Analysts were lukewarm on 2009 Black Friday sales, but from all indications, they were better than expected. At least online.

Online Black Friday sales grew 11 percent compared to last year’s, according to comScore. Overall Black Friday sales grew 3 percent, about what analysts had predicted.

ComScore reports that 2009 Black Friday online retail sales reached $595 million, the second highest spending day of the year.

“While this acceleration in spending suggests the online holiday season may be shaping up slightly more optimistically than anticipated, it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter,” said comScore chair Gian Fulgoni.

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Within three years of purchase, nearly one in three laptops will fail, according to warranty-provider SquareTrade.

Two-thirds of these failures will be due to hardware malfunctions; the rest, from accidental damage.

“In SquareTrade’s experience, the 31% laptop total failure rate is higher than most consumer electronics,” write the report’s authors, Austin Sands & Vince Tseng.

“Given that the typical laptop endures more use and abuse than nearly any other consumer electronic device (with the possible exception of cell phones), it is not surprising to see such high failure rates,” the authors write.

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There’s an old concept in religious mysticism called bilocation, literally the ability to be in two places at once. While once a way to be canonized as a saint or burned as a witch, a sort of bilocation is being made increasingly possible with technology.

A great example of technology allowing us to virtually be in two places at once are services like Alarm.com, which allow you to monitor your home security from anywhere online, via computer, PDA or phone (there’s even an iPhone app).

Through the website or app, users can monitor the status of their home – whether doors are locked, when they (or windows or cabinets) are opened, when somebody enters a specific room – as well as control the home’s environment, for example turning lights on or off.

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The FDA is strengthening its efforts to catch online scammers who purport to sell swine flu vaccines.

The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent last week the first joint-agency warning letter to Weil Lifestyle LLC, ordering the company to cease marketing fraudulent supplements that it claims prevent H1N1.

Earlier this month, the FDA and the World Health Organization warned consumers against internet pharmacies purporting to sell Tamiflu, the vaccine released at the beginning of October. In 390 of the 400 cases surveyed, the online pharmacies were not certified to sell Tamiflu online.

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A lot of time is spent, a lot of internet ink is spilt, trying to figure out young internet users.

This endeavor is so difficult that one of the most ‘authoritative’ of these researches – at least as measured by the amount of press it received – was back in July when Morgan Stanley was able to capture that most elusive of creatures, the 15-year-old boy, and present his insider’s report on high-school habits as the final word on teens and tech.

The generational divide is fascinating and is always a source of crunchable numbers and crunchy ideas. As much as the teen demographic has been dissected and analyzed, it’s still a constant source of surprise, predictable in its utter unpredictability.

For example, this:

In a Junior Achievement survey of 1,000 teens ages 12-17, the most popular entrepreneur was Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO, who received the top vote of 35 percent of those surveyed, was more popular than Tony Hawk, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Kimora Lee Simmons, Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg.

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Netbook sales have grown 264 percent year-over-year, while overall the notebook market has dropped 5 percent in that period, according to DisplaySearch.

Netbooks, which represented 11.7 percent of notebook sales in Q2 2009, were the only category other than Portable PCs (those with displays from 13” to 16”) to post Q/Q growth.

Netbook sales broke $3 billion in Q2 2009.

One of the prime drivers for netbook sales has been a continually falling price. While in Q2 2008 the average sale price (ASP) of a netbook was $506. In Q2, the ASP had fallen 29 percent to $361.

When netbooks are taken out of the equation, overall notebook ASPs only fell 10 percent, from $867 in Q2 2008 to $781in Q2 2009. But adding netbooks to the overall sales makes the market change a bit more striking: portable PCs (notebooks and netbooks combined) have seen their ASPs drop from $849 to $688 in the past year, a decline of 19 percent.

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Organic electronics (OEs) use carbon-based polymers and small molecules, as opposed to traditional electronics, which use inorganic conductors such as copper and doped silicon.

While there are many hurdles to widespread adoption of OE technology, if perfected it could lead to innovative, and lower-cost, devices, according to a white paper published by Productronica, an international trade fair for innovative electronics production.

“From ‘electronic newspapers and magazines’ to smart windows, flexible film solar cell sheets to luminescent wallpaper, organic electronics has the potential to change the way we use computers and other electronic devices,” according to the white paper.

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Twelve percent of households own Apple computers, up from 8 percent in 2008, according to the NPD Group’s 2009 Household Penetration Study, based on the results of more than 2,300 online panelists.

More than 8 out of 10 (85 percent) of these households also own a PC and 66 percent of them own three or more computers, more than twice the amount of PC households who own the same amount.

No surprise considering the Apple tax and the fact that being an individual is pretty expensive these days, the average Apple owner is better off than most consumers. While 21 percent of all consumers make $100,000 or more, 36 percent of Apple’s owners make over that amount.

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The amount of times spent of social networks has tripled in the last year, according to Nielsen (PDF).

A year ago, users spent 6 percent of their online time on social networks, but as of August 2009, time spent on social networks now represents 17 percent of total internet use.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Nielsen’s Jon Gibs.

“While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth,” Gibs said.

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Duke researchers have developed a smartphone application that creates fingerprints of an interior space’s ambience, which might be the answer to GPS’s weaknesses.

“We believe that SurroundSense is an early step toward a long-standing challenge of improving indoor localization,” Duke assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Roy Choudhury said. (Choudhury is also the head of another cool project we wrote about a few months back.)

SurroundSense takes a sound and light fingerprint from the space a user is in and compares it against a database of locations, using a smartphone’s camera and microphone to record information about the space.

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