The Concorde: loud but fast. (Wikipedia)

President Barack Obama blew Mitt Romney away when it came to raising money from employees of America's top technology companies, according to Nate Silver. Maybe that had something to do with the president's ability recruit talent to build his campaign's much-ballyhooed IT infrastructure. [NYT]

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian just wanted to make the world suck less. [Venture Beat]

Private equity billionaire Robert M. Bass wants a supersonic jet, without the sonic boom. [Bloomberg]

Everyone, presumably, wants to read their urine samples with a smartphone. [AllThingsD]

Cyber Monday sales were as much as 30 percent better than last year's for some of the largest retailers, which is good, but not as good as the 33 percent growth in 2011 from the year before. [WSJ]

"Father of the iPod" Tony Fardell didn't exactly shed a tear over Apple's Maps fiasco. [BBC]

Planned cities are beautiful ... from above. [Wired]

Website seized! (ICE)

Anyone searching for cheap, counterfeit sports memorabilia, media, clothing and jewelry today may be disappointed. In conjunction with other law enforcement agencies around the world, U.S. authorities have taken down 132 domain names as part of their Project Cyber Monday. This marks the third year for the project, which goes after sites identified as sources for fake, illegal goods.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a statement about the take-downs, which noted authorities targeted sites meant to fool unwitting consumers "into unknowingly buying counterfeit goods as part of the holiday shopping season."

ICE's statement indicates authorities also followed the money to hit site owners where it hurts:

In addition to the domain name seizures, officials identified PayPal accounts utilized by the infringing websites. Proceeds received through the identified PayPal accounts, in excess of $175,000, are currently being targeted for seizure by the investigating [Homeland Security Investigations] field offices.

Since 2010 authorities have seized 1,630 domains. ICE reports that the banners used to alert potential customers that the site has been seized have received a total of 110 million views.

As for those Canal Street guys peddling knock-off Rolexes? We're probably still stuck with them for the time being.

(scaldoscoop.tumblr.com)

Some data from Fab.com's blog-happy CEO Jason Goldberg, who checked in with some data earlier this week from Fab's Cyber Monday sale. Mr. Goldberg includes a triumphant illustration that would be a hockey stick if it weren't a bar graph (and if it included all those early pivots). But as such, Fab's orders by month have been steadily growing and in November, the company had what looks like more than a 33 percent increase, likely due to the big sale. Fab did more than $1.1 million in discounted deals on Monday alone Friday through Monday, the company reports.

The company is getting members inbound through social sources, most notably Facebook, Mr. Goldberg says, with more than 25 percent of their sale revenue coming from users who were originally referred by the social network. Email invites and Twitter shares accounted for another 25 percent of sales on Monday.

"Meanwhile, it was certainly a blowout mobile holiday for Fab.com, as more than 20% of sales came via our iPhone, iPad, and Android apps," Mr. Goldberg wrote. If the growth continues and the sales keep up, it's a great success story for a startup that was once a struggling social network for gays, then a gay deal site, before finally finding its calling.

Ideeli CEO Paul Hurley

Just a quick hit from the front lines of the e-commerce madness. One of New York's big daily deal players, ideeli, just fired off an email on their Black Friday sales. The economy as a whole may be in the toilet, but that's not showing up in their numbers.

• ideeli doubled revenue over last year for the Black Friday weekend.
• Visits to the site were up 30% over last year during the same period.
• Conversion rate was up 50%. Not only did more customers visit, they bought more.
• Over the Black Friday weekend, mobile traffic was double compared to same period last year. ideeli is now seeing over 20% in sales coming from mobile devices.
• Cyber Monday sales were up 36% as of 2pm yesterday.

The dark economic climate may in fact be contributing to ideeli's success. As CEO Paul Hurley told Betabeat back in August, "Recessions are very good for businesses like ours, because there is so much excess product available, and people are looking for good deals. Most of our market is aspirational consumer, we do big brands but not couture. Partly what happened at Gilt was they built a brand around the promise of luxury discounts, and that is not a scalable model. We have a much larger target market of lower end shoppers."

Ok Gilt, hit us with some holiday numbers and show Mr. Hurley if this whole luxury discounts thing can scale or what?