzes figures Apple will sell 14.8 million iPhones, with sales ramping up after that, assuming the company moves to a multicarrier model in the states. Says Reitzes, “As we move into C1Q we continue to believe it is quite likely that we will see the iPhone introduced on Verizon in the US which should continue sales momentum. By CY-end 2011, we believe Apple will have more than 2 carriers in the US, which could help its market share vs. Android significantly.”

These days, Twitter is carrying some 64 million tweets per day, 2.7 million tweets per hour, 44,481 tweets per minute, and 741 tweets per second. Which is impressive.

“Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost six billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace,” Pingdom analysts note. “Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.”

Indeed. And that growth has got to be encouraging for a company hoping to justify its rich valuation by selling its audience to advertisers. Now if it could only figure out how to manage it a bit better. Ironically, the service has been suffering latency and availability issues today.

[Image Credits: Pingdom, Scarletbits]

Maybe, according to comScore: The Internet traffic counter says Americans’ appetite for Web clips actually shrank in January.

ComScore says 173.4 million people watched 32.4 billion streams that month. That’s down from 177.6 million and 33.2 billion respectively, in December.

A minor dip, to be sure. Bear in mind that the number of videos streamed is more than double the total we saw a year ago.

And maybe you can chalk the month-to-month drop on the Christmas holidays, which give people lots of downtime that they tend to spend on the Web.

Still, given that we’ve been consuming ever-increasing amounts of video for quite some time, it’s worth noting.

It’s also worth noting that comScore’s (SCOR) numbers don’t mean exactly what you think they do.

When comScore says that Hulu streamed 903,078 videos in January (down 10 percent from December), it doesn’t mean that Americans watched 903,078 shows. It means they watched some combination of 903,078 clips and advertisements, because comScore counts them both as streams.

In other words, a single episode of say, “The Daily Show,” could count as multiple streams, depending on the number of ads Hulu showed.

There’s nothing wrong with counting this way as long as we all know what the numbers mean. But comScore itself acknowledges that it’s confusing. And the company says it plans to break out ads and content at some point in the nearish future.

ComScore’s competitor, Nielsen, meanwhile, already distinguishes between the two. (If you want more on this, check out Hulucination, an awesomely obsessive blog by Big Money writer Chadwick Matlin).

Back to the numbers. Beyond the dip, pretty much the same thing we see every month: Hulu–owned by News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC–streams more video than anyone. Except for Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which dwarfs everyone.

Meanwhile Vevo, the “Hulu for music videos” owned by two of the big music labels, shows up on the Top 10 list in its first full month of operation.

In other news: Did you know you can choreograph a figure-skating routine to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?

That’s an impressive spike and one that continues a three-month streak of gains that began last November after a worrisome period of stagnation between September and October (click on chart and table below to enlarge).

Hard to believe that comScore’s measurements for January 2009 showed Twitter.com with an estimated six million visitors. With 67.5 million more just a year later, the site’s annual growth rate is a jaw-dropping 1,107 percent.

[Image Credits: comScore, Scarletbits]

According to comScore’s (SCOR) January 2010 core search volume and market share data for the U.S.–as reported by J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan, Bing’s share of the search market rose to 11.3 percent from 10.7 percent in December. Meanwhile, Google’s share fell to 65.4 percent, from 65.7 percent in December and Yahoo’s to 17 percent, from 17.3 percent. Not significant declines by any means (though Yahoo is down 21 percent year-over-year), but nice little breadcrumbs for Bing to snap up just the same.

Which is not to say that Microsoft (MSFT) will be able to parlay its advance into more meaningful gains. Certainly, it will continue to be dwarfed by Google (GOOG) for the foreseeable future. But perhaps not by Yahoo (YHOO), particularly given the discrepancies in their core search volume. In January, Bing saw its core search volume increase by 49.6 percent, up slightly from 49.4 percent in December. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s core search volume decreased by 8.9 percent, considerably more than the 1.9 percent decline it suffered in December.

At $2.99 a pop, and after subtracting Apple’s 30 percent fee, that’s about $39,000 in revenue for the publisher, which isn’t even enough to rehire anyone the company let go during last fall’s layoffs.

And those sales numbers are puny compared with the title’s analog reach: GQ reports average newsstand sales of more than 200,000 per issue, plus more than 600,000 paid subscribers.

But they’re enough for Condé to declare the digital magazines, designed to be consumed on iPhones and iPods, a “success out of the gate.” For now, that seems plausible for two reasons.

For starters, this is a Big Media digital product that doesn’t cut into the existing analog offering. The company isn’t exactly sure whether digital buyers cannibalized print numbers, but its hunch is that they did not, and that seems right to me.

Second, it doesn’t matter from a financial perspective. That’s because Condé has convinced advertisers to credit both sales equally. And selling digital copies via iTunes is much more lucrative than spending money to print and distribute paper copies.

Just as important: While Condé won’t say so out loud, sales of the first few GQ iPhone issues have given the company confidence that it will be able to port the app to the iPad, or whatever Apple (APPL) calls the tablet it plans to unveil next week.

The ported app won’t be as flashy as the digital demos of tabletized magazines Condé and other publishers have shown off–it’s pretty much a literal translation of the magazine into digital form–but it’s a start.

