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Christmas and holiday season

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Top 10 kids’ toys of 2014 per Google Search rankings

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Google is giving Ol’ St. Nicholas a run for his money this holiday season because it ALSO knows what people want for the holidays. Rather than getting mail in the North Pole however, Google gets its data via its popular search engine. In data from its Trends platform, it has determined the top trending toys, devices and apparel searches on Google Shopping. An overview from the Commerce blog:

  • Game consoles and tablets continue to be the top gifts trending on Google Shopping, but wearable technology such as the “fitbit” is also on the rise this month.
  • Certain retro toys are making a comeback this season. Thanks to the new movie “Ouija,” searches for “Ouija boards” are up 300% since October. And queries for “Barbie Dream House” and “My Little Pony” are up as well compared to last month. 6
  • Cold-weather staples, such as “Hunter boots” and “Canada Goose jackets,” are among the most popular apparel searches, up 46% and 140%, respectively, since October. But “jogger pants” are the newcomer gift this season, up 39% from October. 7

But the most important data they pulled, especially if you are a clueless father like myself, is the top 10 Kids’ gifts list. Without further ado, in order:

Top-10-Christmas-presents-20141. American Girl

2. My Little Pony

3. Paw Patrol

4. Lego Friends

5. Ouija Board

6. Peppa Pig

7. Shopkins

8. Nerf Guns

9. Barbie Dream House

10. Zoomer Dino

Any of this hitting home?
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Google rolling out support for Gmail and Google Calendar data export

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Google is rolling out support to its take out service for exporting email and appointment data from its Gmail and Google Calendar services, the company announced today.

While Google often supports data exporting when sunsetting a service, the company says in this instance it’s simply allowing users the ability to better archive personal data and switch to other services with less friction.
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Flurry: Holiday 2012 sees new 1-week record with 50M iOS & Android activations and 1.76B app downloads

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Flurry today released its stats for worldwide app downloads during the 2012 holiday season. It recently released some stats for Christmas Day, including a huge 332 percent increase over previous years to 17.4 million new iOS and Android activations and 328 million app downloads. Today it shared some stats for the entire week starting on Christmas and ending New Year’s Day, noting it recorded the highest number of activations and app downloads for any week in history. As highlighted in the images, Flurry estimated 50 million devices activations and an increase of 65 percent to 1.76 billion app downloads:

The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 65% over the early-December baseline, historically breaking through the largest single week record previously set during the same week of 2011.  While several weeks since late November delivered billion+ week download levels, the holiday week delivered a record-shattering 1.7 billion downloads… Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4.