Data & Analytics

New York City -- Barnes & Noble reported Friday that its holiday sales will likely miss internal projections as its Nook e-reader performed worse than expected during the holiday selling period.

The book seller also disclosed on Friday an investment by London-based media and education company Pearson of $89.5 million in cash in the e-reader subsidiary, representing a 5% equity stake.

Pearson joins Microsoft Inc. as an investor in the Nook subsidiary.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — It’s not the latest iPhone or the newest Tablet, but Staples is touting a breakthrough in binder design for the New Year.

The Staples Better Binder boasts removable FileRings which the company contends make it the first such product to offer a feature that allows users to detach the rings from the shell for easy filing.

New York City -- A report issued Thursday by Experian Marketing Services found that online traffic to the top 500 retail sites on Christmas Day 2012 rose 27% compared to 2011.

The top retail sites received more than 115.5 million total U.S. visits, according to Experian. To date the holiday online traffic for the past 7 weeks to retail sites are up 10% for 2012 vs. 2011.

Other report key findings include:
    

New York City -- Holiday-related sales rose 0.7% from October 28 through December 24, compared with a 2% rise last year, according to a preliminary report from MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse.

"It has been a very uneven industry performance, probably at least for the last year, and that certainly continued into the holiday season," said Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers, in a Reuters report.

WASHINGTON — LG Electronics USA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plan to collaborate on a number of environmental stewardship programs.

New York City -- Online sales rose 22.4% on Christmas Day, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks more than 1 million e-commerce transactions a day from 500 U.S. retailers.

The increase was higher than the 16.4% increase in 2011, and provided one bright spot in what has proven so far to be a lackluster holiday shopping season.

London -- A report released Thursday by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Path Intelligence showed that U.K. consumers stepped up their pace of holiday shopping over the week ended Dec. 23.

The Path Index—which melds shopping-center footfall and the time spent per visitor into a shopper-hours index—rose by 7.9% from the prior week to its highest reading of 2012 at 151.3 (January 8, 2012 = 100) for the period ending Sunday, Dec. 23.

NEW YORK & LONDON — Nook Media, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, has teamed up with Pearson, a leading global learning company, to accelerate customer access to digital content.