Akamai: Cyber Monday is off to a promising start

Early Cyber Monday activity was going strong this morning, reported Akamai Technologies Inc., a Cambridge company that helps businesses deliver e-commerce and other content over the Internet.

By 10 a.m. today, local time, "online visits to Akamai retail customer sites had already surpassed 2007's Cyber Monday peak of 4.6 million visitors per minute," an Akamai spokeswoman said in an e-mail. At approximately 10 a.m. Eastern Time today, Akamai was tracking roughly 5,315,524 global visitors per minute to retail sites, 2,569,274 of which were coming from North America. At 11 a.m. Eastern Time, Akamai's global retail customers were experiencing 5,795,872 visitors per minute."

Of course, online visits don't always translate into sales. Still, Akamai's early Cyber Monday traffic report was grounds for some optimism.

Meanwhile, investors uneasy about the holiday shopping season gave back some of Wall Street's recent gains, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 400 points in morning trading today, the AP reported. Please click here to read that AP story.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)