Russian newspaper RBC Daily claims the iPhone 5 could go on sale in Russia in November, “almost immediately” after the smartphone launches in the U.S. (ahem …). The publication claims Russian carriers are particularly keen on adding the device to their lineups as quickly after its official launch as possible to avoid losing revenue to the country’s gray market.

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:

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.

The Journal pins the hardware street date for the week of November 8, but I’m told it will likely be earlier. Sources in a position to know say Windows Phone 7 smartphones will be in stores on October 21. They also say that Microsoft (MSFT) has lined up another exclusive carrier overseas: Orange.

According to Nielsen’s rankings, Google (GOOG) captured a 67.3 percent share of the month’s searches–up from 65.4 percent in November. Meanwhile, Yahoo (YHOO) claimed 14.4 percent and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing 9.9 percent of the market.

It’s worth noting that both Yahoo and Bing suffered declines in December. Yahoo slipped nearly a full percentage point from its 15.3 percent market share in November as did Bing, which fell from 10.7 percent. (See tables below; click to enlarge.)

At least, if you’re looking at the market for smartphone ads and “in-app” smartphone ads–as defined by AdMob, the smartphone ad company Google is buying for $750 million.

Also those caveats aside, compare these two charts from AdMob’s November and October reports, respectively. First, here are the October data measuring advertising activity on AdMob’s network, by operating system:

And here are the November data:

So Google (GOOG) is still trailing Apple (AAPL) by a wide margin, but it’s moving quickly–20 percent to 27 percent in a month is awfully fast. And bear in mind that the search giant was at a mere seven percent not too long ago.

If you want, you can raise an eyebrow about AdMob’s potential bias, given its new owner-to-be, but for a long time the big knock on AdMob’s data was that it was too Apple-centric. In any case, there appears to be something happening here. Let’s see what happens in the January report.

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]

ComScore data on the search market are widely considered the industry standard and therefore more closely watched by Wall Street. Still, the big picture is clear: Google is not the competition, it’s the environment in which you compete. The IT industry used to say that about IBM (IBM), but today, the adage seems equally applicable to Google, which dominates the search market just as IBM once dominated the computer industry.

Here is a funny but decidedly creepy new commercial from Microsoft (MSFT), in its ongoing marketing campaign to push its Bing search service.

In the commercial, below, titled “Vampire Decision Engine,” the software giant taps into vampire mania, playing into Halloween and the next chapter in the “Twilight” movie series, “New Moon,” set to debut in November.

In it, an Edward Cullen type, aided by a comely young woman, is looking for a place to “eat.”

According to Bing’s blog, it’s one of a new series of television spots in its $100 million marketing campaign.

The creative is different from earlier commercials, which featured search-overloaded people spouting keywords.

“Our latest Bing advertisement is the first in a series of new commercials where we highlight specific ways Bing can help simplify your life and help you make decisions faster,” said Bing in its blog.

You can see more video on Bing’s YouTube channel, owned by, yep, Google (GOOG)!

The device, intended as a replacement for the Centro, Palm’s last PalmOS smartphone, is expected to feature a 2.6-inch multitouch display, inline keyboard, two-megapixel camera and 4GB of internal storage, among other features. Word on the street has it priced at $99 with contract, rounding out the lower end of Palm’s new webOS lineup.

And when will it arrive at market? No one seems to know, though Tavis McCourt and Justin Patterson at Morgan Keegan & Company speculate that we’ll see it sometime this fall. “We believe initial Pixie shipments will begin in the November quarter, although timing is still uncertain (we believe the goal would likely be a holiday launch),” the analysts wrote in a research note today.

“Although Pixie is unlikely to be a ‘hero’ product with massive advertising and subsidy support, its $99 price point should drive substantial volumes and we believe distribution can be broader initially if not exclusive. In general, we have used the Centro as a benchmark for the Pixie. At a $99 retail price point, the Centro peaked out at about 1 million units shipped/quarter with distribution at all of Palm’s significant historic customers. We have the Pixie ramping quickly to these levels in calendar 2010 as distribution ramps.”

That seems a reasonable expectation, especially if the Pixie isn’t exclusive to a single carrier. And at present, it’s thought that the device will be available, at least initially, from both AT&T (T) and Sprint (S).

So, as McCourt and Patterson note, Palm (PALM) could be poised for some significant gains in market share. “We expect Pre shipments of 2.2 million in 2010 (May 2010) and Pixie shipments of 1.2 million,” the analysts write. “Based on our bottoms up estimate, we forecast Palm will ship just over 7 million smartphones in fiscal 2011, which would likely represent about 4 percent of smartphone share, but a more meaningful–10 percent share of its core N. America market.”

[Image credit: Engadget]

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

A remarkable metric, given the economic downturn. How is it that gaming is thriving at a time when the global financial crisis is squeezing wallets? “There are a couple of reasons,” Ron Meiners, director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group, recently told News.com. “One is the traditional value of entertainment during tough economic times. Like the great fantastic musicals in the 30s. Movies did great, because they took people’s mind off of the troubles they were facing. [And] videogames have great value as entertainment. The number of hours of solid entertainment that comes from a videogame purchase is much greater than a movie, for example, for very comparable cost.”

There was just a glimmer of news at the event, though it wasn’t surprising or pleasant: The Times’s Web business is falling away, day by day.

Digital head Martin Nisenholtz said revenue at his unit had been OK until the last two months of the year, but that there had been “softness in November, accelerating into December…next year is going to be a different year, by a fairly profound margin.”

Bear in mind that the Times’s digital performance pre-November was grim to begin with–digital revenue grew just 4.3 percent in October–and it becomes possible to imagine that digital revenue will decrease for at least part of 2009.

Nisenholtz didn’t do anything rash like attach any numbers to his comments, but he did add a little bit of color: His About.com unit, which is boosted by cost-per-click/search ads, is still doing OK-ish. But the business of selling display ads to Times Web sites is getting pummeled, and could be “under great stress” next year, he says.

So if About.com is doing (comparatively) well, why not sell that asset to help the paper escape its cash crunch? I asked CEO Janet Robinson that question after the event. She did everything but insist that the paper would never part with About.com, and praised it up and down–“an extremely important part of our digital future,” etc.

But given a couple chances to do so, she never explicitly ruled out a sale. Given the paper’s position, I don’t think she can.

[Image Credit: 1962 NYC Newspaper Strike photo from Life/Google archive)

The video has a star-studded cast, all singing Marc Shaiman’s “Prop 8–The Musical,” including Jack Black (as, um, Jesus), Neil Patrick Harris, John C. Reilly, Margaret Cho, Allison Janney and others.

It’s set as a musical being presented by the Sacramento Community College Players.

Prop 8, a ballot initiative passed in the November election in California, eliminated the right of gay and lesbian people to marry by overriding a state Supreme court decision and changing the state Constitution.

It is currently undergoing legal challenge.

In any case, this video is very funny, especially the part about shrimp cocktail:

Please see this disclosure related to me and gay marriage.

One of the more interesting developments of this election cycle has been the boom in viral online videos being used–from a plethora of political spoofs of the candidates to educational videos to people simply venting.

And those pushing citizens, especially young people, to register to vote have been using the boom in online video too.

Last week, BoomTown featured one effort by a passel of celebrities to snarkily get people to vote by telling them not to (but not really).

This week, actress Jessica Alba turns into a Home Shopping Network maniac by hawking “The Muzzler,” for those who don’t vote.

It’s a lot over the top–including featuring a pink muzzle on indestructible “Heroes” cheerleader Hayden Panettiere.

But it does get the point through like a sledge hammer that it is important to vote in the Nov. 4 election.

Alba has already posed for several shocking pictures for the group doing the video–Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan group dedicated to getting young people to vote–including wearing a muzzle and being bound by electric tape.

So, whoever you plan to vote for, here is a list of deadlines to register to vote in the 50 states, with many being today and the rest of this week.

And, here’s the Muzzler video: