Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the Thanksgiving weekend’s most newsworthy bits below.
“ChromeOS machines could immediately replace 60% of the Windows desktops in the corporate market.” — Linus Upson, VP Engineering of Google Chrome (Fortune)
- Black Friday sales rose a meager 0.3% compared with last year. Despite thefts, stampedes and other decidedly cringe-worthy shenanigans, Americans spent $10.7 billion on discounted merchandise. (CNNMoney and CNN)
- Web site WatchMouse tracked the top 100 e-tailers in the month leading up to Black Friday and found that 27 of them had 100% uptime and 15 experienced 99.99% uptime. On the opposite end, the winner for “worst e-tailer” went to American Eagle Outfitters for nearly one full day of downtime. (TechCrunch)
- Is Facebook readying a video chat feature with Skype? One eagle-eyed app developer stumbled across “VideoChat” code that certainly lends credence to the idea. (Green Any Site)
- Rumored iPad 2.0 features: video cam (duh), new screen display, a 3-axis gyroscope, “better mobility” (ie. lighter form factor?), and an undisclosed number of USB ports. (ComputerWorld via 9to5Mac)
- Sony TV head Yoshihisa Ishida wants to end the division’s six-year (un)lucky streak by making the company’s flagship business more fiscally responsible and introducing products that “change the perception of the TV.” To that end, he’s introducing the Sony Internet TV, the first TV set with Google TV integrated from the get-go. (Wall Street Journal)
- WikiLeaks announced it came under attack yesterday just hours before the site was expected to leak new troves of previously-undisclosed documents. According to the whistleblower web site, it was flooded with data requests, aka a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. (CNN)
- Seems someone managed to finally out-leak WikiLeaks. Several German Twitter users got their hands on scans of an embargoed copy of Der Spiegel that hit newsstands before the agreed-upon embargo. Among the hundreds of thousands of documents, the early consensus seems to be that many of them don’t contain anything earth-shattering, “just a lot of candid talk about German leaders,” material already well known to specialists in the area they refer to, and some info that had already been widely published in the press. (ABC News via Boing Boing)
- Apple rejected an magazine app about Android. Said an Apple rep: “You know… your magazine,” replied the Apple rep, who identified himself only as Richard. “It’s just about Android…. we can’t have that in our App Store.” (Fortune)
- Since it launched a month-and-a-half ago, the free Android version of Angry Birds was downloaded 7 million times. App maker Rovio also revealed another interesting tidbit: that all Android apps with more than 50,000 downloads are gratis. (Phandroid)
- Analysts predict tablet sales for 2011 to range somewhere between 35 and 100 million, with the iPad accounting for the majority. (Fortune)
