With the savory flavors of turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie still lingering in our minds and mouths, it’s hard to believe that another annual holiday is already upon us. Yes, that’s right, to the joy (and dismay) of many, the holiday shopping season has officially launched. And while I’m sure there are plenty of stories circulating about Black Friday escapades and toy store showdowns, I’m more interested in what happened on Cyber Monday.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the relatively new term (circa 2005), Cyber Monday refers to the Monday following Black Friday when online retailers experience a spike in sales. It’s explained away like this: when shoppers return to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, they begin purchasing items over the internet that they couldn’t find in stores. Whether or not this term is valid is up for debate. Many critics and media experts argue that Cyber Monday is simply a marketing ploy. Either way, online retailers have been beefing up their advertising, sales, and promotions on that day in recent years, and shoppers have been receptive.

As predicted, this year’s Cyber Monday sales set some records. Similar to the in-store shopping trends from Black Friday, websites drew in more shoppers this year, but their spending habits trended down. Despite our seemingly tighter budgets, comScore reports that internet retailers raked in $733 million on Monday, which is a 21 percent increase over last year’s spending and the first time that daily online retail sales have topped $700 million. comScore also predicts that daily online sales totals will surpass $800 million a few times over the next month.

The retail sites with the most visitors on Cyber Monday were: Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Dell, Best Buy, Yahoo, Apple, Overstock.com, Circuit City, and MSN Shopping.

In other news, Yahoo experienced a NaviSite-like blooper on Monday, as thousands of sites powered by Yahoo Merchant Solutions reported technical difficulties for the better part of the shopping day. While these problems didn’t last for a week, and the sites weren’t completely out of commission, the technical difficulties did fall on the busiest online shopping day of the year. And, oh yeah, the glitches affected the checkout process, so shoppers received error messages right before they were about to (virtually) hand wads of cash over to these sites. The issues began at 6 a.m. on Monday morning and weren’t resolved until around 6 p.m. that night. Uh oh. The incident has Yahoo merchants threatening to go Google.

Other sites experiencing slowdowns because of heavy traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday include Buy.com, Eddie Bauer, J. Crew, Toys R Us, Costco, and Lowe’s.

In closing, I’d like to make a comment to whoever coined the term Cyber Monday. I don’t like it. Black Friday, I get. You rip yourself from a turkey-induced slumber at 4 a.m., travel off into the dark of night, and find yourself face to face with droves of vicious shoppers (with no souls) when you reach the mall. Um, scary. Compared with that, Cyber Monday just sounds lame…or kinky, I don’t know which’s worse.

Even though over 800 people were packed into The Estate last Friday night for the TechCrunch Boston Meetup, I was able to navigate the club surprisingly well and speak with almost all of the event’s sponsors. I also endeavored to do a little research this weekend while I was still in recovery mode. So after combining what I have seen, heard, and read over the past couple of days, I am left feeling impressed by more than a few companies.

I’ll start with the seasoned veteran: TripAdvisor.com. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it compiles user-generated content and recommendations on everything from trip locations and hotels to flights and vacation packages. Even though the site has been around for nearly eight years and nets more than 25 million unique visitors a month, the company continues to make it out to local events (its U.S. headquarters are in Needham, MA) and remain involved in the emerging tech community.

A representative from the company said that TripAdvisor.com was hiring aggressively in all departments, so their motivation for sponsoring the meetup was mostly to seek out new talent. Either way, they brought a ton of free t-shirts for everyone, so they receive a nod of approval from me for the effort that they continue to put in when it comes to customer, industry, and employee relations. Also, the accolades they received in a recent episode of The Office, and the fact that this entry is posted on their site means that the company will probably always hold a special place in my heart.

But I’ll move on to more pressing issues, or rather, companies that you most likely don’t already know about. In terms of sites directed towards the average consumer, my favorite of the night had to be MyPunchbowl.com. This site launched in January and currently has an undisclosed number of registered users, but judging from the way they were received at the event, their member base must be steadily rising. MyPunchbowl is the brain child of Punchbowl Software, and its goal is to improve the overall user experience by offering “end-to-end” party planning. In other words, the site helps members with everything from picking the date of their party to sharing pictures and stories with guests after the festivities are over.

After browsing the site and some of its features, I agree that its software is easy and fun to use. I also like how the site allows you to personalize your virtual invitations (as opposed to sending them out in bulk) and the fact that MyPunchbowl helps you out with checklists of all the minor details that you might otherwise overlook. All in all, I like the product and the design, and the fact that this site is only ten months old bodes well for the future of the company. The site is also run by four guys (as of now), which kind of disproves the notion that men can’t plan a good party.

