Online holiday sales soared 14 percent from 2011, to $42.3 billion during the November-December period, according to the latest news released minutes ago from online-sales tracker Comscore.

Free shipping day, which fell on Monday, Dec. 17, saw sales skyrocket by 76 percent, to $1.013 billion, and even on Christmas Day, sales jumped 36 percent to $288 million, the report says.

Despite the growth, the 14-percent final tally fell short of Comscore's 16-percent growth forecast. After four weeks of growth, the next three weeks of the November-December holiday season failed to surpass a 12-percent growth rate, Comscore reported.

Shoppers' worries about the economy and Congress' fiscal cliff budget negotiations contributed to the December "swoon," said Comscore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Digital Second City Scene beat the rest of the technorati pack with the story of Chicago-based ParkWhiz, one of the first of a growing number of web and mobile competitors vying to help motorists find discounted parking-garage spaces in real time on their smartphones.

Four days after the Sun-Times column hit, ParkWhiz won $2 million in venture funding and put on its board new investors, including Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of social news website Reddit; Garry Tan, partner at Y Combinator venture fund, and Amreesh Modi, managing partner at Caprigo Ventures and former chief technology officer at Chicago-based digital maps-maker Navteq Corp.

And then, 42 tech and mainstream media picked up on ParkWhiz's funding story.

Hey, remember the Bright One. Think Wrapports, too -- the "rapport" of new technology and the "wrapping" of a traditional print newspaper.

Robots will be the focus of two upcoming events in Chicago -- the "Automate" show at McCormick Place convention center and the Illinois FIRST Robotic Competition for high-school teams at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Jan. 21-24 McCormick Place show highlights how robots are playing increasingly important roles in helping businesses save money, and how they are becoming more sophisticated in working side-by-side with humans.

The Jan. 5 robot competition at IIT is expected to attract nearly 800 people from 40 Chicago-area teams of 9th through 12th graders. The teams will spend the coming months designing, programming and testing their robots to compete in the Midwest Regional Competition in April.