Good Sites for Holiday Deals

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are out of the way the holiday shopping season is now in full swing. Here are some sites that can save you money:

1. Bing.com - Microsoft's new search engine is not only a formidable competitor to Google but it is also a great way to save some money when online shopping. Simply search Bing for the item your interested in and the results will show you what they found. As a part of those results any merchant who has partnered with Microsoft in the "Bing Cashback" program will display the gold coin icon under their listing. By clicking through this link, providing your email and making a purchase the Bing system will keep track of your running total and provide you with a rebate.
2. Twitter.com - Twitter can be a great way to get real time updates from your favorite retailers. This year more than ever brands like Toys R Us and Coach are leveraging social media to communicate with their customers.
3. Amazon.com - The largest online retailer is constantly updating it's deals. You can check out their deals page to see the latest.
4. CyberMonday.com - The Monday after Thanksgiving used to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. While that may no longer be the case any longer it is the unofficial start of the online deals. This site is a good resource because it aggregates all the deals happening for easy search by category, merchant. etc.
5. Sample Sale Sites - A new trend in ecommerce has been the online sample sale (check out TechCrunch's article in October about the trend) in which retailers offer their excess inventory at deep discounts. Sites like Gilt.com and  Hautelook.com require users to register and once they do they have access to fashion and lifestyle brand sales.

Morgan Stanley's look at the current and future of the web

Morgan Stanley recently presented their report on "Economy and Internet Trends" at the Web 2.0 conference. Lots of data included here with much of it financial in nature but starting with slide 29 the presentation gives an interesting outlook that is worth browsing.

Much of the content focuses on the mobile market with some truly amazing growth expected over the next five years. For instance, according to Cisco global mobile IP traffic is likely to grow by 66x in the next four years. Two other topics that gets plenty of focus are the effects of social media on behavior and the growth happening in Japan.

Protect your site at all costs

As the holiday season is upon us with less than a week to Thanksgiving it is smart to remember the value of ecommerce infrastructure redundancy. While many companies do a good job of avoiding a single device at the web/app/database server layers there are plenty out there that don't protect some other from other pitfalls. Here are some important things to think about:

• Third party API's - Most sites do not handle all functions that a site needs to perform themselves. For instance, it is both expensive and impractical to host tax calculations internally. If your site is using third parties it makes sense to follow some best practices including
• Make sure your front end has a graceful experience if the API is unavailable.
• For sensitive and critical API's like credit card processing consider routing traffic over a private line.
• Review and know your API service level agreements. If there are issues at midnight you want to know who to call.
  
•  Network Devices - Devices like routers, firewalls, switches, etc. are the hops between your customers and your web site. If it is important enough to have redudancy at the server levels isn't it just as important to do the same thing here?
  
• N+1 - One mistake some folks fall into is building out an environment that has redundancy but is venerable to device failure. For instance, if your site has 4 web servers and at full volume all machines are fully utilized you are at risk. Losing a single machine could potentially cripple your site. Get to know the concept of N+1 and you will sleep better.
  

I think back to the outage earlier this year of credit card processor Authorize.net that got me thinking about how important it is to have all your bases covered in the critical portions of your site. Just ask the owners of all those ecommerce sites that were unable to take orders during the downtime due to their dependency on the service.

Time launches technology blog Techland

Time Inc just launched their new mainstream technology blog at Techland.com. The site covers gaming, gadgets, tech news and a few other general geek categories.

iPhone requires .NET? Really?

I am in the middle of developing an iPhone app and in order to get the app onto my phone before it is in the Apple store I need to work through the iPhone Configuration Utility process. Barely got through step 1 in the process when i got this notice. Sort of odd that a Microsoft framework is required when installing a Apple utility.

EverNote: Forget Me Not

One of my biggest problems in a typical day is keeping track of the seemingly endless list of things I need to remember. The truth is we live in a fast paced, adrenaline fueled society that demands we juggle 50 things at once.  I will also admit to be less than perfect in the self organization department. Despite my endless attempts at writing notes on the nearest piece of paper, leaving myself voice mail reminders and emailing thoughts out as soon as they pop into my head I still manage to loss some piece of information from time to time. Until now......

A few months ago I read an article about a service called EverNote describing it as a ubiquitous note capture tool. The description and review seemed to place it in the category of just another attempt at retaining bits of information much like most email clients offer as a peripheral function. But over the next few weeks I continued to hear good things about the app and so last week I decided to give it a spin. It wasn't long after signing up that I found myself using the free service for pretty much everything I need to capture during my day. And I mean I use it everywhere for pretty much anything I can think of needing to hold on to.  Here are some examples:

• With the desktop app on my laptop I can drag and drop emails from Outlook into Evernote.
• The mobile web interface allows me to jot down notes on my BlackBerry.
• I started using the Web Clipper Bookmarklet which is smart enough to save only the content you have highlighted on a web page into your new note.
• The service gives you a custom email address you can send notes to.

Needless to say I am impressed by the flexibility of the service. It is simple enough to use but there is quite a bit of "smart" underneath the hood of Evernote to make the app a powerhouse as a productivity tool.  For example, yesterday I discovered that the service actually indexes content in images and therefore makes them searchable. How cool is that? Just snap a picture of a whiteboard with notes on it, upload it to EverNote and the content is now searchable as if you typed it into a document. The screenshot on the right is my simple example of what I am talking about. I took a picture of my Blockbuster card, uploaded it to Evernote, logged in and searched "membership". It pulled up my image and highlighted the search content! Pretty amazing stuff.

So, if your like me and find it tough to keep track of everything that comes your way in the course of a day this service may be just what you need. Hey, what do you have to lose? The basic service is free.

It will be getting cold out soon.....

Every year about this time I start thinking video games. Probably because like most people (and bears) I tend to hibernate in the colder months. Nothing better than finding your game for the winter months and spending the next few months of downtime getting better and better.  Sure it is still August but before you know it I will be shoveling snow off my driveway and wearing wool hats to keep my head from freezing. Hell, regular season football is two weeks away!

So it was pretty nice when I read this morning that their seems to be a console gaming price war going on. Looks like Microsoft is dropping it's price on the XBOX 360. Now I understand that I am late to the game (no pun intended) when it comes to upgrading to the current console platform. In my defense the past 4 years I have been a little occupied with the birth of my two kids and therefore my gaming skills have suffered. On the rare moment when I did have a half hour to sit down and play I was more than happy to fire up the old PS2 and get 9 innings of baseball in. But with the recent drop in price on the XBox and PS3 I may need to step up and start gaming again. Need to practice quick since my son will probably be ready to compete in the next few years.

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