I am awarding honorable mention awards to Mzinga, Moola, and Wine Library TV. Based on my interaction with the people at Mzinga, I am pretty sure that the company creates Facebook-like applications for businesses. So basically, they create social networking forums for a business’s customers and employees in order to gather and mine useful information from them. A cool concept, even though the social networking angle is starting to feel a little stale to me these days.

Moola is a site that gives you a penny, which you can then double every time you beat another contestant in a head-to-head game. So if for some reason you are able to win a string of 30 games in a row, you’ll be ten million dollars richer (or more like six million, if you consider the havoc that taxes could wreak on your prize money). The mediocre games on Moola.com don’t really interest me, but its business model does. The site will be ad supported, so in order to play a game, you need to watch an ad and correctly answer a question about it. It sounds annoying, but when money is on the line, I suspect that a lot of people will follow these prompts. This is great news for advertisers, who can ensure that people are at least looking at their internet ads.

My last nod goes to Wine Library TV, or the personality behind WLTV, Gary Vaynerchuk. In an effort to overcome stereotypes about the wine industry and encourage more people (of all backgrounds) to enjoy the world of wine, Vaynerchuk records five episodes of his own personal wine tasting each week for the site. His approach may be a bit overwhelming, but you can never say that Vaynerchuk is boring. Honestly, I just love the fact that he reviewed Trader Joe’s famous Two Buck Chucks.

Even though this site isn’t as tech-oriented as the other sponsors from the Boston meetup, I think it shows how flexible of a tool that the internet really is. User-generated sites and blogs can help anyone push any sort of agenda, and in this case, Vaynerchuk wants to make wine fun for everyone.

That’s about all I have got to say for today. If I offended any companies by not posting about their product or offering them some type of meaningless honorable mention, just know that I have no authority to award anything to anyone. I just thought it would be fun. It’s a Monday, and I’ve got to do something to entertain myself.

TechCrunch hosted its latest meetup at The Estate (a club off of Boylston Street) this past Friday night, and all I have to say is that Boston’s tech crowd sure knows how to party. The venue was packed to capacity with hundreds of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, as well as the press, PR reps, and a handful of slightly buzzed tech enthusiasts.

The event began at 6:00 and lasted until 11:00, with the crowd only beginning to thin around 10:30 p.m. when many attendees made their way over to the after party at M.J. O’Connor’s. The folks at TechCrunch were gracious enough to reserve the back room of the bar on Columbus Ave to accommodate everyone with plans to party until last call. (You can check out Don Dodge’s blog for a description of the tequila shots that ensued.)

IDG Ventures co-hosted the event alongside Tech Crunch, and additional sponsors included Brightcove, Moola, Mzinga, OurStage, TripAdvisor, MyPunchbowl, and Wine Library TV among many others. Product sponsor SnapYap has also created a video wall with coverage from the event. I think I place myself in the majority when I say that I had a great time, even if the night still feels somewhat like a blur. I blame the whirlwind of free t-shirts, product pitches, business cards, and maybe, possibly, the open bar. What can I say; I’m a sucker for free gin and tonics.

Some notable web celebrities that I spotted at the event were (of course) the TechCrunch team, including founder and co-editor Mike Arrington, CEO Heather Harde, and co-editor Erick Schonfeld. There were honestly too many people in attendance to name, but Doug Levin (the CEO of Black Duck Software), Chris Herot (the CTO of Zingdom), blogger Sarah Wurrey, and social media expert Chris Brogan have all posted recaps of the night that you can peruse as well when you get the chance.

I plan on posting again today with a few more links and insight into the companies and ideas that grabbed my attention at the party.

We live in a society that loves customized items and gifts, so I’m not surprised that one company has been able to cash in on something truly unique: our genetic codes. DNA 11 was founded a few years back by two friends in Canada, and their intent was to create personalized artwork from the DNA of their customers. Although I just recently learned about this company, it has been gaining momentum over the past two years with media attention from The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, USA Today, and GQ. DNA 11’s artwork has also been featured on HGTV, The Discovery Channel, The Today Show, and most notably, in the plot of an episode of CSI: NY.

It sounds unorthodox, but the art world and consumers have embraced the idea of DNA portraits. I’m not certain if it’s because we’re vain, or maybe it’s just that we love owning something that no one else has, but DNA 11 has sold its artwork to customers in over 50 countries worldwide.

