Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 30

• China to open e-commerce, other sectors to foreign investment: newspaper: China will lift restrictions to investments by foreign firms in a range of service industry sectors, including e-commerce, logistics, accounting and auditing, the China Securities News quoted commerce minister Gao Hucheng as saying. Gao said China would also promote the orderly opening of other service fields including finance, education, culture and health care, the report published on Saturday said without elaborating or giving a time-frame. China's trade in services would exceed $1 trillion by 2020, the minister predicted. The Ministry of Commerce has previously said the value of China's services trade was expected to exceed $750 billion this year.

• Thiel-Gawker Fight Raises Concerns About Press Freedom: The story of Gawker versus Hulk Hogan — or, perhaps more accurately, Peter Thiel — has some asking whether press freedom in the United States is in peril if a scorned billionaire can help deliver a crippling blow to a media company. But since Mr. Thiel spoke to The New York Times on Wednesday about his reasons for funding the lawsuit against Gawker, the debate surrounding the dispute has expanded to encompass ideological battles in media, technology and politics. A variety of observers, including other billionaires and figures involved in GamerGate, have entered into the fray to address themes like Mr. Thiel’s political motivations, and the wider issue of Silicon Valley power players and their involvement with the news media. Several journalists felt that Mr. Thiel’s political views and connection withDonald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, could be worrisome based on Mr. Trump’s previous comments about changing libel laws to make it easier to sue media outlets.

• Twitter's retreat from 'Buy' buttons puts its payments partner Stripe in an awkward spot: In September, payments startup Stripe trumpeted a new product that would allow retailers to sell goods directly in social networking and content apps. The biggest partner app Stripe launched with was Twitter, whose 'Buy' buttons allowed users to buy items directly from a tweet. But just a month later, Twitter disbanded the team working on 'Buy' buttons, as Recode reported on Thursday, and shifted its focus on commerce to other initiatives. The 'Buy' button technology still exists, and retailers can still use Stripe's new product, Relay, to sell products on Twitter. But the perception that Stripe's biggest partner no longer considers it a priority doesn't look good. You could imagine the challenge convincing potential retail partners that they should invest in a program whose biggest platform partner no longer appears to be interested. The idea behind Relay is that people will increasingly want to purchase items online wherever they discover them, even if it's not on a shopping site or app. And as people spend more of their online time on Twitter and other social apps, they should have the option to complete transactions quickly without leaving those apps, the thinking goes, rather than getting redirected to another site that may be difficult to navigate on a mobile phone. In addition to Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook have also bought into this thinking to some degree. Each has introduced 'Buy' buttons, with varying levels of investment. But neither one of them currently works with Stripe on the Relay product. The open question for Stripe is whether retailers and users will show real interest in Twitter's Buy buttons without the company promoting them — and, if not, whether Stripe can find another big-name app to replace Twitter as the anchor partner.

• Amazon built a tool that puts Alexa in your browser: Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is super useful in the Echo and lot of fun to use. But if you don't have an Echo or can't buy one because you're outside of the US, it can be hard to appreciate Alexa's skill set. In light of this, Amazon has created a web app that lets you play with Alexa right in your browser. You can access the web app at echosim.io and it lets you ask Alexa all kinds of questions. What it doesn't let you experience is the always listening nature of the Echo device and its far field microphone array — you have to click and hold a button on the site before you speak to it. (That makes it closer to the experience you get with the Amazon Tap than the Echo itself.) The real purpose of this simulator is to let international devs see what Alexa is capable of, since Amazon doesn't yet the Echo or other Alexa devices outside of the US. Amazon says it was inspired by a project from a hackathon last year. Still, it's open to anyone with an Amazon account, so fire it up and start pelting Alexa with questions.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 24

