Twentieth Century Fox is hoping to lure viewers back to the cratering DVD market–by offering them an endless series of digital distractions during home releases of the studio’s movies.

FoxPop, a technology that makes its debut next month, works like a specialized Twitter feed, offering up a string of trivia, photos and shopping suggestions during selected movies.

Users can run the application on their computers or their iPhones or iPod touches. It syncs with the movie, displaying material that is supposed to be relevant to what is happening on-screen at that moment.

FoxPop is to make its debut Dec. 1 with the home-video release of “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” this year’s sequel to the 2006 Ben Stiller comedy. Fox hired a marketing company to write a string of informational tidbits and quizzes about the movie’s stars, props and setting, which is filled with artworks and artifacts from the museum’s archives.

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Shopping on cellphones–long a dream among e-commerce companies–is not yet a mass-market phenomenon. But some new tools could help change that picture.

Amazon.com (AMZN) Thursday unveiled free software for BlackBerry handsets (trackball models only, please), that allow users to browse for products, read reviews, and buy on the go–just like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone that came out in December.

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Online analytics firm comScore (SCOR) today released numbers for holiday online shopping activity in the U.S., and it looks as though cold weather that kept people indoors and online in some places provided one bright little sliver of hope.

Online shopping in the first 51 days of the holiday season, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21, was $24.71 billion, reports comScore, down one percent from the prior year’s haul. Now, the weekend that just passed, Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, was down 17 percent from “the corresponding fourth weekend after Thanksgiving in 2007,” at $677 million. However, that’s a 98 percent increase from the $341 million booked during the Dec. 22 to 23 weekend of 2007, the “weekend nearest Christmas last year,” as comScore slices it.

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On April 17, 2008, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s patent application titled Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere. Apple’s patent generally relates to improving the experiences that online-shoppers may have at an online Apple Store, sometime in the future. While Apple points to the obvious advantages of shopping online, such as being continuously open for business 24/7, allowing consumers to quickly use search functions to find multiple items and of course the best of all, never having to leave the house to shop. However, Apple acknowledges that they have a long way to go before delivering a more interactive experience that could match that found in the real world.

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