With turkey time over in the US, the first results are in for online shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Black Friday, normally a day for mass offline shopping when bricks-and-mortar retailers finally enter the black, saw a 42 per cent increase in online sales volume on last year to $434m, according to comScore Networks.

High traffic caused an outage on Wal-Mart’s site as shoppers sought to avoid “mayhem at the malls.”

However, Nielsen/Net Ratings reported traffic to retail sites was up a more modest 12 per cent on last year, with eBay the top destination, followed by Amazon and Wal-Mart.

The disparity could be explained by shoppers buying big-ticket items such as high-definition televisions – Nielsen said the consumer electronics category received a 211 per cent boost in visits on the previous week.

Today is the retailers’ conceit known as Cyber Monday. While Amazon is ignoring it, Google is plugging its Checkout product - adding merchants, charity donations and promotions to a new holidays website.

Checkout could certainly use a boost - none of the top-ten e-tailers recorded by Nielsen use the service, according to the listings on the new site.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

The Mac-o-sphere is abuzz over a story on Fortune online that says Apple is close to striking an exclusive deal to distribute the Beatles’ music catalogue over iTunes.

Fortune is right in suggesting that an iTunes-Beatles deal would mark a "Nixon Brezhnev-worthy truce" between Steve Jobs and Neil Aspinall, the former Beatles manager who looks after Apple Corps, the Beatles’ holding company. In May, Mr Jobs cheekily invited the Beatles to make their digital debut on iTunes after Apple emerged victorious from a copyright dispute with Apple Corps over the use of the Apple name.

During that trial, Apple Corps said it planned to start selling music online after years of shunning the medium, but it didn’t mention iTunes  - or any other platform, for that matter. Two weeks ago, the head of EMI’s North American group told a conference in San Francisco that the Beatles’ catalogue would be available for download "soon."

Our own source close to EMI, the Beatles’ record label, says there is nothing new in the Fortune story. Apple, as usual, says "we don’t comment on rumours and speculation."

Meanwhile, the market for ‘new’ Beatles releases looks vibrant as ever. "Love" a mash-up of remixed Beatles songs, has reached number five on Amazon.com’s top sellers’ list just a week after its debut. Personally, I’m not going to get excited until EMI to relents and distributes The Grey Album.

Not wishing to put a damper on any festive spirits or shopping plans, but there are so many tech toys Santa can’t provide this Christmas, we thought we’d draw up a Grinch’s Wishlist over the next couple of weeks. Our Top Ten list, in descending order, begins with….
10. An Enzo Ferrari – all 400 of these million-dollar cars have been sold and the new version is not due until 2007.
There is one less on the second-hand market since Stefan Eriksson, a former executive of the Gizmondo handheld game console company, famously crashed his red one at 162mph on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in February.
The Swede was sentenced to three years in jail earlier this month for drunk driving, embezzlement relating to a second, black, Enzo Ferrari and illegal possession of a firearm.
His UK bank is repossessing the black Enzo, so a chance of a bargain there, but don’t even think about picking up a Gizmondo this Christmas – the concept was a non-starter and the company went spectacularly bankrupt in January.

US online retailers are licking their chops at the prospect of Black Friday and Cyber Monday bookending the coming Thanksgiving weekend.
Already, shoppers have spent $6.35bn online (excluding travel) since the holiday season officially began on November 1, according to comScore Networks. That’s 23 per cent up on last year.
ComScore expects spending in November and December to exceed $24bn, 24 per cent higher than 2005, and Cyber Monday splurges to reach almost $600m, up from $484m last year.
However, there will be precious little to be made on the new PlayStation 3 due to shortages, although Sony points out a halo effect on the PSP - sales up 29 per cent week-on-week - and the PS2 - up 24 per cent.
Speaking of haloes, Microsoft says the game standing in for the long-awaited Halo 3 this season - Gears of War - has sold 1m copies in its first two weeks, undoubtedly beating Sony’s rival Resistance: Fall of Man, given the lack of PS3s.
Oh, and we may have finally established a link between the lines we observed for the PS3 and the queues outside Niketown here - Nike has come out with a limited edition PS3 sneaker.
Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

This is a golden year for the cellphone industry and all who sail with it.
More than a quarter of a billion mobile phones were sold worldwide in the third quarter, according to today’s figures from Gartner, and with the holiday season ahead, there must be a chance of hitting 1bn this year for the first time.
Sales of 251m in Q3 were up 21.5 per cent on last year and Gartner raised its full-year forecast to 986m units, with 281m forecast in Q4.
For chipmakers, it has been nothing but good news for the likes of Texas Instruments, the biggest supplier of chips for cellphones, and Qualcomm.
But this may be the best of times as slower growth lies ahead, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. It predicted last month annual growth of around 16 per cent this year will have declined to 3 per cent by 2011, when 1.255bn phones will be sold.
"The growth in developing markets such as India, China and Latin America is impressive but we are not seeing the same levels of phone take-up per capita," said Dave McQueen, Principal Analyst.
"With handset sales in saturated developed markets being much slower and reliant on replacement of old models, the net effect is a major slowdown in overall rate of growth from next year."
Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Beijing: Who says you can’t beat the pirates and file-sharers on price? Not Quacor.com, a new Chinese website whose English tag-line says it all: "The world 1st website for copyright movie absolutely free!".

