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A tourist's snapshot of a New York City police officer giving new boots to a barefoot homeless man in Times Square has created an online sensation. Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Ariz., took a cellphone picture of Officer Larry DePrimo giving the man the all-weather boots and socks on a frigid night in Times Square on Nov. 14.

If you’ve shopped for a TV in the past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of Vizio. After all, the company, a decade old this year, has been holding its own in the US TV market against global giants like Samsung and Sony while at the same time expanding into new products like PCs and tablets. Impressive no doubt, even more so considering the company does all this with just 400 employees. At $3 billion in annual revenue, this translates to about $7.5 million per head, a number that’s over ten times that of Sony. That’s an amazing degree of productivity, especially for a company that has in no way taken the easy path of shipping me-too boxes, but instead has been one of the most progressive in adopting new technologies for the TV market such as new interfaces and smart TV.

The two-year-old drive to give consumers a simple way to block companies from tracking their behavior as they move across the Internet has faltered, say participants in the process who are struggling to reconcile privacy concerns with an advertising model that pays for many free Internet services.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

Cyber Monday online sales beat forecasts by nearly half a billion dollars. ComScore on Monday predicted that Cyber Monday would generate $1.5 billion in online sales, but according to Adobe, the shopping day ended up raking in $1.98 billion, which was a 17% increase compared to last year.

Zillow has agreed to acquire rental and real estate search startup HotPads for $16 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. The deal is the online real estate company’s first acquisition of a consumer-facing and its sixth acquisition overall in the past two years.

With so much consumption going on, giving back can easily be overlooked. The 92nd Street Y in New York hopes to change that with its social media movement #GivingTuesday. #GivingTuesday is not a charity drive to benefit one cause but a call for many organizations and individuals to give to those less fortunate during this time of year, say its organizers. Retailers around the country will host donation drives in stores on Tuesday. Meanwhile, participants with an online presence are soliciting charitable contributions from their social media followers.

Yahoo's shares touched $19 Monday, the first time they have traded that high in more than two and half years.

Federal law enforcement authorities have announced the seizure of 132 domain names in several countries to stop them from selling counterfeit merchandise online.

Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday.