ReadWriteWeb

It seemed like everything was going so well. Holiday mall traffic was said to be brisk, consumer sentiment seemed to be thawing a bit, even the unemployment numbers made a U-turn just before critical mass and started heading nicely downward. Then came reports of exceptions to the general rule of an improving U.S. consumer economy in Q4 2011, most notably from big-box retailer Best Buy, which reported lower same-store unit sales for the quarter and flat revenue.

So what happened; did a piece of the sky fall and someone forget to blog about it? Some clues came this morning from analyst firm NPD Group, which reported a 6% overall drop in holiday consumer electronics sales compared to the same period in 2010. Sales were sharply lower for MP3 players, digital picture frames, point-and-shoot... whoa, whoa, wait a second! MP3 players? What decade are we talking about again?

If you've ever investigated various sources for hosted Exchange e-mail or SharePoint sites, or virtual cloud servers, for a small business of under 100 employees or so, you've probably run into a service called 123Together.com. It's titled like it wants to be listed first in the Yellow Pages, but in terms of service quality, it's been limping along with a handful of others looking to gain par against GoDaddy.com.

But 123Together also has a stake in cloud services, with simple virtual servers in the cloud that compete on at least one level with Amazon. Meanwhile, retailer Best Buy is interested in competing with Amazon on any level it can. Last month, it decided it can't compete with Amazon, announcing a plan to dump its Napster service's existing customers onto Rhapsody. Best Buy had just acquired the Napster brand in September 2008.

Best Buy is joining Amazon, Google, and Apple in offering customers a cloud-based storage and streaming service for digital music. Using its "PlayAnywhere" technology, the Best Buy Music Cloud will let users upload their songs to the cloud, then stream the music across multiple devices, including Blackberry, Android and iOS.

But with stiff competition from the other big companies who've entered the cloud music locker space lately, can Best Buy offer something that will make customers use its service? Based on what's available today, the answer is "probably not."

Tecca, a new mobile comparison shopping application, is the first company to launch from the digital media fund set up by electronics retailer Best Buy with Fuse Capital. The app focuses only on electronics, which makes sense, given its backing. Available now on both iPhone and Android with both a tablet app and mobile website in the works, Tecca offers pricing information, ratings, reviews and even a barcode scanner.

Best Buy made the news last week for suspending and likely firing a young employee who made an online cartoon mocking iPhone buyers - even though the video made no mention at all of Best Buy. Apparently the company doesn't mind cruel humor if it's the one dishing it out, or if the target is poor people instead of Apple, or something.

Now Best Buy has launched a new ad campaign designed by shock-dork-marketers Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (Subservient Chicken) called "Phone Shame Eliminator." The campaign tells people too poor or otherwise disinclined to have smart phones that they are sexually unattractive, going nowhere at work and not very bright. Some of the ads are also funny, even if they are classist, tasteless, obnoxious and cruel. They are not nearly as funny as the cartoon the Best Buy employee got fired for making.

Yesterday we wrote about the increasing usage of Semantic Web technologies by large commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Best Buy. The Semantic Web is a Web of added meaning, which ultimately enables smarter and more personalized web apps to be built. In this post we explore how a leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, is using a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to add semantics to its webpages.

This is not just an academic exercise for Best Buy. As we will see, semantic technology has already led to increased traffic and better service to its customers. We spoke to Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com, to find out how.

At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last week, I met up with two W3C representatives to discuss the current state of the Semantic Web - a Web of added meaning and structured data. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the official standards organization of the Web and is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I spoke with W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman and W3C eGovernment Interest Group leader Sandro Hawke.

The main takeaway from the conversation was the rapid adoption of RDFa, by big commercial companies such as Facebook and Best Buy. It's come as a "very pleasant surprise" to Ivan Herman.

Earlier this week, electronics retailer Best Buy announced a new mobile backup service called mIQ. Designed to compete with similar services like Apple's MobileMe or Microsoft's My Phone, mIQ offers up to 1 GB of storage space in the cloud for photos, video, contact and calendar information, SMS messages, and more. However, unlike its competitors, mIQ has a couple of distinct advantages: it's 100% free and anyone can sign up to use it.

Yesterday major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they're looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.

Last fall, Best Buy bought Napster for a jaw dropping $121 million, a staggering sum in the free-music era that Napster helped create. The electronics retailer thinks it can do something special with the music service though and now those plans will see the light of day.

At 5pm PST the new Napster will launch with a $5 monthly subscription plan (down from the old $15 plan) and what you get for that price looks quite good. 5 MP3 downloads per month (screenshot shows free credits for an initial 35 MP3s too), free on-demand streaming of more than 7 million songs and additional download purchases for between 69 cents and $1.29. There's a screenshot of the new interface below and our thoughts on where this new version still falls short.