4. Kindle bowls a perfect game of 299
It's been a busy week for Kindle watchers. Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) finally lowered the price of its e-book readers to a cool $299. This is the third price cut in the history of device, which originally hit the market nearly two years ago at $399, before the sticker got trimmed to $359 a few months later.

Cheaper Kindles mean that buyers will have to go through fewer Kindle books -- at $9.99 apiece for best-sellers, less than their hardcover counterparts -- to justify the initial purchase.

Amazon is also exploring the placement of targeted ads within its digital reads. This is the kind of marketing tactic that would make any highbrow bookworm squirm, but if it creates a monetization angle for Kindle to offer more free or discounted books, it can really bring e-books to a much larger audience.

5. If you're watching this, you should be buying that
TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) have entered into a strategic alliance to create a platform that will help the consumer-electronics retailer keep closer tabs on its customers.

If successful, TiVo digital video recorders sold through Best Buy will let couch potatoes stream Napster tunes and receive relevant in-store promotions. That's a good start, but won't it be just a matter of time before TiVo begins spitting back BestBuy.com order information for CDs from a band you just saw on Conan O'Brien's show? Or maybe the latest Curb Your Enthusiasm season on DVD the moment you check out a syndicated episode of Seinfeld?

Naturally, this is the kind of platform that shoppers may shy away from if it becomes too creepy or intrusive, but Best Buy has agreed to put more marketing muscle behind TiVo -- and that's something that TiVo can certainly use, given its waning subscriber numbers.

Everybody wins. If this move took place on a TiVo remote control, it would be the equivalent of hitting the green "thumbs up" button three times.