U.S. shoppers hit Web stores en masse yesterday during so-called Cyber Monday, straining the online systems of some well-known vendors such as Costco, Toys "R" Us, and Yahoo that apparently lacked the computing resources to meet the spike in demand.Cyber Monday, the first work day after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the United States, proved an intense online shopping day, causing some sites' response times to slow to a crawl and payment systems to malfunction.Costco, which didn't respond to a request for comment, faced major performance problems on Monday, according to separate reports from two companies that monitor Web site performance.Gomez and Keynote separately detected significant performance degradation in Costco's Web site that made the shopping experience a torturously slow one for people in the United States.The performance problems at Costco slowed down not only the rendering of its home page, but also processes such as searching for products and placing items on the shopping cart, said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance strategy.At its worst point Monday, the Costco home page was taking almost 10 times longer than usual to load -- instead of about 3 seconds, people had to wait 32 seconds for it to render completely, Poepsel said.A multistep process that goes from getting to the home page all the way to creating a one-item order that usually takes a combined 20 seconds, on Monday was taking about 180 seconds, with customers facing nagging delays at every step of the way, he said.The Toys "R" Us Web site also saw a significant performance degradation Monday, although not as bad as Costco's, according to separate reports from Gomez and Keynote. Toys "R" Us didn't reply to a request for comment.The ToysRUs Web site was up to 300 percent slower than usual at times on Monday, and page download times ranged between 30 seconds and 60 seconds between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. EST, according to Keynote.Meanwhile, a Yahoo spokeswoman acknowledged that the flood of online shoppers caused the checkout transaction processing system of its Merchant platform to malfunction, affecting the ability of its stores -- mostly small businesses -- to close sales. According to this Yahoo status page, the problem began Monday morning and wasn't solved until almost midnight Pacific Time.Gomez also reported that TigerDirect's Web site had performance problems on Monday and took about 24 seconds to load at its worst point. Gilbert Fiorentino, CEO of TigerDirect, acknowledged that the company's site ran into performance problems for an hour or two on Monday, but said it recovered fully and fairly quickly.He chalked up the issue to a combination of things, including the day's overall spike in traffic and particular interest in TigerDirect's initiative to donate to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure group for fighting breast cancer. The consumer-electronics vendor launched this campaign on Friday and will run it until December 31. Despite the problems, Monday was a very good sales day, he said.Keynote also saw issues with the site of home improvement and construction products vendor Lowe's on Monday, a repeat of performance problems the site also faced on Friday. Lowe's spokeswoman Maureen Rich acknowledged that the company's site suffered delays Monday, which varied in length depending on when and from where people accessed it. She declined to comment on whether the problems had affected sales."We resolved the issue and are investigating what happened," she said, adding that the site never went down completely at any point in the day.Keynote also flagged the Web sites of Buy.com for having significant problems with its "checkout" button on Monday and of J. Crew for significantly slow response times. Neither Buy.com nor J. Crew immediately replied to requests for comment.When a Web site becomes so slow that customers give up on it and leave, the negative effect of the experience goes beyond that particular instance of a lost sale, Poepsel said. The inconvenience and disappointment customers feel erodes their confidence in and loyalty to the company and damages the brand, he said.This holiday season, Keynote is tracking 30 major retail Web sites, and so far has found that about a third of them had significant performance problems on Friday and Monday when accessed from monitoring points in the United States, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations."A lot of these Web sites have done a good job optimizing their home page, making it fast to download and really capturing that potential customer coming in, but where we see many performance issues is during the shopping experience," White said.The problems seem more common among brick-and-mortar retailers that are still trying to perfect their online stores, he said. These vendors aren't load-testing their sites properly prior to big shopping days such as Cyber Monday, so their systems wobble when there is an extraordinary spike in traffic, White said."A lot of traditional brick-and-mortar companies are jumping in on the bandwagon of online shopping this year, more so than any other year, and they really need to understand the importance of Web site performance and availability," White said.E-commerce sites were very busy on Monday and Friday, according to Akamai, which tracked usage of more than 300 such sites.Aggregate traffic from North America to this group of Web sites reached a peak of almost 3 million visitors per minute at around 2 p.m. ET on Monday, a 37 percent increase over 2006's Cyber Monday. Global traffic hit a peak of 4.6 million visitors per minute, up 30 percent. On Friday, traffic peaked at around 4 million visitors per minute, up from about 3 million on the same day last year, according to Akamai.Online retail spending hit $531 million on Friday, up 22 percent, while Monday was expected to generate more than $700 million, according to comScore.On Sunday, Shop.org, the e-commerce arm of the National Retail Federation retailers' trade group, released the results of a survey forecasting that significantly more U.S. residents would shop online on Cyber Monday this year than last year. The survey predicted that about 72 million people would shop online, compared with a little more than 60 million last year.This story was updated on November 27, 2007

