Dear Friends,

One of the local ski areas is open, although the trails are primarily full of man-made snow rather than the stuff falling from the sky. I launched an internal contest for Small Dog Employees to guess the date of the first “big dump” and below zero temps. I guess I am as ready as I am going to get for the winter, but it has been pretty mild here so far.

Our Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday sales were all big successes here at Small Dog. All three stores and our website were cranking at full capacity and we set sales records by nearly quadrupling sales over last year. I think a bit more optimism in the economic outlook was a strong contributor but the two biggest factors were our new store in Manchester, NH and the fact that again this year, Apple has provided us with the hottest products on the planet just in time for the holidays.

The new iOS 4.2.1 makes the iPad even more useful than ever. Our project with the Vermont legislature is a great example of the potential for this amazing device. Every day during the legislative session, a legislative digest is printed and distributed to all of the legislators. This thick document contains hundreds of pages of legislation and analysis. The cost to print is substantial but in a pilot program we are beginning to outfit the legislators with iPads and pushing the digest to them each day so that it is available to them immediately on the iPad and the state saves the printing costs. The calculated payback for the state is about 9 months!

The iPad was also spotted for the first time on C-Span on the speaker’s podium in the House of Representatives when Rep. Henry Cuellar gave a speech using the iPad.

We are in the middle of Hanukkah which is early this year. We have some Hanukkah specials on our website here!