In fact, the week before Thanksgiving Allrecipes recorded 12 million sessions from a mobile browser or app, up 97 percent from the same week the previous year. Home cooks aren’t just using the internet as a valuable culinary tool, they’re using their smartphones and tablets to bring that tool directly into kitchen. They aren’t just searching for recipes either. They’re often looking for instructions on cooking techniques. That week 1.6 million visitors watched instructional videos on the Allrecipes sites, an increase of 200 percent over last year.

Allrecipes wasn’t the only online cooking resource to have a big Thanksgiving. Crowdsourced recipe portal Food52 saw inquiries to its Hotline mobile and web cooking questions app jump 147 percent the week of Thanksgiving as compared to its usual traffic levels. Its recipe page views increased 82 percent for the same period.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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First spotted by FierceWireless, the deal gives customers signing up for its $80 unlimited-talk-and-text smartphone plans 2 GB of data to consume each month rather than just the standard 1 GB. The major catch is that data must come off its 3G network — no LTE phones allowed. After years of ceding prepaid to its competitors has Verizon finally seen the light of contract-free mobility? If it has, then Verizon is attacking prepaid in a strange way. Even with the limited time promotion, its prepaid plans are by far the most expensive in the market – you can get the same plan anywhere from $20 to $30 a month less at a slew of other carriers (and in many cases access to much faster data networks).

What Verizon likely sees here is an opportunity to find a second life for its 3G CDMA EV-DO networks. Now that Apple has found LTE religion, almost the entirety of Verizon’s smartphone portfolio sports a 4G radio, which means its data traffic will quickly migrate off its old 3G networks. Big Red still needs those EV-DO networks as back up in areas where its 4G service is unavailable, but those areas are quickly becoming few and far between. Verizon plans to have LTE in every place it offers 3G by the end of 2013, and thanks to its LTE in Rural America program it will have 4G in places it’s never before built a CDMA network.

Verizon’s LTE network (yellow) will eventually grow to encompass its 3G network (red).

So in just year or two Verizon will have a largely empty 3G network. Eventually it will shutter those CDMA systems, replacing them with 4G technologies, but that could take the remainder of the decade if not longer. Verizon needs those CDMA networks for its legacy voice services, and its planned launch of an IP-based voice-over-LTE service is still on the drawing board. In short, that 3G data network is going nowhere so it behooves Verizon to find ways of filling it.

That may be why Verizon is getting the prepaid bug after so many years of ignoring the market. Prepaid isn’t just for the budget-minded or credit-challenged anymore, and say what you will about Verizon’s pricing and data plans, but it consistently scores high marks from consumers for customer service, reliability and quality of service.

Verizon may be thinking there’s room in the market for a “premium” prepaid operator and that it’s just the carrier to fill that niche. It just so happens to have a rapidly emptying 3G network to serve those customers. Sprint got the same idea when it started relegating WiMAX to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid customers, reserving its new LTE network for those on its contracts.

Still, premium subscribers will expect a premium service. Sub-megabit 3G connections just won’t cut it, especially if T-Mobile or Sprint is offering far faster network connections for far cheaper prices. Verizon will need to drop prices a lot more if it hopes to make any kind of dent in the sans-contract market. But if it reserves its 3G network for prepaid users – along with contract customers using “dumbphones” – then it can afford to slash plan costs. The networks investment is already sunk, and that spectrum will be tied up for years to come. Any money it can make off of 3G is just gravy.

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If you are done shopping and are looking for some good stuff to read, here are seven stories I recommend for this weekend…

• 10 Things Julius Caesar could have taught us about business leadership: Oliver Blanchard goes back in time and finds that there is a lot to learn from the Roman emperor.
• Making Cents: As someone who celebrates the success of new connected companies like Spotify and Pandora, it is eye-opening to see the other side of the equation. Damon Krukowski of Galazie 500, a musician, shares his story.
• The man who hacked Hollywood: Since I am in Hollywood myself, why not share this story about Chris Chaney, who hacked the emails of some of the biggest names in Hollywood? Just plain common sense and some dedication from his Florida home.
• The divine Gary Cooper: And talking about scandals, even the old Hollywood had many of those. I wonder what bloggers would have done with Gary Cooper.
• Why it is good to be Michael Lewis: Well, there are many reasons, and they all start with his books. Great profile of Lewis and his rise to the top of the writing totem pole.
• Mexico: Risking life for truth: is a great story about reporters who ply their craft in Mexico at the risk of being beheaded. An eye-opening story about how journalism happens in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
• The Mandate of Hell: Tom Engelhardt laments the pervasiveness of the do-nothing culture, especially amongst the politician set. As an apolitical person, I found this piece resonating with me.