• The Uber Model, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Translate: Other than Uber, the hypersuccessful granddaddy of on-demand apps, many of these companies have come under stress. Across a variety of on-demand apps, prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down. Here is what we are witnessing: the end of the on-demand dream. That dream was about price and convenience. Many of these companies marketed themselves as clever hacks of the existing order. They weren’t just less headache than old-world services, but because they were using phones to eliminate inefficiencies, they argued that they could be cheaper, too — so cheap that as they grew, they could offer luxury-level service at mass-market prices. So do a lot of other apps offering services across a number of industries. They are super convenient, but the convenience comes at a premium, which seems here to stay. Some of these services could make for fine businesses, but it is hard to call them groundbreaking. After all, paying extra for convenience isn’t really innovative — it is pretty much how the world has always worked. Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used its growth to keep cutting its prices and expand its service. Uber shifted from a convenient alternative to luxury cars to an alternative to taxis to, now, a credible alternative to owning a car. But Uber’s success was in many ways unique. For one thing, it was attacking a vulnerable market. In many cities, the taxi business was a customer-unfriendly protectionist racket that artificially inflated prices and cared little about customer service. The opportunity for Uber to become a regular part of people’s lives was huge. Many people take cars every day, so hook them once and you have repeat customers. Finally, cars are the second-most-expensive things people buy, and the most frequent thing we do with them is park. That monumental inefficiency left Uber ample room to extract a profit even after undercutting what we now pay for cars. But how many other markets are there like that? Not many. Some services were used frequently by consumers, but weren’t that valuable — things related to food, for instance, offered low margins. Other businesses funded in low-frequency and low-value areas “were a trap,” Mr. Walk said.

• Why you should be skeptical that any video is real: Be careful about believing what your eyes are telling you. Researchers have shown how a video of a person talking can be altered in real time to change what a speaker appears to be saying. In a new video, the scientists show how they edited YouTube clips to change mouth movements. The system uses a webcam to track one person’s facial expressions, and then applies them to the face of the person in the target video. The software creates a 3D representation of a subject’s face, which can then be swapped with the 3D representation of another face. The process works even if one subject has facial hair or a different skin tone. But it won’t work if a person’s long hair blocks his or her mouth. Currently the researchers are considering commercializing the technology for use in TV shows that are re-released in a different language. Editing actors’ facial movements to match the audio should make the dubbed programs seem more natural, even if what’s onscreen is actually fake.

• Square Teams Up With Facebook to Offer Ads That Can Be Gauged: On Wednesday, Square announced a new integration with Facebook. Under the integration, small businesses that use Square to process payments can buy and target Facebook advertising using Square’s software. Square will make subscription fees off the new product. Small businesses can benefit from the move because Facebook ads bought through Square’s platform are directly connected to sales activity and data, Square said. That will allow business owners to understand whether their Facebook ads are working to attract new and repeat customers. The Facebook ad integration is just the most recent new line of business for Square, which went public in November. When the company began in 2009, it focused on providing a square credit card reader that easily attached to smartphones and tablets, giving small, cash-only businesses the ability to accept credit cards. Square takes a small percentage of each transaction, a fee it splits with credit card companies and other financial intermediaries. But as Square has grown, the company has diversified from that payments processing core, which some analysts and investors have criticized for having overly thin margins. Square now offers cash advances to merchants through Square Capital, scheduling with Square Appointments and food delivery with Caviar. The company has also begun offering other subscription-based products to businesses, like an email marketing service linked to sales history. The new Facebook advertising integration was spurred by an acquisition of talent and technology from a start-up called LocBox a few months ago. Square hired Mr. Mehta and his colleagues from LocBox, which specialized in online marketing for small and local businesses, to work on similar advertising technology at Square. The new lines of business still account for far less revenue than Square earns by processing payments. But Square believes that as more small businesses begin adopting its full array of products, these nascent revenue streams will grow. Two weeks ago, Square reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, posting a 49 percent revenue increase to $374 million for the fourth quarter from a year ago, with sales from its software and data products more than tripling.

• Why I’m skeptical about Apple’s future: Facebook is set to release its virtual reality headset, Oculus, next week. It will be big and clunky, expensive, and cause nausea and other problems for its users. Within a few months, we will declare our disappointment with virtual reality itself while Facebook listens very carefully to its users and develops improvements in its technology. Version 3 of this, most likely in 2018 or 2019,will be amazing. It will change the way we interact with each other on social media and take us into new worlds — like the holodecks we saw in the TV series Star Trek. This is the way innovation happens now. You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released. Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection. Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers — believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed. He ruled with an iron fist and did not tolerate dissent of any type. People in one division of Apple also did not know what others in the company were developing, that is the type of secrecy the company maintained. Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the ’90s and Microsoft in the late 2000’s. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007. Since then, it has been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors—as with the iPad and Apple Watch. Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features.  It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well.

• Shopify Doubles Down on ‘Buy’ Buttons Despite Sluggish Start: Last year certainly wasn’t the year of the “Buy” button that some envisioned, but Shopify is betting that 2016 could be. The e-commerce company, which makes software that small businesses use to sell products online, is expanding the number of online sales channels its customers can sell through as shopping on mobile devices booms. The new channels include product discovery app Wanelo, home design site Houzz and coupon app Ebates; Shopify said that more are on the way. “This is a continued bet on distributed commerce,” said Satish Kanwar, Shopify’s director of product. The expansion follows Shopify’s previous work to let its merchants start selling directly on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, in addition to their own sites. But shopping on Pinterest got off to a slow start last year, and e-commerce efforts on Twitter and Facebook are still in early stages.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 19, 2016

• Social media ‘buy buttons’ are n't off to a great start, but they might still be big: In the past year, there’s been a flurry of experimentation with “buy buttons,” a way for social-media sites to allow users to purchase cocktail dresses, throw blankets, candle-making kits and sundry other items from retailers without leaving the social network. Pinterest launched “buyable pins” in June, the same month Instagram released its similar “shop now” feature. Those offerings joined ongoing tests by Facebook and Twitter for similar ­functionality. The rush by tech giants and retailers to join the buy-button arms race would suggest that these businesses see money-making potential. And given how much time people spend on social media — an estimated 1 of every 5 minutes spent on a mobile phone in the United States is on Facebook or Instagram, for example — it would be logical to assume that these buy buttons are bringing retailers a blast of online sales. But this holiday season, social channels accounted for 1.8 percent of overall online sales, according to data from Custora, whose software platform is used by many retailers. That’s just a tiny sliver of purchases, and it’s not even growing: In 2014, Custora found that social media led to 1.9 percent of sales during the same time period. But even if buy buttons have not had an explosive launch, experts say they could prove to be a crucial solution to some of retailers’ biggest online shopping problems. Right now, stores are seeing a massive “conversion gap” on mobile devices, meaning that there has been a surge in the number of people browsing sites from mobile devices, but only a small share of them are actually making purchases. In studies, shoppers frequently say they don’t buy on their smartphones because it is a hassle to enter payment information and go through a checkout process on the small screen. Buy buttons could also help retailers re-create the idea of the impulse buy for the online era. On the web, a shoppers’ journey so often begins with a search in Amazon or Google for a specific item. That has made it hard for retailers to do what they’ve long done in stores with elaborate window displays and sweet treats near the checkout counter: Persuade you to buy something eye-catching on a whim.

• Son's SoftBank Vision at Risk as Sprint Goes From Bad to Worse: The acquisition of Sprint Corp. was supposed to help Masayoshi Son realize his vision of transforming SoftBank Group Corp. into the world’s most-valuable company. Instead, the 2013 deal has become his biggest setback so far, dragging down SoftBank shares and cutting into the billionaire’s wealth. SoftBank tumbled yesterday to its lowest level since the Sprint deal closed 2 1/2 years ago. Son’s fortune has shrunk by $3.2 billion over the past 12 months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the Japanese company’s stock plunged. SoftBank paid $22 billion for a controlling stake in the No. 3 U.S. wireless operator at the time. That investment has lost $7.3 billion in value, according to SoftBank, and Sprint is now the No. 4 carrier.  At the same time, a slowdown in China brought down shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., SoftBank’s biggest holding, by 22 percent last year. “There will always be fans of SoftBank, it’s just at this moment in time, no one cares --it’s out of fashion,” said Andrew Clarke, director of trading at Mirabaud Asia Ltd. in Hong Kong. “They have too many concerns about Sprint and Alibaba because those shares are being crushed.”

• Upstarts Are Leading the Fintech Movement, and Banks Take Heed: Ryan Craine hates carrying cash and finds writing checks to be a headache. He doesn’t do much of either anymore — he mostly uses his smartphone to pay for things. Mr. Craine, a 28-year-old tech support worker in Washington, D.C., uses Apple Pay at the stores and restaurants that accept it. About 20 times a month, he turns to Venmo, a digital wallet for transferring money from one person to another, to pay his share of rent, meals, groceries and utility bills. To refinance his student loans last year, he went to an online lending start-up, Earnest. Mr. Craine’s money choices point to the millennial-led shift toward new digital financial services, a change in behavior that threatens to upend the consumer banking industry. The popularity of the services has left the major banks rushing to adapt, even as they have regained their footing after the financial crisis. Americans in their 20s and early 30s, analysts say, offer a glimpse of tomorrow’s banking market. “Their relationship with the financial system is very different — it’s an electronic one, on their smartphones,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “That can and will be very disruptive to the banking system.” Money is pouring into so-called fintech start-ups. And major technology companies — Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Samsung — are all entering consumer banking, typically starting with digital payment apps. Investment worldwide in start-ups focused on retail banking markets rose to nearly $6.8 billion in 2015, according to CB Insights, a research firm. That is more than triple the $2.2 billion in 2014. In 2010, 40 percent of Americans with bank accounts visited a physical branch once a week, while only 9 percent made a mobile transaction weekly, according to survey research by Javelin Strategy and Research. By 2014, the percentage reporting weekly visits to bank branches fell to 28 percent, while the weekly mobile banking share tripled, to 27 percent.

• WhatsApp drops $1 subscription, studies making businesses pay: The world's most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, is dropping its token $1 fee still levied on some users as it experiments with making businesses pay to reach their customers, Chief Executive Jan Koum said on Monday. In addition, the Facebook-owned communications service expects in the coming months to offer complete encryption of messages, in a move to ensure the privacy of user conversations that is likely to draw further criticism from some governments. The authorities in the United States, Britain and elsewhere say the growing prevalence of encryption on services such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage, hamstring their ability to monitor criminal suspects or thwart militant plots and have threatened to pass new laws to block these changes. WhatsApp, the service that offers free text, picture and video messages, has been slowly working to develop end-to-end encrypted communications services for more than a year. It has already introduced full encryption for users on Android phones. "We are a couple of months away from calling it done," Koum said, noting that once completed, WhatsApp will represent the world's largest service offering completely private messaging. "Soon we will be able to talk more about this," he said. Once fully introduced, WhatsApp will be the largest encrypted communications service in the world, he noted.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

