Friedbeef’s Tech

There are literally hundreds of sites out there claiming they offer the best deals, and cheapest prices on the net.  New startup dealighted recently threw down its gauntlet and made its way into this arena as well.  So how does it stack up to the competition? 

What dealighted brings to the table

dealighted is built around 2 concepts. 

1. It aggregates hot deals from a few popular deal sites
2. It pulls up related deals when you search for an item

Displays Hot Deals?

The site aggregates user contributed deals (around 650 or so each day) posted to sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, and Anandtech, and identifies those deals that are the most popular (usually around 125). As soon as a popular deal is identified, the deal appears at the top of dealighted’s homepage.

Now this is fine if you’re just browsing around trying to find something interesting in general, but because you cannot filter the items by category, you end up looking at a page which has deals for a TV, T-shirt, and a quilt - hardly an ideal shopping experience.

Related Deals?

When you search for an item, you are brought to a page where it shows online retailing prices on the left, and extra related deals on the right.  Sounds good - but does it really work well?

The acid test:

• Step 1: Check the top selling MP3 player and camera on Amazon
• Step 2: Check relevance of deals offered
• Step 3: Check the prices vs other popular search pricing engines

Results:

• Step 1: Most Popular MP3 player: 30 GB iPod Video & Most Popular Camera : Canon PowerShot SD800
• Step 2: The related deals displayed had many iPod and Cannon related products, but in terms of giving me deals for that exact product - 0 out of 10 deals was for the correct iPod, and 1 out of 10 deals was for correct camera.
• Step 3: Because it was picking out prices from key Internet retailers, prices were competitive vs other shopping sites

Bottom Line

Overall, dealighted has failed to blow me away but I do however think it’s a nice concept and you have to give them points for trying something new.

If you’re interested in finding good places to shop online you can check out my post on the top 5 ways to maximize your shopping experience.

Disclaimer: dealighted has paid me to review their service, and to give an honest opinion.  Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by dealighted in any way.

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Many people don’t know this, but Windows XP does not come with free DVD playing software by default.  Whatever DVD software they have is usually bundled in to their package when they purchased their system.

Having recently reformatted my hard disk, and having suddenly lost my ability to play any DVDs on my system, VLC media player came into the picture.

Why VLC?

VLC is a cross-platform free software project which plays almost every video format known to man.  Not only does it solve my DVD playing problems, it seems that it can play halfway downloaded files as well - Perfect for previewing the legal movies you’re downloading from bittorrent :)

Question to Readers: What other Windows Media Player alternatives have you tried for videos?  Tell us in the comments!

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What is Trendio?

Measuring Internet buzz may be useful, but the Web 2.0 brainchild of 21 year old French-Swedish Jens Agersberg is trying to making it fun. 

Trendio is a game based on current events.  It is a stock exchange where words from the news are the stocks, and the value of the words are calculated according to their presence in the media.  Aside from the gaming aspect of this service, with this information, it makes it possible to visualize trends in the media and try to predict what will make the headlines tomorrow.  All free, and all for fun of course.

The Good:

1. Good design: The site design looks pretty slick making great use of tag clouds and a constantly updated news headlines to help suggest to you what’s hot at the moment 
2. Quick Updates: You can see changes every 2 hours, so you can play throughout the day
3. Subscribe to results: RSS feeds are used to keep track of your portfolio which saves a lot of time
4. Wide range of topics: This service should appeal to any demographic.

The Bad (5 Things Trendio could do better):

1. Allow private leagues: Performing in a community of strangers is one thing, but playing against your friends are a whole new ballgame altogether.  Being #1 in a group of 5 friends would give more of a kick than being #10 in a sea of 1000 strangers.
2. Allow more than 1 keyword to be graphed: I’m searching through a bunch of keywords to buy, but I can only seem to graph them one at a time.  Part of the beauty of graphs is the ability to visually benchmark something against another, so it seems like a waste not to be able to do that.
3. Speed up the site: Scrolling through some of the selections can take ages sometimes.
4. Suggest related keywords for me: When I search for Teri Hatcher, I’m thinking of her involvement in ‘Desperate Housewives’, so give me an option to see stats for Eva Longoria as well.
5. Better prizes for contests: This site launched in March 2006 - which means they already had one full year to develop.  Yet all the contests I see on the site have one prize only - Glory.  Which again brings me back to my point about private leagues…. Bragging rights mean nothing unless it’s among friends.

The bottomline:

Trendio is bit of fun to dabble around in the initial stages, but it does have it’s flaws. It definitely has potential though, and I might be inclined to give it another chance further down the road.

If you like buzz services you may want to check out Google Fight to benchmark the number of search items returned, and Google Trends.- an analysis of the number of searches made by Google users

Disclaimer: Trendio has paid me to review their service, and to give an honest opinion.  Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by the Trendio in any way.

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