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For most of us, Thanksgiving is about football, beer and arguing politics with Uncle Mike. But for the cook in kitchen, it can be an extremely stressful ordeal. Preparing a huge meal for a dozen people on a tight timeline is hard enough as it is, but doing so under the critical gaze of your mother-in-law and with kids are scurrying underfoot, it can be impossible.

Luckily there’s help on the other side of your PC, tablet or smartphone screen. Here are three apps that can help ease the stress of creating a holiday meal and might even help you avert a Thanksgiving culinary catastrophe.

Food52 Hotline

Last November, hundreds of home cooks gave thanks to Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs and the gaggle of dedicated cooks at Food52. Together the group saved a lot of holiday meals from disaster with a service called Hotline, which you can think of as digital version of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, except its scope isn’t limited to the preparation of oversized poultry.

You can ask Hotline a question by posting on the Food52 website, via its iPhone app or by tweeting directly at the @food52hotline Twitter account. The format allows you to ask detailed questions about general cooking topics or specific recipes. Food52 editors will parse the questions and forward them to the site’s contributors based on fields of expertise. Chances are, one of Food52’s 50,000 crowdsourced contributors will get back to you within the half hour. If you mark the question as urgent (i.e. you’re eyeing the fire extinguisher), you may hear back within minutes.

Anyone looking for a little extra help may want to invest in Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, an iPad cookbook app that pretty much breaks down every aspect of hosting a holiday party and cooking dinner into all of its component parts. The recipes are not only detailed, but the techniques are illustrated with photos, diagrams and often how-to videos. What’s more, if you run into a problem, you can access Hotline right from the app.

CookingPlanit

So you’re a neophyte in the kitchen, but for some reason you agreed to host Thanksgiving this year. You don’t just need recipes and advice, you need someone holding your hand in the kitchen. You might be the ideal candidate for Cooking Planit, a new culinary app available for the iOS devices that is pretty much the closest thing you can get to a digital cooking assistant.

CookingPlanit guides you through every aspect of meal planning from shopping for groceries and prep work to timing your roast’s stay in the oven. It doesn’t matter how inept or careless or distracted you are, Cooking Planit doesn’t leave anything to chance. It even tells you when to take breaks.

The Austin-based startup launched only this summer so it’s building up its recipe library and features. Right now, its biggest drawback for holiday meal planning is it can only scale recipes to six servings, so if you’re planning on hosting a big dinner, you might want to give Cooking Planit some time to mature.

That said, if you’re looking to start out small and simple, CookingPlanit’s in-house chef Emily Wilson has prepared two simple Thanksgiving menus (though neither includes a whole roast turkey). The app allows you to mix and match recipes to create your own menus. The cooking assistant then crunches the ingredients and instructions to create a detailed shopping list and dinner-day game plan. You just need to show up and do what your iPad tells you to do.

BigOven RecipeScan

Meals don’t get any more traditional than Thanksgiving dinner, and that means a lot of us are cooking from old family recipes that are hand-printed on index cards, jotted down in notebooks or scrawled in the margins of cookbooks. BigOven’s RecipeScan service can’t improve upon those recipes, but it can produce digital versions, making the Thanksgiving grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking a lot easier.

BigOven does this not through fancy algorithms or handwriting-deciphering software; rather it uses Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourced internet labor marketplace. Basically BigOven is hiring people to translate your chicken scratch handwriting into digital text as well as into semantic food data that Big Oven’s recipe aggregation and meal-planning engine can parse. BigOven will convert any recipe you capture with its iPhone, Android or Windows Phone app, even if you snap a photo out of a magazine or cookbook. You can then combine your recipes with other digital recipes from BigOven’s libraries and those you “clip” from Websites into a universal recipe box.

The first three scans are free, after which customers can buy scans in bundles or at 59 cents a pop. Since human labor is involved, the process takes a few days, so it’s bit late to digitize this year’s Thanksgiving menu, but it’s never too early to start planning next year’s.