• Holiday Shopping Is Chilly for ‘Buy’ Buttons at Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest: More than a year after Twitter and Facebook began placing Buy buttons on their social networks, their e-commerce initiatives still appear to be relegated to experimental side projects. And at Pinterest, the tech platform that many believe is most conducive to e-commerce, one of its mainstream launch partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day via so-called Buyable Pins. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Facebook and Twitter, and tepid early results at Pinterest, highlight the myriad challenges all three platforms face in transforming their immense user bases into shoppers. The sluggishness of the combined efforts also serves as a warning to other industry players betting big on the idea of social commerce that it’s still unclear if consumers will make purchases in big numbers on platforms that aren’t mainly retail destinations. Spokespeople for the three companies declined to disclose sales numbers for these initiatives. While each platform had its own reasons for pursuing e-commerce initiatives, the central idea was that they thought there was an opportunity to make it easier for their users to buy a product when they discover it on the platform. In theory, the usefulnesses of such a feature would be the biggest on mobile phones, where clicking through to make a purchase on another site can make purchases less likely because of uneven mobile webpage experiences. Facebook was the first to take a crack. Sixteen months after Facebook first began testing Buy buttons on ads and regular posts to let people purchase products they discover on Facebook without leaving Facebook, the initiative is still being dubbed a beta test, restricted solely to online merchants who work with e-commerce software provider Shopify. The company has also recently added purchase capabilities to some Facebook business pages and to a dedicated shopping section of Facebook, but these features, too, are being characterized as “tests” that aren’t available to all Facebook users in the U.S. At Twitter, it’s still unclear how big of a priority e-commerce will be going forward under the leadership of new CEO Jack Dorsey. The company began placing Buy buttons in tweets in September of 2014, and struck partnerships in October of this year with software partners such as Bigcommerce and Stripe to get more merchants on board. Best Buy, for example, will soon join the program — just not in time for the just-passed Black Friday weekend. But regular Twitter users can still go weeks without seeing any tweets enabled with e-commerce; most Re/code colleagues I polled, who are absolute Twitter power users, said they never come across them at all. Then there’s Pinterest, the massive tech platform that retailers were most excited about for its e-commerce potential. The company began inserting Buyable Pins into its iPhone app in late June, and just added the feature to its Android app in early November. The company says more than 10,000 merchants have joined the program, including big retailers and brands like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Tory Burch, but at least one of these big partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day on Pinterest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the sales figures. This source and another also said that Pinterest insiders have privately admitted to being disappointed with early sales numbers.

• AppDynamics Raises $158M; Now Valued At $1.9 Billion: Last month, based on an SEC filing, we told you that seven-year-old, San Francisco-based AppDynamics had raised a fresh $83.4 million in funding as part of a round that was targeting up to $150 million. Turns out the company met that target and then some. CEO David Wadhwani — who joined the firm in September after spending more than a decade as an executive at Adobe, including as its digital chief — says the company has just closed on $158 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital. Other participants in the round include Adage Capital, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Cross Creek Advisors, as well as earlier backers Institutional Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. AppDynamics makes software to monitor the performance of business applications, competing with some traditional firms like IBM, as well as younger outfits like New Relic, which went public last December and has seen relatively steady stock performance since. (New Relic, which raised $214 million in venture funding, has a current market cap of $1.8 billion.) AppDynamics had previously raised roughly $206 million in debt and equity, including a $120 million round — $70 million equity and $50 million of debt — that closed in July of last year. At the time of the funding announcement, the company told VentureBeat that the money represented “pre-IPO growth financing.” Asked today what this new round means, Wadhwani said he “won’t speculate on the exact timing” of an IPO but added, “I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do.” The new funding, he said, “represents freedom. We can [execute on our plans for the company] on this money and effectively choose when we want to go public.” Wadhwani declined to discuss the company’s post-money valuation, but a source close to the company pegs it at $1.9 billion.