When you initially purchase a DNA portrait, the company sends you a DNA retrieval kit through the mail. A video appearing on the company’s website explains the DNA retrieval process and shows a model swabbing her own mouth for DNA. After you mail your DNA back to the company, it’s given a six-digit tracking number to protect your privacy and sent to a lab for processing. Software is eventually used to zero in on a partial picture of your code and transform it into a digital image. With various color schemes and framing options available, these portraits start at $390 a piece.

The company now offers fingerprint and lip print portraits as well. The latter product, known as a KISS portrait, is why the company has been in the news lately. This is DNA 11’s first obvious attempt at reeling in more female customers, and being that I am female, I feel it necessary to comment on these pieces of art. Honestly…the KISS portraits are tacky. CNET.com calls them “very Marilyn Monroe,” but I think that’s just taking the easy way out.

I understand the concept behind the portrait: it’s unique, and hanging it in your home will showcase your femininity, your sense of self, whatever. But in my opinion, any art project that’s sponsored by MAC’s Viva Glam Lipstick is difficult to defend as, well, art. DNA 11’s website even suggests that you give your KISS portrait to a “lover.” I can already imagine women everywhere handing their boyfriends and husbands gigantic pictures of their lips for Christmas. Congratulations DNA 11, you’ve given the deranged women of the world another chance to further tarnish our gender’s name.

In my own defense, I realize that art is subjective, so if this is the kind of thing you like, I encourage you to buy one. A portion of the sales from KISS portraits do go to charity, although explaining that “one KISS Portrait sale can help purchase 1000 condoms in India” may not be the best way to market your partnership with the MAC Aids Fund.

So whether you are looking for a unique piece of art or simply decorating a new living space, it might be worth your time to check out DNA 11’s full product line. I prefer the DNA and fingerprint portraits myself, but I am sure there are some lovers out there who will want an over-sized portrait of someone’s lips. Oh, and what’s even better is that you can get a DNA portrait of your pet. The DNA retrieval kit works best on cats, dogs, and horses…and no, I am not making this up. But given that I don’t have a pet of my own, and I am fully aware of what some people will do for their animals, I’ll keep my comments to myself on this one.

Being that this is the first post for DNSO.net, I won’t spend too much time explaining the purpose behind the site. I understand how blogs work, and after this post drifts off the site’s homepage, I doubt that many visitors will be traveling to the absolute bottom of the archives to read it.

In summary, DNSO.net is all about posting interesting, relevant, and straightforward tech news. It’s all right if your knowledge of technology is mediocre, because these posts won’t include the complicated explanations and lingo seen all too often on other tech blogs. I possess about as much tech knowledge as the next person, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to know about current events in the industry, and my guess is that you do too.

So in the spirit of my forthcoming posts, and the fact that I may make a mistake or two in my reporting of recent tech news (which I encourage any readers to correct), I decided to launch this blog with a story about someone else’s mistake. And lucky for me, it’s a big one.

During what many would consider a routine data center migration gone disastrously bad, the internet hosting company NaviSite, Inc. knocked 165,000 websites offline for several days last week. The service issues began on Nov. 3 when NaviSite attempted to transfer information between hundreds of servers it acquired from Alabanza, Corp. (another hosting vendor in Baltimore) to its home-based servers in Andover, Massachusetts. Ironically, NaviSite wanted to move the data between the two locations to improve the performance of the sites its serves.

NaviSite originally informed customers that their sites would be down for less than a day because of the data transfer. The company even scheduled the migration on a Saturday to lessen the impact. NaviSite’s initial plan was to move 200 of the 850 servers involved in the transfer by truck (from Baltimore to Andover). The company intended to move the data from the remaining servers virtually. Now I can’t fully explain the issues that ensued, but from what I gather, they had something to do with synchronization glitches.

When the virtual migration between the two locations began to take too long, NaviSite decided to unplug more of its servers and transport them to Andover in trucks as well. Maybe this is just me, but doesn’t this back-up plan seem a little, oh, I don’t know…short sighted? As I graciously mentioned above, I don’t know that much about technology, but unplugging a bunch of computers that weren’t working properly in the first place and driving them across a few state lines in hopes that they’ll work there doesn’t sound like the IT solution of the century. Even if physically moving more servers helped transfer some of the data, it wouldn’t help with the rest of the information that needed to be moved virtually.

In the end, many of the sites that were depending on NaviSite’s services were down for almost a week. In the days of the internet, electronic commerce, and instant gratification, that’s an eternity. It’s impossible to calculate how much revenue was lost because of the outage, and many customers are furious with the lack of response that they received from NaviSite and its customer service department during the botched migration. NaviSite has publicly apologized for the incident, but my guess is that this apology won’t help them much at this point. It’s common knowledge that thousands of disgruntled customers make for a least a few nasty lawsuits…