Poultry image courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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That’s up from 88 percent the last time RichRelevance in April, and it easily beat out Android and other competing mobile platforms. Shoppers on Apple devices were also willing to spend more, with an average order value of $123 vs. Android’s $101, and $87 from those shopping from traditional desktop operating systems. RichRelevance used data from 3.4 billion online shopping sessions between April and December at U.S. retailers ranging from specialty stores to major e-commerce sites.

Mobile shopping is still a relative drop in the bucket compared to its desktop companion, with just 3.74 percent of total online retail dollars spent in the U.S., but that number is growing. Thanks in large part to the success of Apple devices, mobile web shopping has doubled in eight months, and RichRelevance CEO David Selinger says the trend will only accelerate. Key to being a part of that growth for retailers, Selinger suggests, is “ensuring a seamless experience across the interplay of device, context and consumer behavior.”

Mobile devices seem to be most used for shopping at times when users don’t necessarily have immediate access to other types of computing hardware. For example, RichRelevance found that during Thanksgiving, 24 percent of shoppers visiting retail websites were on mobile devices, the highest share between November and December. On weekends traffic spikes, too, up to 17 percent from an average of 14 percent during the period measured.

If there’s any key takeaway here for Apple’s competition, it’s that the browsing experience is key to mobile commerce. Apple’s iPhone still offers the most true-to-web rendering of non-mobile websites of any smartphone, in my opinion, which means that even if online retailers are slow to tailor their experience to small screens, shoppers can still have a relatively painless shopping experience. It might also just be the case that the demographics of Apple mobile device buyers inclines them toward mobile shopping anyway, since they tend to have a lot of disposable income and be more responsive to advertising.

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Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December. 21 will be a big online traffic day next year?

Here, most courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other  big data and heavy traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order:

February 5: Super Sunday,  Super Bowl XLVI. This year, the big event will even be live streamed! Need I say more?

February 12: The 84th Annual Academy Awards. Eddie Murphy fans may stay away; the rest of the world will show up. Always a big event.

March 6: Super Tuesday. With seven primaries and two caucuses slated, Super Tuesday will be a big day, even if pundits are already calling it “less super than usual,” since many states have accelerated (and some have moved back) their primaries in hopes of maximizing clout.

April 29: The first anniversary of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Gird yourself for the memorial plates. The main event last April may not have broken the Internet, but it certainly did break records.

July 27: Opening day of the London Summer Olympics. Or “The Games of the XXX Olympiad” as they would doubtless prefer to be known. The games will run until August 12, so brace yourself for a brisk mid-summer.

August 27-30: The Republican National Convention. Doubtful this will come close to the 2008 Obama inauguration stats, but political junkies will be online in force. Last time around, the traffic to sites like the fivethirtyeight blog was off the charts.

Sept. 3 through 6: The Democratic National Convention. There won’t be a nominee fight, but the true political fanatics will still tune in. (See above.)

Nov. 6: Election Day. After all the build up, including the seemingly endless Republican debates, you’d think people would stay away. But they won’t.

November 23. Okay, so Black Friday this year was a shadow of its former self, ceding top shopping spot to Thanksgiving, but it’ll still be a day to reckon with. Old habits die hard.

November 26: Cyber Monday.  Also had an off year in 2011, but it could regroup in 2012.

December 21. For those out of the loop, Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end of the world per the Mayan calendar.

Wildcard dates: Then there are some events we know are coming but can’t narrow them down yet. As in:

• The Apple iPad 3 launch.
• The Apple iPhone 5 launch.

On the other hand, there isn’t a World Cup this year, so we’ll be spared that crush.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elmo H. Love

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Will this year be the one when turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? We will have to wait a few more hours to find out. But the loss of Cyber Monday, which got its name when most people had to go into their offices to shop online, shows how far broadband, and now mobile, have come.

Wikipedia notes that Shop.org was the first to use the term Cyber Monday back in 2005, but the phenomenon of increased web traffic had been noted by retailers a year or two prior. In 2003, only 20 percent of U.S. homes had broadband connections, a figure that stands at 68 percent today. But in the past few years, as Cyber Monday traffic has bled back into Black Friday and even the two days of the weekend, the smartphone has changed the holiday landscape even more.

So while PayPal is reporting that it’s seeing six times the traffic on Monday than it did last year, it’s the Akamai data around traffic generated on Thanksgiving that catches my eye. Much like last year, it seems consumers aren’t waiting for any industry-mandated shopping day to submit their credit cards online. Thanksgiving itself experienced 70 percent growth traffic, according to Akamai, which saw a peak traffic of about 2 million page views per minute on Thanksgiving evening, the peak so far for this shopping season.

