Blog: January 2011

Saint Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's Day, is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between companions, friends, family members, children and even our pets.  Every February 14, across the United States and in other places around the world, candy, flowers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine.  Have you ever wondered how much money men and women typically spend on the holiday?  I have.  The illustration below shows (in dollars) an average of what each person has spent on the holiday in past years. 

According to the National Retail Foundation, the average man will spend about two times as much on his sweetheart this Valentine’s Day than she will spend on him.  Men suffer a bad rap for being less romantic than women, and always have. Naturally, if I conducted a survey of men or women asking “Who’s more romantic?” the majority would answer women. At first glance, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that women are the romantics. Indeed, they are when it comes to saying “I love you,” remembering Birthdays and Anniversaries, and knowing “it’s the little things that count” (like an engagement ring). But when it comes to that one day each year, Valentine’s Day, that means so much to women as the representation of truly deep and important definition of romance, men seem to be the big winners.

Want to impress your Valentine, but you’re on a tight budget? Or maybe you just don’t know how much to spend? Or where to shop?  For you romantics out there who gauge the strength of your love by an annual showering of flowers, chocolate and jewelry on Valentine’s Day — you might want to shop at BargainMatch.com!  Big Savings + Cash Back = BargainMatch!

Remember my Cyber Monday blog from back in November, “Shop until Your Mouse Breaks”?  I was skeptical.  Was Cyber Monday just another piece of bait to scheme shoppers?  Scheme, not so much! Amazon announced in late 2010 that on its peak day for the year, November 29, customers ordered more than 13.7 million items worldwide across all product categories, which translates to a – self-proclaimed – record-breaking 158 items per second. 

As I explained in my previous blog, Cyber Monday is a day of online sales that follows Black Friday weekend, which runs from Thanksgiving through Sunday. The Cyber Monday estimate of shoppers from the National Retail Federation was a 10% increase from last year.  Cyber Monday, a work day for most Americans, lured and estimated 70 million shoppers, most of whom were shopping online during work hours.  48.9% of Cyber Monday orders were placed from work computers, comScore said, a slight decline from last year.

The numbers don’t lie, shoppers were willing and ready to spend money this past holiday season.  An estimated 107 million shoppers “went shopping” online on Cyber Monday, capping a five-day spending spree that raised retailers' hopes that consumers would deliver the best holiday season in four years.  Americans spent more than $1 billion on Cyber Monday as illustrated below, making it the biggest online shopping day in history, digital marketplace research firm comScore said Wednesday.  Clearly, Amazon took a huge piece of that particular pie.

The three top-selling items on Amazon.com this past Cyber Monday were the Kindle Wi-Fi and Kindle 3G, iPod Touch 8GB, and the video game Call of Duty.   In fact, Amazon’s bestselling product ever is the Kindle 3G.  Thanks to the Kindle 3G's strong sales this year, Amazon dubbed the device its worldwide bestselling product of all time, eclipsing the seventh and last book in the wildly popular Harry Potter series.

This year Cyber Monday will be on November 28^th and Black Friday a few days earlier on Friday November 25^th.

I am interested to hear- Did any of you reading this buy anything from Amazon.com this past cyber Monday?  Now that you all know what Cyber Monday is, will you be looking for deals this November 28^th online? 

Skype is my main source of communication.  I use Skype for work.  I use Skype to talk to my friends that live oversees or in other states.  I use Skype to talk to my family daily.  I use Skype for both business and personal purposes, probably as do most of you reading this blog.  Millions of Skype users worldwide experienced connection issues with Skype starting at 9am PST on Wednesday, December 22, 2010.  As the day went on, connection issues turned into a complete outage.  This marked the second time in 2010 that Skype was hit with a major outage.  Most users experienced approximately a 24 hour outage.  Different features of the website, such as video conference chat and phone calling, became unusable throughout the day, trailing behind one another.  In the next 24 hours Skype slowly restored service.  The last feature to return was Skype’s conference video calling, a feature many of us use daily to stay connected with those we work with, are related to or are close friends with across the nation and in other countries.

"For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of," said Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. "Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide."

So what happened?  Skype first noticed a problem when the number of people signed into the website dropped off significantly in a short period of time.  Skype says the outage was due to many of its supernodes going offline at the same time.  Supernodes act as a phone directory for Skype.  If a user is attempting to locate someone online and the Skype application is not able to find that someone, the user’s computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach that them. 

Basically, Skype servers became overloaded with client requests and a significant number of supernodes had already failed.  A supernode is important to the peer-to-peer network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients, helping to establish connections between them and creating local clusters typically of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode. Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the peer-to-peer network again. As a result, the peer-to-peer network was left with 25–30% fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes.

What is a supernode? In peer-to-peer networking, a supernode is any node that also serves as one of that network's proxy servers, handling data flow and connections for other users. This semi-distributed architecture allows data to be decentralized without requiring excessive overhead at every node.  These supernodes run the Skype software. 

How does Skype use supernodes? Skype, by default, is configured as a supernode, an issue that has caused controversy. Despite criticism, Skype has contended that supernodes on their network act only to maintain information about who is online at a given time, and are not used to route calls between users.  Supernodes connect individual Skype clients to each other that create a peer-to-peer network, the cloud that connects all Skype users to each other.  The only difference between “regular” supernodes and those that Skype uses are that the ones Skype use are on a public network.  If a user is   running Skype on a computer and is not behind a firewall, there is a large chance the user’s computer can become a supernode.  See the image below for an illustration. 

How did Skype reciprocate?  During the outage, several Skype Executives took to the blog, posting sincere apologies and continually updating users about the status of the outage.  After service was restored, Skype rendered a formal apology for the outing via their blog, as well as, issued 30 minute talk time vouchers to most users.  Skype’s CEO issued a formal and heartfelt apology on the company's official blog, formally discussed the issues that caused the outages and offered compensation to the millions of affected users. A word from Skype CEO, Tony Bates:

“I would like to take a moment to thank each of you for your patience, understanding, and support during Skype’s outage. We know how important your Skype conversations are to you and we take any disruption to our service very seriously.”

When the Skype outage occurred my day was greatly impacted.  Was yours?  We would love to know; comment below!