Published July 21st, 2008
in Interesting / Other.
A tablet PC with WiFi, USB, 4GB of storage and 512 MB of memory, running Firefox and Skype on top of… hmm… well… not important, because the PC is not for sale. It is being built by Mike and folks at TechCrunch and they are calling everyone for help.
Judging by the comments, the blog post stirred a lot of excitement and I don’t want to be the party pooper but this comment resonates the best with my way of seeing it:
A pipe dream…. mark my words.. you need people who are in the business…. I have always been fascinated by people who have no clue about anything, from a totally different field who wake up and feel they just had gods greated idea the planet has ever seen…
Do yourself a favor and talk to some product designers at some of the it companies… then you’d burry your little project immediately…
I have little experience with hardware projects, but I know a lot about open sourcing software and one thing is certain - it requires a lot of coordination. Even if producing the above device is feasible price-wise taken the requirements, which I really doubt, it will take a huge coordinated effort from multiple parties: designers, suppliers, manufactures, marketers etc.
Unless TC gets someone on board who really knows this stuff and has very dip pockets - the idea is doomed to fail. What do you think?
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Published March 24th, 2008
in Deal Site Reviews.
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).
Continue reading ‘Coupon Site – RetailMeNot Review’
Published January 5th, 2007
in Popular Sites Series.
This is December 2006 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
Hawkee enjoyed a nice ride this month (up 34.16%) after it was featured at TechCrunch. It is amazing what difference a single post on a popular blog can make.
The next best performer is TheFind with 29.68% increase. I will attribute this rise to their active advertisement campaign (including that on TechCrunch as well).
Sortprice is the worst performer. The change is not that significant though, only 9.76% down. On average price comparison sites seem to be doing much better than the bargain hunting sites that I reviewed recently.
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is the 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.
