record

There has been a lot of talk about the DiggBar and its handling of URLs this week, after the company implemented some changes in its service. To clear the air, Digg has addressed the situation. Digg CEO Jay Adelson issued the following statement on Digg the Blog:

A lot of Facebook executives and employees are probably wearing big, satisfied smiles this morning.  As statistics continue to trickle in, it looks like the vanity URL offering that the company held over the weekend was a huge success.

The European Commission has imposed a record fine against Intel Corp of $1.45 billion (1.06 billion euros) for violating antitrust rules and other practices used to exclude competitor AMD from the computer chip market.

Cybersquatters stayed busy last year, according to a new report from the World Intellectual Property Organization.  Indeed, they set a record, and it looks like they're on track to do so again in 2009.

The PC industry will see its sharpest unit decline in history, with shipments totaling 257 million units in 2009, an 11.9 percent decrease from 2008, according to Gartner. Previously, PC units had their worst decline in 2001 when unit shipments shrank 3.2 percent. "The PC industry is facing extraordinary conditions as the global economy continues to weaken, users stretch PC lifetimes and PC suppliers grow increasingly cautious," said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner.

Click Forensics has released its latest figures on click fraud for the fourth quarter and says it has jumped to the highest level since 2006.The overall industry average click fraud rate grew 17.1 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008. That's up from 16.0 percent in Q3 2008 and from 16.6 percent for Q4 2007.The average click fraud rate of PPC ads appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2 percent. That's up from 27.1 percent rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from 28.3 percent for Q4 2007.

Akamai Technologies said today it saw a record spike in online traffic during the Inauguration of President Barack Obama.As the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming over the Akamai network, the company reported it reached a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority live streams) at around 12:15 p.m. today.Total traffic on the network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second and the company also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time.

Online holiday retail spending has slowed slightly, but remains relatively solid according, to a new report from comScore.For the holiday season through December 12, $19.44 billion has been spent online, about the same amount as last year. For the twelve days beginning with December 1 (Cyber Monday), the kick-off to the heaviest part of the online shopping season, sales totaled $8.26 billion up 3 percent compared to a year ago.