• In a Global Market for Hacking Talent, Argentines Stand Out: Want to learn how to break into the computerized heart of a medical device or an electronic voting machine? Maybe a smartphone or even a car? Thanks to the legacy of military rule and a culture of breaking rules of all sorts, Argentina has become one of the best places on earth to find people who could show you how. As Silicon Valley’s talent war has gone global, particularly for those skilled at breaking into things, this Latin American nation has become a rich recruiting ground for corporations and foreign governments. Companies need hackers to help defend against online criminals and state-sponsored spies. And as the world’s critical infrastructure moves online and the threat of war moves into cyberspace, governments are desperate to acquire hackers’ tools. Within Latin America, Brazil has become known in recent years as the world leader in Internet banking fraud. But Argentina’s hackers have a reputation for creativity. In particular, they are known for their ability to find so-called zero-day flaws, which are unpatched holes in widely used technology that can be used to spy on or even destroy adversaries’ computer networks. Technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have encrypted their products and services so that in many cases the only way to monitor a target’s communications is to hack directly into its device. As a result, there is a new urgency among governments in acquiring zero-day exploits. A mix of executives from around the world, government officials, contractors and — or so it was rumored — spies gathered here in October in an industrial building converted into a cultural center to watch hacking done the Argentine way at the 11th annual EkoParty, the largest hacking conference in Latin America. Long before foreign companies came calling, hacking things was a life skill in Argentina, a way to get by through decades of repressive military rule and a volatile economy. Argentines have a saying, “atado con alambre,” which translates roughly as “held together with wire,” to describe the inventive nature of so many here who learned to do much with little. The country still has one foot in the tech industry’s past because of stringent import rules. Amazon will not ship to your door here. BlackBerry has more market share here than Apple. A new iPhone costs $2,000 or more on MercadoLibre, an online auction site, but many iPhone owners said they had been able to persuade a friend traveling from abroad to sneak one through customs. To get their hands on the latest, greatest devices, Argentines often have to think like a hacker — or even become one. “You make do without resources, without high-end technology, with poor Wi-Fi connections,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentine political analyst. “We improvise creative solutions, for lack of other options, and many have applied these same procedures to the technical industry.”

• FAA Permit for Drone Flight School May Help Amazon, Google Speed Up Delivery Plans: The Federal Aviation Administration is plotting how to regulate drones. Tech companies with plans for drones — Amazon, Google, DJI, GoPro and a bevy of others looking to tap a potential multi-billion dollar market — are itching for the FAA to get on with it already. Last week, the agency made a small legal maneuver that advocates hope indicates more leniency to come on the commercial applications of drones. The FAA authorized the Kansas State University Polytechnic campus to train students and outside companies on flying unmanned aircraft. This type of authorization, called a Section 333 exemption, is common; construction sites, news outlets and disaster relief groups have received them. Amazon scored one in April. The notable difference here is in how close the FAA lets drones get to people. Even with flight authorization, drones must stay 500 feet from people, unless the craft meet some stringent safety and logistics requirements. The only exception had been on closed film and TV sets, which deploy drones for movie magic. But the FAA lifted the 500-foot restriction for the Kansas school, even though it didn’t ask for the specific closed-set exemption.

• Target and PayPal Sites Report Problems on Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, is not immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to gain access to the site of Target, the discount chain,and PayPal, the online payments processing service. Both are now back online after an onslaught that reflects the shifting trends in the way consumers are looking for shopping bargains. Foot Locker, Groupon and Victoria’s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns Monday afternoon, according to Catchpoint Systems, a web monitoring firm. In a statement on Monday, Target said it was experiencing its biggest online volumes ever in response to a 15 percent online discount that it had announced previously. Visitors to the site early Monday got a message saying: “Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic’s causing delays. If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP.” According to a statement from Target, the company said it placed online shoppers in a queue in order to manage the volume of users, but it then allowed them to keep trying to gain access by refreshing their browser. A heat map on downdetector.com showed most of the problems with PayPal were reported in North America and Europe. Problems started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. PayPal said in an emailed statement that the “brief, intermittent interruption” in service was resolved. It did not provide a reason. The holiday buying frenzy has evolved over the years as more stores offer sales before and sometimes on Thanksgiving Day. It has also shifted away from physical stores as Americans have increasingly turned to online shopping. For many people, Monday was their first day back at work after the long Thanksgiving weekend, so some shopping was presumably being done surreptitiously while at work.