Published May 27th, 2009
in Money Saving Tools.
Membership and rewards cards stuffing my wallet have always been a problem for me. In the old days (before iPhone) you could help the problem by printing the bar codes on a single card and using that one card in the stores. Now as the smart phones have become so much more intelligent, there is an even more elegant solution.
Please enjoy CardStar, an iPhone application that lets you enter all your membership and rewards cards into your phone and display them at checkout when you need them! I don’t have an iPhone to try it but judging by the screen shots I already love this little app. I wish there was something similar in Android Marketplace so I could use it on my G1.
By the way, the app is currently free (regular price is $0.99).
Published May 20th, 2009
in Money Saving Tools.
Visual shopping is the area I anxiously watch for the next break through. My latest discovery is Modista, a website built by two Computer Science Ph.D. students at UC Berkeley which allows you to browse several kinds of products from multiple merchants. The selection is limited to shoes, purses, eyeglasses, and watches and functionality is somewhat basic but there is something appealing in this simplicity.
Modista is essentially a matrix of products aggregated from different merchants and arranged by similarity. X-axis offers same items by shape while Y-axis - same color. Clicking on a product in the matrix makes your new selection current and populates the matrix with new similar products. The whole shopping experience is somewhat similar to browsing real store shelves where a virtual store assistant is constantly feeding you with look-a-like products.
The site works exceptionally well with shoes and a somewhat worse with other product categories. You can narrow your search by price, color, and a few other product specific characteristics (like size for shoes) and also add your selections to a ‘favorite’ list. This is pretty much it.
While Modista is one of the more elegant implementations of visual shopping, they are not the first nor the most advanced solution. That title probably goes to like.com who were the pioneers in this niche and grew tremendously every since (judging by my monthly reports). Besides the entire social aspect missing at Modista, like.com also offers some advanced shopping features like an ability to upload an image of your own product, or select a certain area on the product photo and base your visual search on that area alone.
I loved the easiness and visual aspect Modista brings to online shopping however when I showed Modista to my friend, the answer was ‘it causes flickering in my eyes’, so your mileage can certainly vary. ;-)
Published May 16th, 2009
in Popular Sites Series.
This is April 2009 revision of the Popular Coupon sites list. You can find the previous revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to March results. This list currently has 34 sites - one more than in March (I discovered couponcode.com). On average the coupon sites have gained (3.27%) in April.
The best performer is coupons.com (27.46%), which also moves by 2 positions up to become #1, and the worst result comes from couponcodes4u.com (-7.75%) which also slides down by one position. Enjoy the complete list below!
Published May 12th, 2009
in Popular Sites Series.
This is April 2009 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to March results. The list has a total of 35 web sites which is the same number as the last month. There are 17 more sites in my database that don’t meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
The best performer this month is shopper.cnet.com (24.11%) followed by shoplocal.com with a gain of (14.8%).
The worst performer this month is dealio with a loss of (-45.7%) followed by pricerunner (-25.87%). mpire is also in red and is close to falling off the cliff. ;-) Please enjoy the complete list below
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
(**) Note: the web site is a portal with price comparison engine being one of the offered web services. Alexa rank cannot be used to judge how popular this price comparison engine is.
Published May 8th, 2009
in Interesting / Other.
Do you use Twitter a lot? Here is a neat way to link Amazon product without a need for any of the URL shortening services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly
Take the normal product URL, extract the identifier part, e.g. ISBN for books or product identifier for other items, and append it at the end of “amzn.com/”
Examples:
http://www.amazon.com/Buyology-Truth-Lies-About-Why/dp/0385523882
becomes
http://amzn.com/0385523882
and
http://www.amazon.com/LG-Network-Blu-ray-Disc-Player/dp/B001UQ6F5M
becomes
http://amzn.com/B001UQ6F5M
Also, if you use Amazon’s wishlists, you can build a short link by appending the wishlist identifier to “amzn.com/w/”. Here is for example my wishlist:
http://amzn.com/w/37ZKKD0NVPAZD
Credit goes to Eric Engleman of Tech Flash for blogging about the trick.
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