    1 minute with ForexSurvivor   (26 Nov Asia) EURUSD reversal on Friday is ‘shaky, inconvincible & weak’ as Thanksgiving Holiday illiquidity ensured a wrong movement. I would prefer considering Wednesday Closing rather than Friday’s even though I am seeing ‘extra’ dips in eurusd which will be nothing but a preparation for launching short trend to pierce 150euro-psycho price. For the sake of the trading do not sell 15000, and buy the high of the previous week to pierce that

Commenting on yesterday's piece, Hanan Cohen says that newspapers in Israel use TinyUrl to publish web addresses on paper. This is both a good idea and not such a good idea. First, it's a good idea because it saves space and in print, space is at a premium. But they're leaving money on the table. If they used their own web address they could monitor traffic, see how many clicks each location in the paper generated. Maybe stories on the op-ed page generate more clicks than those on the front page? Maybe stories by Ms. Jones get more clicks than those by Mr. Smith? There's also a chance to reinforce the brand, and drive more traffic to your site as opposed to tinyurl.com. And it's good for the web, because it helps keep us from centralizing too much on one site. Lots of reasons to put up your own url shortener. So someday you might see urls like this in the NYT... http:\//nyt.us/7h It's going to be a busy day here, so probably not too many posts. If you're in the US, good luck in your travel or prep for the big holiday tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the day when the OPML 2.0 spec is finalized. If you have any further comments, this is the last minute! As they say, speak now or forever be a troll turkey. Otherwise, we'll have a new official format to deploy starting tomorrow. Thanks everybody!!!

The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients "despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job."About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a "sense of outrage" when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system's record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season."I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book," he said. "We can't seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable."Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said."You break it, you fix it," he said. "That's a very simple concept. It's been around in china shops for years."In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:* Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.* Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.* The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).* Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF's president. "This is not rocket science," he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition."Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?" Johnson said. "We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we're not doing it."

Georgia's sales tax holiday starts a minute after midnight Thursday and continues until midnight at the end of the day Sunday.

Q. We're looking for a last-minute family holiday in the Netherlands, but we don't want to go to Amsterdam, because we've been there before.

Parliament on Sunday went off duty after completing last minute constitutional amendments and approval of laws that will pave the way to elect the president by popular vote. However,

(InfoWorld) - Failure to agree on a law slashing the cost of using your mobile phone abroad this week hasn't dented the European Commission's optimism that the legislation will still be passed, it said Friday. The proposal has been the subject of intense negotiations between the European Parliament, the Commission and the 27 national governments all week. There was still no agreement by late Friday, but Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the Commission "remains confident" the law will be passed. The Commission and the Parliament are eager to reach agreement on maximum levels of so-called roaming charges before Europeans start their annual migration south to warm holiday destinations -- the peak time of year for using phones abroad. However some powerful countries are resisting pressure to curb the costs, which the Commission says it wants to reduce by around 70 percent. The U.K. and France are trying to secure a better deal for mobile phone operators, under pressure from two of the largest mobile phone companies in the E.U. -- Vodafone Group of the U.K. and France's Orange. Germany, holder of the six-month rotating presidency of the E.U., is negotiating on behalf of all 27 countries. It has proposed capping roaming charges at €0.60 ($0.82) per minute for making a call abroad, and €0.30 for receiving one. The Parliament has proposed €0.45 and €0.20 respectively -- similar to the levels suggested by the Commission. Failure to narrow the gap means that the proposal has been removed from the agenda of next week's plenary session of Parliament. Instead, it will be debated and voted on come May 22, the Commission said. The GSM Association has lobbied lawmakers intensively over the past months. It argues that the Parliament's price caps would more than half operators' annual retail revenues from €5 billion to €2.4 billion. The organization claims that this dramatic fall would curb operators' abilities to innovate and invest in new services and infrastructure, and it could lead to a contraction in coverage across the E.U. European consumer organizations describe current roaming retail prices as "scandalously high" (€0.58 to €5 per minute) and want the price caps to be readjusted to reflect the real costs of roaming, which, according to a French consumer group, is around €0.24. If the Parliament vote takes place at the end of May 2007, the 27 telecoms ministers from each country could give their final approval to the law at a meeting on June 7. As the regulation will be directly applicable in all member states after its publication, the new price caps could still take effect in July.  ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today!

Many online merchants this year will still sell goods with standard shipping terms through Monday, Dec. 18, or Tuesday, Dec. 19, a boon for late holiday shoppers.

CNN's Judy Fortin delivers a quick dose of healthy information in her daily Health Minute, which airs Monday through Friday between 1 and 6 p.m. on CNN Headline News.

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