The eye-popping stuff, meanwhile, will take some time to build.

Remarking on Apple’s (AAPL) December quarter in a note to investors this morning, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Doug Reid said iPhone and iMac sales for the period have been quite strong. “Our checks suggest December quarter sales of iPhones are tracking ahead of our prior estimates, driven by increased market penetration in the United States, additional carrier agreements in multiple countries, and first-time launches in Korea and China,” Reid wrote.

“Mid-December Apple Store and carrier checks indicate that the 2009 holiday shopping season has seen a sharp increase in the purchase of iPhone as a gift option,” the analyst continued. “We also estimate better than expected iMac sales in the quarter following a successful product refresh (announced on October 20). Our checks indicate strong demand throughout the holiday season for the new iMac line.”

Seems that the shipping delays associated with Apple’s new 27-inch iMacs haven’t undermined sales nearly as much as some feared. Reid says that demand and in-store availability of both 21.5-inch and 27-inch models remains strong, so much so that he’s raising his iMac unit estimate for the December quarter from 655 thousand to 721 thousand.

Demand for the iPhone has also been strong thanks to the end of carrier-exclusivity agreements in some markets.

“The ability to add iPhones to existing family service plans with carriers has been a key driver in C4Q09, our checks indicate. In addition, industry checks also suggest that AAPL is benefiting from the addition of second or third carriers in markets (e.g. UK, Canada) and from a strong initial sales ramp in Korea.”

How much of a benefit? A sizable one. Reid figures Apple will sell 8.21 million to 8.89 million iPhones during the December quarter. And he expects the company to sell 31.59 million to 32.27 million in fiscal 2010.

Five dollars and a ratty “Think Different” T-shirt says Apple shares will hit another new 52-week high today.

According to the latest NPD Group data, as reported by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, overall Mac sales in the U.S. were up 21 percent year over year in October and November. MacBook and MacBook Pro sales rose five percent during the period while desktop Mac sales increased 74 percent.

Impressive, to say the least. Certainly, these figures bode well for the quarter–assuming, of course, there’s little impact from those iMac shipping delays I wrote about earlier today. Said Munster: “While it remains early, it appears the new iMacs are driving Mac sales in the Dec. quarter and we are incrementally more confident in slight unit upside in the Dec. quarter.”

[Image credit: Flickr/nobihaya]

Some of you might see this as bad news, but I’m in a lemonade-from-lemons mood and I’ve found an upside. You can’t plagiarize yourself, right?

Peter Kafka, MediaMemo/All Things Digital, April 14, 2009:

Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected.

In the old days, this might have qualified as news. But for the past year or so, Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been revising its forecasts downward every couple of months as the reality of the financial meltdown sinks in. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff.

Peter Kafka, MediaMemo/All Things Digital, July 6, 2009:

Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected.

In the old days, this might have qualified as news. But for the past year or so, Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been revising its forecasts downward every couple of months as the reality of the financial meltdown sinks in. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff.

See you in October!

Sacked.

A quick scan of the carnage.

• 8,000 whacked at Sprint (S)
• 6,000 let go at Royal Philips (PHG)
• 1,100 sacked at AMD (AMD)
• 4,000 adjusting to new economic realities at Motorola (MOT)
• 3,000 laid off at Seagate (STX)
• And a few hundred at Oracle (ORCL), as well
• 1,900 declared redundant at Dell (DELL)
• 5,000 losing their jobs at Microsoft (MSFT)
• 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors pink-slipped at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)
• 1,500 gone at Yahoo (YHOO)
• 12,000 released into the wild at AT&T (T)
• 600 cut loose at Adobe (ADBE)
• 6,000 aligned with the global economic climate at Sun (JAVA)
• And at Nortel (NT) 1,300 positions cut on top of the 1,200 previously announced

Grim isn’t it? Sad thing is, this is just a simple snapshot of what’s been happening in tech. According to the Department of Labor, employers in the states shed 524,000 workers in December, 2.6 million in all of 2008. That makes the last year the worst for layoffs since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost. And that’s frightening, because according to some experts, we’ll get no respite in 2009. “We are very early in the cycle,” Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland told BusinessWeek, adding that we’ve so far only seen a sliver of the job losses to come. “We are going to see the fury of the Old Testament for what we have done to the economy.”

Now, Net Applications cautions that the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage, which increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So perhaps the IE’s lower usage during the month was a bit more pronounced than it might otherwise have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that its reign is clearly in decline. In January of 2007, IE held nearly 80 percent market share; now it holds 68.15. Still, the lion’s share of the market, but a share that has slipped nearly 15 percent in just two years, (click on chart below) and given recent news, seems certain to slip further in the months ahead.

A disheartening prediction. And to make matters worse, Bailey speculates that Apple (AAPL) won’t unveil any new product categories at MacWorld come January, and because of that won’t see the sort of near-term pop it typically experiences after the introduction of a compelling new product. Said Bailey, “[The] nearer-term outlook is less positive, as it now looks unlikely that Apple will launch a new product category at MacWorld in early January, taking away a potential catalyst for the shares and causing Apple to try to generate demand in a tough environment without the benefit of a new offering in the first part of 2009.”

Apple shares closed at $94.75, down 3.58 percent for the day on the news.