Is it mobile or marketing?

Akamai reports that on Black Friday, it counted 1.6 page views per minute during its peak at 12 a.m. EST, and overall, Black Friday traffic was up by 43 percent. But note that when Akamai saw the peak, it was still 9 p.m. on the West Coast, which means shoppers were hopping online on Thanksgiving Day itself. Perhaps this was because they were on the couch after their meals or maybe because the promotions were too good to pass up?

Akamai saw a peak of 1.6 million page views per minute as of about 2 p.m. EST and wrote on its blog that Cyber Monday would surpass Black Friday as the peak traffic shopping day so far this season and should do so sometime Monday night. Once again, the office isn’t the place to shop online anymore. Akamai is waiting to see if Cyber Monday will beat the Thanksgiving peak.

More people, fewer problems, faster sites

No matter when people hopped online, there were more of them and the sites ran faster. Web tracking by SmartBear on Black Friday shows that retailers’ sites were about 30 percent faster as of Nov. 25 than they were throughout all the previous holiday seasons. According to data from SmartBear, which provides metrics on site performance, sites that took 20.83 seconds to load during the holiday last year took only 14.67 seconds on Black Friday itself. Target, The Gap and Toys “R” Us experienced some issues but more so on Thanksgiving as opposed to the day after.

Akamai said last year’s global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at noon EST on Black Friday, which makes this year’s peak 20 percent higher. On Cyber Monday 2010, global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at 1 p.m. EST, while this year, we’re still waiting.

This is good news for retailers who feel the pinch of lost revenue when customers can’t shop online, but it’s also good for consumers who are impatient to buy their merchandise and get on with their lives — even for those who are increasingly using mobile devices to shop while possibly doing other things. As Ryan Kim says in his article on Monday morning:

JP Morgan noted a Shop.org survey over the weekend that found almost 15 percent of respondents will shop on a smartphone or tablet on Cyber Monday, compared to 6.9 percent who did so last year. IBM Coremetrics said sales on mobile devices for Black Friday increased to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year.

So more of us are online, using mobile device as well as our PCs, while the web keeps getting faster. Looks like holiday shopping mirrors the broadband experience as a whole.

For those who care how their favorite retailer fared the onslaught, below is SmartBear’s chart on how various online merchants performed on Friday. “RT” is response time.

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Allrecipes.com said it had its biggest traffic day ever on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The website saw more than 6.8 million visits from people who viewed more than 32.5 million pages of content. According to Allrecipes, that represents a 32 percent increase from the day before Thanksgiving 2010. For larger reference, typically the site sees some 24 million unique visitors over the course of one month.

And more people are looking for food-based content while they’re away from the desktop. Visits to Allrecipes.com from a mobile device during the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were up 218 percent year-over-year, the company says.

Of course, this news could come in handy given Allrecipes’ current strategic situation. Last month, Allrecipes’ parent company Readers Digest announced plans to put the cooking site up for sale.

But regardless of the fact that Allrecipes is in play, there is definitely a larger trend at work here. For example, a new tablet-based cookbook produced by iPad textbook startup Inkling is selling like hotcakes: Earlier this month it became the third highest grossing iPad app worldwide. Meanwhile, new startups such as Foodily are solely aimed at making it super easy to find and share recipes with online contacts. With so many people looking to the web for recipes and cooking tips, there are certainly more food-focused technologies on the horizon.

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For tips on classic American cuisine, it’s hard to go wrong with Martha Stewart — especially when she gets Russell Crowe to help out with prepping the bird.

But for a more low-fi approach to your turkey (as well as some incredibly tasty-looking side dishes), here’s Working Class Foodies’ fail-proof Thanksgiving dinner:

Now, for the don’ts: When it comes to the best way to not ruin your family’s Thanksgiving and/or house, one thing is pretty clear: Play it safe; don’t deep fry it. That’s what the below PSA strongly encourages.

This point is made explicitly clear by Tampa Bay’s MJ Morning Show, which did a demonstration of what might happen if you were to deep-fry your turkey in the home.

Whether deep-fried or not, the important thing is that we hope you enjoy whatever you end up eating today — and that you have a happy Thanksgiving.

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