Quacor, which opened shop last weekend, is offering a roster of Chinese and foreign films ranging from chop-socky comedy Shaolin Soccer to hacker fantasy Matrix Reloaded for download or streamed viewing without charge.

If it sounds a bit too good to be true, it may well be: we cash-strapped comrades at the FT Beijing bureau have yet to manage to actually watch any of the films despite repeated efforts, and the site’s discussion board is full of complaints that it is not working.

Quacor staffers say their servers have simply been swamped by demand, though, and the site may still be, er, one to watch.

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You won’t find this on a Google search …but the $500-a-share internet company wants Mark Warner, Virginia’s former governor, to run for president in 2008.

Google has blown a cool $13,000 on campaign contributions this year to Warner, according to statistics obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

That is double the amount it has donated to another highly touted Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Warner made millions from a start-up mobile phone company and later led a venture capital fund. He showed his internet smarts when he allowed himself to be interviewed in the virtual world Second Life in August.

But “blown” may be the operative word for the Google bucks - the company would have been surprised to learn last month that Warner had decided to spend more time with his family rather than run for the White House.

Google is spending less of its own time in Washington than other companies. It is one of the least active on the Hill, spending just $720,000 on lobbying firms since 1998, according to the Center.

Its new index on political spending by internet, software and electronic equipment companies suggests a general Democratic leaning among technology companies.

IBM may be known as Big Blue not just for its logo but also for its politics. It has spent $1.6m in campaign contributions since 1998 - 58 per cent going to Democrats and 39 per cent to Republicans - and paid $49m to outside lobbying firms.

It was topped by Microsoft, who voted Republican in contributing 53.7 per cent of its $15.8m to the red party. Microsoft spent $56.5m on lobbying.

Google’s campaign contributions are a pittance in comparison at $450,000, but 98.5 per cent of this went to Democrats.

The Center’s Media Tracker includes campaign contributions to all candidates for Congress and the presidency from 1998 to 2006 and money spent lobbying the federal government since 1998.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Venture capitalists spend a lot of time with their portfolio companies hashing out business plans. Now it may be time for the industry to indulge in a little self-help.

There are two big problems facing VCs. First, firms that raised massive funds during the bubble have to put all that money to work chasing a finite number of good ideas. Second, even when a firm stumbles onto a good idea, it’s not as easy to cash out as it used to be. Although the market for acquisitions remains healthy, the IPO market has slowed to a trickle, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley. And public offerings are what the industry has traditionally relied upon to make most of its returns. This secular shift in the IPO market is compounding the pressure faced by the industry as it enters its fourth down cycle in 40 years.

The mounting pressure has led to calls for an overhaul of the VC business model. As Clint Harris, founder of Grove Street Advisors and a limited partner in several venture funds told me, "there are some trends emerging that aren’t favouring those who are sticking to their knitting."

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Microsoft may have spent four years and a small fortune trying to catch up with Google, but for now search is very much a two-horse race. These latest figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show that Google’s 50 per cent share of searches in the US has been holding steady, while Yahoo! has managed to claw back a couple of points over the past year or so.

Microsoft continues to lose ground. It has lost around a third of its share in the past 18 months, falling to less than 9 per cent. As Steve Berkowitz, new head of online services, says in this interview in the FT, a new user interface and better marketing of Windows Live would help. Great technology isn’t enough: time to start acting like a real consumer company.

Looks like we’re not the only ones who have noticed the big pickup in penny stock spam making it through our spam blockers.

Via Venture Chronicles, Eweek says security experts have traced some of the spam back to a sophisticated gang of Russian hackers running a network of 70,000 zombie computers. The network, known as a ‘botnet’, is capable of sending up to a billion spam messages a day. Apparently, the ‘bot herders’ who control the network have been harvesting email addresses from "about 20 small investment and financial news sites" in order to better target their ‘pump and dump’ stock scams.

Meanwhile, Mikko Hyppönen and his team at F-Secure have been connecting the dots on Warezov, a mass-emailing worm it says is responsible for the recent  pickup in Viagra spam.  This scam, which sends emails that link to fake pharmacy sites, is being run out of China.

Earlier this month, Paul Taylor wrote in the FT about the spam "tsunami" that is threatening corporate computer networks:

Based on an analysis of almost 70bn e-mails sent between September and November, there was a 59 per cent rise in spam over the period and the onslaught is continuing, according to Postini, the e-mail message management company.

Unwanted e-mail represents 91 per cent of all e-mail and the daily volume of spam has risen by 120 per cent over the past 12 months.

It’s easy to get depressed about this huge influx of spam. Fortunately, someone has found a use for it. Spamland, from the Brothers McLeod, is an art project that dramatises the semisensical text that image spammers use to get around spam blockers. Their first installment came out a few weeks ago. You can watch it on YouTube here.