Adobe reports new online sales records for Thanksgiving, Black Friday; $1.33 Billion and $2.4 Billion respectively

Adobe released its 2014 Digital Index Online Shopping data for the holiday season. Between November 1 and November 28, $32 billion have been spent online, 14 percent more than in 2013. Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday set new sales records with $1.33 billion and $2.4 billion, respectively.

Mobile devices continued to play a dominant role. For the first time smartphones nearly doubled their share of total online sales on both days. November 11 (“Singles’ Day”) set a new sales record with $1.29 billion and is expected to surpass Cyber Monday in growth this year. The average order value for sales coming directly from a social network was led by Facebook with $114.45.

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Review: 808 HEX XL Bluetooth speaker

By Corey Herscu

Pardon my cynicism, but in terms of Bluetooth speakers, once you've reviewed one or two (or three) speakers, they all begin to sound the same, regardless of what is claimed to be different under the hood.

As we at CanadianReviewer have extensively played with speakers from heavyweights such as Logitech, Bose, and Sonos, we tend to be a bit pickier and look for more than just sound quality from the products we use.

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Transmit allowed to add iCloud Drive upload to its app (again)

Following a request from Apple to take down Transmit’s feature that lets it send files to other services (including iCloud), Apple seems to have a change of heart. The cloud storage management app has been allowed to let users upload content to iCloud Drive now. It was previously taken out because according to Apple, uploading content to iCloud Drive that isn’t made in the app violates their data storage guidelines. We’re not sure what made Apple change its mind but this is good news for Transmit users.

Source: Panic | Via: iMore | Download: Apple App Store ($9.99)

Google to shut down Google Earth API

Six years after Google introduced Earth API for 3D mapping, the search giant is shutting it down. The reason is the NPAPI plugin framework it works on is being abandoned by Chrome and Firefox due to security concerns. It also doesn’t have cross-platform support on mobile. The API will be shutdown on December 12, 2015. What will take its place? Google hasn’t announced anything yet but they do have plans of “sharing more exciting product news in the future.”

Source: Google Geo Developers Blog | Via: The Next Web