The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘credit’

Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.

Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?

Read more…

When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.

Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends’ transactions and little else. Now, it’s much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You’ll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You’ll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users).

More important than the redesign is the new feature Blippy is launching. Starting today, you can manually review each purchase before it’s displayed on Blippy. This is an important step in the direction of better privacy controls. Previously, you could pick and choose which sources you imported your transaction data from, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. You could remove items after they appeared in your stream, but not before. Now you can do that by approving each one. A bit of a pain? Sure, but for some who are really concerned about privacy, this is a welcome addition (of course, you may wonder why they’d be using Blippy in the first place, but hey, people are weird).

This new setting will be displayed when users hook up their credit card or e-commerce account for the first time to Blippy.

Blippy has already streamed about $15 million in purchases, co-founder Philip Kaplan notes. “Today, thousands of people are automatically sharing purchases on Blippy. I think of it as ‘a stream of cool stuff my friends are buying.’ The additional level of control we’re introducing will make it even easier for people to share just want they want to share — whether a new iPhone app, movie from Netflix, favorite bar or restaurant, or grocery store run,” Kaplan says.

In January, Blippy raised a $1.6 million round of funding. The company is also getting some traction with retailers — though not all of them.

With the previous turmoil in the economy, small businesses are facing a tougher credit market as lending stalls and credit is tight. BillShrink, the startup that looks to help consumers save money across verticals including cell phones, credit cards, and savings accounts, has launched a new a customized feature tailored to give business owners the best credit card options. The startup will be also be offering advice in the areas of wireless service and CDs and savings accounts in the future.

Navigating the credit world can be different for small businesses in terms of needs and BillShrink is hoping to help small businesses find the best credit card that matches their requirements. BillShrink has added more than 45 of the most popular small business credit cards to its system in order to provide businesses with a diverse set of options.

This is the startup’s first step in offering money-saving advice specifically tailored for businesses as opposed to consumers. BillShrink recently announced that it has grown to 1 million members since its launch in April 2008 and has found “$1 billion in savings on everyday bills”. BillShrink has been gradually rolling out its cost saving services to consumers over the last year and a half. The site kicked off with support for finding the cheapest cell phone plan in 2008. Since then it has expanded to include a service for picking the best credit card, saving money on gas, and choosing the best saving account or CD. Most users are interested in the wireless service though, in part because of a marketing push from T-Mobile.

A couple weeks ago, when we wrote about Blippy, the new startup that allows you to share your credit card purchases online, it caused quite a bit of controversy. That was expected. Sometimes good ideas do. Sometimes bad ideas do. So which one is Blippy? Well, why don’t find out for yourself?

The company has given us 250 invites to give away to TechCrunch readers. Even if you hate the idea, you should sign up to “if nothing else, reserve your favorite username now, before it’s taken,” co-founder Philip Kaplan says in a message to you, the readers. He also notes that you can easily choose just to share certain things, like your Zappos purchases, for example. That’s exactly what Michael is doing. Or you might want to only share your Amazon purchases. That’s exactly what Sarah is doing. Me? I’m sharing pretty much everything. Because I have nothing to hide. At least not on this credit card.

So, if you want to sign up, simply use the code: techcrunch2010 on the signup page, and that should get you access.

[photo: flickr/the consumerist]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising word, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.

RiotWise will match Trending Ads display ads that are highly relevant to the same trending topics within an application. OneRiot says says the “realtime relevance” result in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm.

OneRiot says the Trending Ads offering is a perfect fit for monetizing social web applications such as Twitter apps, IM clients and iPhone apps. The third-party Twitter client makes particular sense considering how many of these clients incorporate trending topics as a feature within their apps. OneRiot will share advertiser revenue with the application developer. OneRiot has already signed up an IM application developer, Digsby, to feature Trending ads on its application.

RiotWise Trending Ads are available via OneRiot’s API, as well as a new Mobile Ad Unit. OneRiot syndicates its search results and realtime advertising across a partner network of over 90 applications, websites and search engines that are utilizing the OneRiot Realtime Search API, including Yahoo and Microsoft.

We’re bullish on RiotWise’s ad platform in general and this new offering seems like a compelling product as well. Trending Ads could be a useful way for third-party Twitter apps to advertise contextually relevant and dynamic content. As long as the OneRiot produces quality advertising content, the new ad format may work.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay , is now part of spiffy Web site Kvittar —“does not matter” in Swedish, according to the Google.

Here is the original:
Pirate Bay co-founder now part of digital receipt start-up

Microsoft has two new Windows 7 ads and, well, they are just like the first batch . A random regular person thinks that they designed Windows 7 when we all really know it was us nerds that posted every little Vista flaw on message boards and blogs. But we shouldn’t take all the credit.

More here:
Microsoft’s new Windows 7 ads keep with the same message

The LHC is recovering from a serious overheating problem, caused by a piece of stale bread dropped by a bird onto an apparently unprotected thermal vent. Impossible, you say? Not impossible

Here is the original:
Breaking: Large Hadron Collider shut down by precision bird strike

Ford just announced the inflatable seatbelt, intended to protect passengers seated in the back of the vehicle, where they are more vulnerable to head, chest, and neck injuries. How long will it be before our vehicles are filled with SecureFoam, filling our vehicles whenever we crash.

View post: 
Ford announces inflatable seatbelts, one step closer to Demolition Man

Take that, fat-cats in Congress! OMG! Did you hear? Lenovo has just added a BIOS feature to its new ThinkPads allowing you to swap Ctrl and Fn! Apparently this was a big request for many people in the world and Lenovo, being good guys, listened intently and pushed this passed the faceless bureaucrats in accounting and GOT THIS THROUGH! Hope, people, is what Lenovo promised, and change is what you get.

Here is the original:
WE WON! Lenovo will allow you swap Fn and Ctrl in BIOS