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More customers chose to point and click rather than park and swipe this Christmas season, with a five percent increase in online shopping over the same period last year, a study by the Internet marketing firm comScore says. By comparison, in-store retail shopping grew only 3.6 percent, according to credit-card spending tracked by Mastercard Advisor's' Spending Pulse.

"Overall this year, we have seen increasing stability in spending, as opposed to the free fall of 2008," noted Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

Cyber Monday A Success

Cyber Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend when online retailers usually offer their best deals and, often, free shipping, raked in $885 million, up five percent from last year's $834 million.

A significant share of the online boost was in electronics sales, which grew by slightly more than 20 percent, with jewelry and watches also producing solid sales. Overall, an estimated $27 billion was spent online.

Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, attributed the sales boost to better marketing and promotion by retailers.

"Sellers are trying different things other than just the usual loss-leader approach," Koenig said. "They have used a number of market plays old and new to coax consumers to open their wallets, and the data we have so far suggests they have been successful."

One such successful tactic, Koenig said, is bundling, or selling multiple, related products at one price. For example, he said Best Buy offered a Hewlett-Packard PC, monitor, notebook and netbook, plus a wireless router with home installation for about $1,200.

But he said while unit sales climbed this year, the revenue generated fell because of the abundance of lower-priced items.

"There were fewer large-screen TVs, but more midsize models in the 20- to 30-inch range sold," he said. "I also think there is some trading down...

For the first time, Apple won't be at the annual Macworld trade show in January. But CEO Steve Jobs and his team will still make the month interesting. Apple has scheduled a press briefing for Jan. 26 in San Francisco, and Apple watchers are salivating at the prospect of a tablet computer that looks like an iPhone on steroids.

A MacInsider report that Apple registered the domain name islate.com at least as far back as 2007 fueled rumors that the tablet may be named iSlate. While Apple has steadfastly refused to comment on the rumors, there is a consensus among the Apple cognoscenti that the device will be a 10-inch-wide tablet, not much thicker than an iPhone, feature the same multi-touch screen as the iPhone and iPod touch, be keyboard-free, and support music, video, e-books and iPhone apps. The price is rumored to be around $800.

The iSlate is exciting not just Apple "fanboys" but also Wall Street. Apple's stock has reached unknown heights in recent weeks as the rumor mills started going crazy. The stock price has risen from $192 on Dec. 18 to about $211 on New Year's Eve, giving the company a market capitalization of $190 billion.

Is Content King?

There are also rumors that Apple is cutting content deals with publishers, broadcasters and movie studios, suggesting Apple intends its device to be a Kindle killer. An influential review in The New Yorker magazine panned Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and said reading books on the iPod touch was a superior experience.

Is the crazed enthusiasm appropriate? Will consumers really flock to Apple stores to pay close to $1,000 -- far more than a Kindle -- just to watch YouTube videos on a larger screen? Some analysts believe that by cutting content deals, Apple could make its tablet a must-have device....

The traditional publishing industry is developing strategies to counteract the adverse effects that digital-content providers like Google and Amazon.com are having on its business. Among other things, publishers facing plummeting sales of physical media and advertising are expected to assert more control over when, where and how their content is made available.

However, Forrester Research Vice President Mark Mulligan believes today's pervasive free content means paid content is no longer king and the traditional media meltdown will continue through 2010.

"As the contagion of free continues to infect everything it touches, the old media business models and products are on borrowed time," Mulligan wrote in a recent blog. "Only with a new generation of media products that play to the relative strengths of the various digital platforms will new successful media business models be built."

A Multitiered Model

Mulligan advises the media industry to align its content assets with current consumer behavior and demand by adopting an entirely new framework for media products. "Just erecting a pay wall around your existing content will simply drive the vast majority of your audiences to the nearest free alternative," Mulligan warned.

Content scarcity may be gone, Mulligan observed, but high-quality, unique content experiences are extremely scarce in the digital arena. "When they exist, they prosper," Mulligan wrote.

Mulligan proposes that publishers follow a three-tiered model to monetize their digital content that consists of free, subsidized and premium content offerings -- a model that Amazon is already following. Beyond offering free books and low-priced best sellers, Amazon recently announced that it will offer exclusive e-book deals on the latest releases from best-selling authors such as Stephen Covey.

However, Gartner Vice President Allen Weiner thinks exclusive e-book deals send out a bad message to the majority of publishers not on The New York Times best-seller list....