Toluu

Digital Daily

by John Paczkowski

Programming NoteNovember 23

Programming Note

I’m off this week, spending time with family and a sinus infection. Enjoy the holiday. I’ll see you again on Dec. 1.

Weekend Update, 11/21/08November 22

Another week, another five work days into a recession. There were a few distractions along the way, of course.

BoomTown reported Monday in a major scoop that Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang will indeed be stepping down as soon as the Yahoo board can find a suitable replacement. Digital Daily argued that it was perhaps the best thing Yang could have done for the troubled company. Early trading on Tuesday saw a 14 percent rise in stock price–an addition of nearly $2 billion to Yahoo’s market cap. Happy days didn’t last long, of course. All it took was a statement from Steve Ballmer reasserting Microsoft’s (MSFT) lack of desire to buy the company to send its share price plunging to $9.

Microsoft is allegedly coming close to settling on a new head

Half a Billion in Online Donations? Yes, We CanNovember 21

Half a billion dollars. That’s what Barack Obama raised online in his 21-month campaign for the presidency. Astonishing, considering total donations for the president-elect’s campaign were around $660 million.

The Washington Post reports that some three million donors made a total of 6.5 million online donations to the campaign. The average online donation was $80, and the average donor gave more than once.

“You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies,” Joe Rospars, the director of Obama’s new media department, told the Post. “You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him, [and when it came to online donations] people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do.”

Astonishing. Seems a comprehensive online presence–one that spans microblogs, social networks and video sites–really does have its benefits, when it comes to political campaigns…important ones, anyway.

iPhone Cut-and-Paste Apparently Withheld Out of SpiteNovember 21

Apple rolled out iPhone 2.2 early this morning, as expected. And, as expected, it boasts enhancements to the device’s Maps application, improvements to its telephone functionality, better security and support for over-the-air podcast updates, as well as a few other interesting additions. Among them, an app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them, slideshows of App Store application screenshots, “return to home screen” functionality and an off-switch for autocorrection.

Notably absent from this latest firmware update: landscape SMS, MMS support and, of course, cut-and-paste–whose continued absence Apple (AAPL) apparently views as a feature.

We’re Doomed…November 21

What an abundance of ugly statistics we’ve seen this past week. An increase in tech sector layoffs and people talking about them. A decrease in chip sales. A decrease in online spending. And now a decrease in corporate IT spending as well.

Forty-five percent of respondents to ChangeWave’s November survey of corporate IT spending expect their companies to spend less money or nothing at all on IT during the next 90 days.

And given