Ash K. Gilpin

PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example - Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.

The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.

The site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.

Source: TechCrunch

Over the past few months, Google has been hard at work making it easier to find and compare local businesses and services right from the standard web results page.

In addition to providing the basic contact information and map locations for several choices at the top of the page, they will also show ratings and provide one-click access to reviews on the search results page so that you can make more informed decisions about where you want to go.

Here are a few specific examples of how you can use Google to search and compare local businesses and services.

 

• Find the location of and driving directions to the Googleplex (or any specific address).
• Find and compare Mexican restaurants in Pasadena, CA
• Get directions to and read reviews about a local eatery in Pittsburgh.
• Find movie showtimes for films that are playing in your neighborhood.

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.

New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, recently launched. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song.

The social network aspect to this is what will make it popular, and the search engine will help people group songs that they all sing and compare. Users have a profile page and can add friends, fans, etc. Others rate their recordings. kSolo (acquired by Fox) and SingShot have dabbled in this space successfully.

Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts).

Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” in October 2006. Next Monday they will announce that they now have more than 6 million paid mailboxes over 1,300 customers, a growth of 50% in three months. Sixty percent of their customers are being serviced through resellers.

They have lots of help with the product, too. They’ll be announcing version 4.5 of their Collaboration Suite (which is already available). 6,300 developers and administrators have contributed to Zimbra. The open source version of Zimbra has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of times.

The company has raised $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.

Source: TechCrunch

Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called UpScoop, which joins a number of startups trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous - it actually takes a few hours.

Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.

Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.

Source: TechCrunch

Adobe announced the immediate availability of a free download for Adobe Acrobat 3D software that delivers updated 3D computer-aided design (CAD) translators. As a result, Acrobat 3D now supports many of the latest versions of major CAD file formats, enabling users to easily convert 3D models from those formats to more secure and widely adopted PDF—regardless of whether they have CAD software. The updated translators leverage technology Adobe gained as part of its April 2006 acquisition of privately held Trade & Technologies France (TTF), a company whose technology is used by many leading CAD, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) developers.

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide, announced that it will launch its new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. on Monday, February 5. With the new ranking model, all Yahoo! search marketing ads in the U.S. will be ranked by quality in addition to keyword bid price. As a result, Yahoo! will be able to provide a more relevant search experience to users, more valuable customer leads to advertisers, and additional opportunities to its distribution partners.”Yahoo! is very excited to introduce our new, more quality-focused ranking model because it has the power to significantly enhance the experience we deliver to our users and unlock the full potential of Yahoo!’s search marketing network,” said Terry Semel, chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. “With this important piece in place our new search marketing system will allow Yahoo! to more effectively connect people with the businesses, products, services and information they are passionate about.”

To date, search ads on Yahoo! and its distribution partner sites have been ranked solely by bid price - the higher the bid, the higher an ad appears within the search results. When the new ranking model goes into effect, both bid and the ad’s quality together will determine where an ad appears in the search results. The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page.

Google has decided that only allowing certain users to run AdSense and IntelliTXT on the same page is not fair to all the other AdSense publishers. Therefore, Google has ruled that AdSense can be used with other contextual advertising services, provided they do not look like Google ads. That means everyone can now run AdSense and Vibrant Media IntelliTXT on the same page!This new rule applies to all contextual advertising service. Therefore, if you’re using Kontara, or any other contextual ad network, you can run them as long as they don’t look like Google ads. It is good to see Google finally give some good news after releasing their latest TOS update. The only problem I can see for new publishers is Vibrant Media requires 500,000 page views per month in order for a site to run IntelliTXT. But at least you can run it on pages with Google ads now!

With this ruling, Google is really putting the screws to Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). If you wish to run YPN, it cannot show up on any pages with AdSense ads in them and the YPN ads must not use the same color scheme as the AdSense ads. Given that choice, many publishers will either give up YPN or give up Google. Google feels most will give up YPN because of AdSense superior ad targeting technology.

Yahoo! launched a new personal finance website, which brings together the Internet’s most useful tools and information to help consumers manage their personal finances. Yahoo! Personal Finance offers consumers a suite of new financial centers, covering every major area of personal finance, ranging from “Banking & Budgeting” to “Retirement.” The site continues the company’s media strategy of bringing together the best tools and information around a particular topic from the industry’s leading providers, while also expanding advertising inventory in one of the largest advertising categories.”The goal of Yahoo! Finance has always been to help our users make informed financial decisions, and now we’re able to do that across every aspect of their financial lives,” said Peggy White, general manager, Yahoo! Finance. “Not all of our users manage an investment portfolio, but we all manage a checkbook. This presents a huge opportunity for Yahoo! Finance to expand beyond our core investing-focused offerings.”

Yahoo! Finance has already established itself as the Internet’s number one destination for investing tools and information, and aims to expand its audience size and engagement with the addition of a new personal finance home.