score

How to own someone at Scramble With Friends

How many points do you usually score in a two-minute round of Scramble With Friends? In certain rounds, with double letters and triple-word bonuses, hundreds of points can quickly add up with each word found.

As with Boggle, the object of Scramble With Friends is to find as many words as you can in a jumbled grid of letters by connecting adjacent letters to form words. A fellow known on YouTube as thedotnetkid grew tired of people accusing him of cheating after he amassed thousands of points in mere minutes.

To silence the critics, he uploaded a video showing how he scored an astounding 2,740 points in the final session of a match against some unfortunate soul. For those fluent with the game, he uses the "freeze time" perk. … Read more

ComScore: Google still top site, Pinterest continues to soar

ComScore just released February data on most-visited Web sites that confirmed Google still rules the Web, with186.6 million visitors.

The next biggest properties were Microsoft Sites with 174.4 million and Yahoo sites with 173.5 million. Facebook, meantime, came in at number four with 158.6 million visitors, and, curiously, MySpace jumped 8 positions to rank number 42 with 25.5 million visitors.

Remember: This is strictly visitors, not a measure of how long people spend on these sites.

Yet one standout from the report is Pinterest, the invitation-only site that at the end of least year ranked … Read more

U.S. online spending hit $50 billion last quarter

The holiday season triggered a healthy surge in online spending, according to stats released yesterday by ComScore.

For 2011's final quarter, online spending in the United States hit $49.7 billion, a 14 percent jump from a year ago. That marked the ninth quarter in a row of positive year-over-year growth and the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit gains.

Ten individual days out of the quarter saw more than $1 billion in online spending. Cyber Monday, November 28, was on top, with $1.25 billion. Monday, December 5, came in second, with $1.18 billion in spending. And Green … Read more

Apple's smartphone share rises, but Android still on top

Apple and Android both grabbed a bigger piece of the pie last quarter, but Google's mobile OS kept the top spot with almost half of all U.S. smartphone customers.

For the quarter, Android's market share rose to 47.3 percent, according to ComScore, up from 44.8 in the prior quarter. Apple also watched its share rise to 29.6 percent from 27.4 percent but remained in second place by a wide margin.

Apple enjoyed a huge gain in smartphone sales during the holiday quarter, selling a record 37 million handsets. But Android continued its onslaught … Read more

Bing surpasses Yahoo in searches for first time ever

Microsoft has finally won second place among search engines.

Carving out 15.1 percent of the market in December, Bing narrowly outstripped the 14.5 percent share eked out by Yahoo, according to data released yesterday by market researcher ComScore.

Of course, Google still led the search engine market with a whopping 65 percent share.

But December was the first month in which Microsoft outshone its competitor and partner Yahoo, according to a Citi analyst cited by TechCrunch. As always, ComScore's numbers include only explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.

Under the hood, Microsoft … Read more

U.S. online holiday spending hits $35.3 billion

U.S. consumers spent a total of $35.3 billion online this holiday season, hitting a record for holiday sales, ComScore said today.

The 56-day holiday shopping period from November 1 to December 26 marked a 15 percent jump in spending over last year's season. The week ending December 25 alone saw $2.8 billion in online sales, a rise of 16 percent compared with the same week last year.

And the spending spree continued on into Christmas Day.

On December 25 there was a surge in sales of digital content and subscriptions, an area that includes downloads of … Read more

Online holiday spending hit all-time high last week

Even though the economy is still having trouble kicking in to high gear, consumers are spending boatloads of cash on gifts this holiday season.

Between November 1 and December 18, U.S. online shoppers have spent a whopping $32 billion, jumping 15 percent compared with the same period last year, when sales hit $27.8 billion, research firm ComScore reported today. Last week's sales performance was most impressive, hitting $6.3 billion during the seven-day period ended December 18 and setting a new all-time spending record for a single week. Last year, online shoppers in the U.S. spent $… Read more

Free shipping spurs e-commerce momentum

E-commerce spending has held its Cyber Monday momentum and remains strong courtesy of free shipping deals, according to ComScore.

The research firm noted the following:

E-commerce sales are up 15 percent for the week ending Dec. 2; The last week featured three $1 billion plus days; 64 percent of transactions included free shipping.

Coming up: Great Debate: Is e-commerce killing brick and mortar?

ComScore provided the following charts:

A few observations to ponder:

ComScore’s data—along with other information from IBM’s CoreMetrics and ShopperTrak—will likely contribute to the clicks-killing-bricks argument for retail. We have a Great Debate … Read more

Cyber Monday rules U.S. commerce with $1.25B in sales

Cyber Monday officially rules the U.S. online-shopping season, racking up $1.25 billion in sales yesterday--a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to ComScore data.

Monday's spending reflected both an 11 percent increase in the number of people shopping online and a significant jump in how much they spent. More than 10 million people bought something online yesterday, the online-marketing research firm said. Those shoppers made an average of 1.9 purchases apiece, in total worth an average of nearly $125--a 9 percent increase over per capita spending on Cyber Monday 2010.

The ComScore data differs … Read more