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Archive for March, 2008

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Are favorite deal site poll results rigged?

Published March 27th, 2008 in Business Marketing. 15 Comments

Exactly 5 months ago I asked all of you to vote for your favorite deal site, and 375 of you did. The top 5 results now stand like this:

Deal Site Votes
fatwallet.com 82
dealtaker.com 82
dealnews.com 59
slickdeals.net 39
markdownmonkey.com 38

The poll was set so that each vote is bound to a unique IP meaning if you used your IP once you can’t vote again. This is not a bullet proof way of eliminating duplicate votes but you really have to make an effort to go around this limitation (if you wanted to).

The comments on the other hand were not limited by IP. With that in mind, here are a couple of facts that make me think the poll results are rigged.

DealTaker comments are spam

I analyzed the comments and it appears 5 out of 8 comments praising DealTaker came from the same IP despite different usernames/emails in the comment signature. Here is the IP used: 71.74.145.215
I appreciate if anyone can find more about the geography of this address. This of course doesn’t prove anything but I am just curious.

Only top 5 positions gain votes

If you take a look at the complete list of votes, you will notice that only the top 5 positions have gained any significant number of votes. The #6 is shopping-bargains.com with twice less votes than #5, markdownmonkey.com
I might be wrong but this fact tells me that the voting is done by the people specifically interested to move the deal site to the top 5 to get listed on the front page.

Results go side by side

This is not as obvious unless you have been watching this for some time like I have and is especially true with positions #1 and #2. I have been seeing it happen several times: as soon as fatwallet.com becomes the front runner, some magical force comes along and dealtaker.com catches up. I have not paid as much attention to #4 and #5 but as you can see they have very close number of votes as well.

I am really distressed by these findings and consider pulling the poll results off the front page. What do you think?

Preserving Savings: Stocks, CD’s, or Precious Metals?

Published March 25th, 2008 in Money Saving Tips. 7 Comments

Economic recession, declining dollar, rising gas prices, growing budget deficit… In the times like these I wish I was a small child and didn’t have to worry about anything. But I am not and this is why I am spending this night trying to figure out what my investment strategy should be for the next 2-3 years.

This is a really tough decision for me. For my IRA account the investment vehicle of choice hasn’t changed, I stay loyal to stocks. For the shorter term savings however I consider these options:

Stocks and Mutual funds

You know the drill. Open an account with a brokerage and invest in the names you trust. The stocks that perform well in recession are staples, health care, energy, tobacco & beverages and gambling. VICEX is the mutual fund that tracks many of these companies. You might also want to consider some foreign stocks. The economies of China, India and Russia are booming. Also check out these recommendations from Seeking Alpha, a very popular blog among investors.

CD’s and Savings

The rates banks offer on savings accounts and CD’s keep going down and the last 75 points rate cut by Federal Reserve has brought more new announcements. I just received emails from ING, WaMu and I am sure there were many more that followed. However if you look just a little harder you can still find savings rates well above 4%. One of such bargains comes from Natinal City who currently offer a 48 months CD with 5% APR. A great resource for tracking these offers is the Bank Deals blog.

Precious Metals

This is a venue which I have avoided so far. Gold has always looked too expensive and I feel too uncomfortable with other alternatives. However I think I found a silver bullet and it came from nobody else but Robert Kiyosaki, the guy who wrote “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. His last article on Yahoo Finance is somewhat gloomy but if you skip the “inconvenient truth” of the first part, the last two paragraphs offers some sound investment advice.

Silver is consumed in many industries, and it’s reported that the world has less than a 10-year supply of it left. That’s why I believe silver is currently one of the best investment opportunities there is — even for people with limited financial training.

Conclusion

I don’t believe in fortune tellers. No one can predict where we are going to be in a few years from now. Therefore my strategy will probably be a mix of some of these investment vehicles. Have you given it a thought? Please share your own approach in the comments.

Coupon Site – RetailMeNot Review

Published March 24th, 2008 in Deal Site Reviews. 14 Comments

Last week Yan had written about RetailMeNot’s launch of a shopping community quoting from this TechCrunch story. After reading those stories and various comments at TechCrunch, I wanted to review RetailMeNot (RMN). RMN is the first coupon site I am reviewing.

RMN certainly does not have a typical coupon website look (cluttered design) but a rather interesting look, though a bit girlish in my books ;). Users rating coupons by indicating if the coupon worked is a brilliant idea. Even though the idea carries a very small execution, the effect of the voting can be seen in Yan’s monthly coupon site ratings, with RetailMeNot at the 2nd position. Also, user’s have the option to submit coupons.

The TechCrunch article notes that RMN features about 71,000 coupons from 13,000 merchants, which sounds very impressive. The success at RMN should also be attributed for not being behind in technology. The Firefox Extension, IGoogle Gadget, Bookmarklet and Mac Widget are some good examples. RMN also uses some of the buzz features popular with websites, such as Tag Cloud, related tags etc.

Being a user driven coupon site, the quality of coupons cannot really be attributed to RMN (good or bad) but should be attributed to its users. I have used their coupons in the past and the coupon ratings there generally seem to be good (meaning, if there is a 60% or more rating, there is a bigger chance of working for you).

RetailMeNot Frontpage

Continue reading ‘Coupon Site – RetailMeNot Review’

Free access to The Wall Street Journal

Published March 23rd, 2008 in Money Saving Tips. 1 Comment

Wall Street JournalWhile most news sources have adopted the modern realities of open informational exchange and freely offer news online, The Wall Street Journal is on of the few remaining newspapers still holding on to the traditional subscription model. Well, not for much longer…

It has puzzled me for a long time why some of WSJ articles are free to read when I get to them from other websites, while these same articles are a “premium content” when I go to WSJ directly. It turns out the newspaper is using the HTTP referer passed by your browser to identify where you come from and selectively opens the content for certain domain names.

One of these sources getting the “free ride” is Digg. Of course the newspaper doesn’t want to miss out on the ton of traffic which the popular social news community may mean if a link to the article gets “dugg” to the front page. The same applies to Google News reader.

Which brings us to an interesting conclusion, it appears that The Wall Street Journal is selectively free depending on where you come from. With this information (and just a bit of imagination) you can easily figure out how you can be a part of that market that WSJ is trying to please.

This article explains the details but in a nutshell it boils down to two approaches:

  1. Find the WSJ article of your interest on one of these “free ride” sources (for example on Google News) and open it by clicking on a link from there.
  2. Install a browser plugin that spoofs HTTP referer and make WSJ believe you come form one of these sites

Either technique gives you free access to the premium content that WSJ charges $79 a year for. And while the newspaper can’t and probably won’t stop you from doing this, the big question that remains however is the morality of this hack and this is what you have to decide for yourself.

Source: The Wall Street Journal’s Web site is already (secretly) free

Weekly hot deals roundup – March 21, 2008

Published March 21st, 2008 in Shopping Bargains. 0 Comments

This week has brought a lot of great bargains. In fact the number we submitted daily almost doubled our usual rate of 10 deals per day. Here are just a few that caught my eye.

There were many more interesting deals this week and I just couldn’t post them all here. I encourage you to visit Buxr.com or subscribe to Buxr.com RSS feed for more great offers every day. See you next week!

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