PUBLIC MARKS with search sales-typelease

Public transportation sites can list nearby bus stops and metro locations.Late night out? Taxi or car service Web sites can find where you are, even if you don’t know.Shopping sites can immediately provide estimates for shipping costs.Travel agencies can provide better vacation tips for current location and season.Content sites can more accurately determine the language and dialect of search queries.Real estate sites can present average house prices in a particular area, a handy tool when you’re driving around to check out a neighborhood or visit open houses.Movie theater sites can promote films playing nearby.Online games can blend reality into the game play by giving users missions to accomplish in the real world.News sites can include customized local headlines and weather on their front page.Online stores can inform whether products are in stock at local retailers.Sports and entertainment ticket sales sites can promote upcoming games and shows nearby.Job postings can automatically include potential commute times.

Good: Montrealers used the bike-sharing service more than ever.Bad: International sales were far below expectations – and it’s going to take longer to pay off the loan from Montreal taxpayers.Ugly: Vandalism is skyrocketing.

However, it would be a mistake to compare the current browsing stats to the current sales stats. The browsing stats are mostly caused by already deployed devices, including the three-year old devices that are still the best the less affluent smartphone users have. So it’s best to see the current browsing stats as a kind of 12- to 24-month moving average of smartphone sales coupled with platform “smartness” (and note the deliberate vagueness and huge margin of error). That explains Symbian’s continued dominance: its sales market share may plummet all it wants, people still have an awful lot of Symbian devices on hand to do their browsing with.

In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies.

Montreal retailer Yasmine Wasfy said she might start including sales tax in her ticketed prices, to soften the blow.

"We're hoping that it's going to be less of a sticker shock at the cash, once they come in, and they just know what they're spending."

High-profile magazines such as Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour and Men's Health, which have invested heavily to create iPad versions of their publications, have all suffered readership losses on the iPad since first debuting between April and the summer.

The world sees sales of 1.37 Billion mobile phones sold in just this past year! Only 22% of all phones sold this year were smartphones. The other 78% were what now is a bit dismissively grouped as 'dumbphones', which includes anything from very high-end featurephones (many non-smartphone featurephones in Japan and South Korea have more features and abilities than the best smartphones known in the rest of the world) to mid-priced phones to the ultra-cheap basic 'Africa phones'.