MediaFile

Holiday shopping: It's down to the 11th hour and rather than jostling for a parking spot or fighting for a fitting room, more consumers are choosing to shop online or on their mobile devices.

Sure, shopping online can save you some coin on shipping costs, and using a smartphone certainly makes price comparisons infinitely easier. But consumers are trading convenience for safety, according to a new study sponsored by Norton and conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research.

“It’s the amount of activity that makes people more vulnerable," says personal finance expert Jean Chatzky. "People just aren’t being as careful as they should be in a number of different ways."

Nearly 12 million people were victims of identity theft during a recent two-year period, according to a study from the Department of Justice. Approximately 6.2 million victims experienced the unauthorized use or attempted use of an existing credit card, representing the most common form of identity theft.

But just because you’re not a fan of plastic doesn’t mean you’re much safer – an estimated 4.4 million people reported misuse or attempted misuse of their personal banking account. The financial loss? A whopping $17 billion.

Shopping in front of a computer or small hand-held device got you down? EBay says it has the answer with its new iPad app, completely redesigned for ultimate browsing on Apple's hippest new tablet.

The app has already been downloaded "tens of thousands" of times  since the launch of the iPad on Saturday, said eBay's vice president of mobile, Steven Yankovich. Currently, eBay is No 11 in the list of free iPad apps, he said.

The app allows shoppers to see high-resolution images of their favorite products, even in thumbnails, and an easy-to-navigate two screen system simplifies the buying process.

……is the cash cow for Chinese company Shanda Literature Ltd, a
subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment.

The company’s business model is simple: read the first half
of a book online for free, and if you want to know the rest
(which usually is the case if you have read that far) you need
to pay for it. Revenues are split with the stories’ authors.

In China, this proves to be successful. According to Shanda
Literature CEO Hou Xiaoqing, the company now has cash reserves
of $1.8 billion, with 800,000 authors creating up to 80,000 new
pages of content per day, he said at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.

But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.

Give the “Glass is Half Full” award to Stan Glasgow, Sony’s top U.S. electronics executive, ahead of what could be the most crucial (and potential painful) “Black Friday” shopping weekend in many years. It’s normally a happy time of year, filled with family gathering, gifts, etc.

This year its different. Read the papers, or a blog. Things look pretty gloomy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, things aren’t as bad as they seem, Glasgow told a gathering of journalists on Thursday, suggesting that there are great bargains to be had on cool gadgets and big TVs, if consumers can overcome their apprehension.

Glasgow, a passionate engineer-by-trade, whose casual briefings with the tech press are usually chock full of geek-y chatter about flat screen TVs, Digital SLR Cameras and OLED displays, took on the economy, such as it is.