Comparison Sites at a Glance

Holiday season is here. I was in the crowd too. Guess when? After Thanksgiving Day. Did I go at 5 am in the morning? No way. However it was already 3:30 in the morning when I went to bed (Nov 26th). ..And I even asked my wife (who was deep at sleep)..."shall I go to the mall? It's only 1 and 1/2 hour left to be 5." And my wife in her deep sleep said "what?”. And I told her that I would go and buy socks. I was kind of joking at that time. So there you go...Again missed that shopping spree for the second time in a row... Anyways, we did go for shopping, coz, my wife was going home and had to buy some gifts for Christmas....And I went to Best buy to look for jump drive, and memory card for my digital camera. They had 512mb memory card for $19.99, and were all out. I would have got one if I wouldn't have gone to bed. I ended up buying 256 mb for $29.99 along with jump drive. Then picked up my wife and daughter from the mall and came home and I went directly to comparison sites to see if I got good deals from Best Buy. I like comparison sites. Some of the sites I go to are as follows:-
shopping.com
nextag.com
mysimon.com
So what are these comparison sites?
Comparison sites lets user select a product/item, compare prices from various merchants, and allows the user to select. Basically it is a place where one can explore prices presented by various participating merchants. Many people use such sites to research before buying an actual product.
These days, such sites are getting really popular. Besides the big players (the ones I mentioned above), many new comers are gaining the traffic as well. Some of the new comers include become.com , which is also founded by the same guys that founded mysimon.com (now owned by cnet).
What’s in for the comparison sites then?
Well, they will earn commission from each purchase the buyer makes through such sites. Yes, the commission seems to be low depending on the item, but it is the volume that counts.
However there is another side to this story. There are people who just research online and then go to the physical stores to buy the product, and such practices are increasing and can hurt these comparison sites. But at the same time these sites are trying to come up with more features and also coming up with products that are hard to find in local stores. They are also coming up with hard to get coupons

There are sites now that can even help buyers search by their zip code, and find the deals from the local stores, but you can't buy from the site. One has to go to the store to buy. At least these sites are helping the customers save time. I m sure such sites are being paid by the local stores.
howeverer, with the gasoline price increasing, I m assuming that many would use comparison sites to buy products rather than driving to the nearest store.

That's it for now...

Some Internet News

Here are some of the interesting news on internet..

• Gmail is on the roll..Recently they had launched "virus scanning", and now they introduced RSS Feed .
• There has been an increase in online shopping. More and more people are spending online these days. Most of the online shoppers are also using comparison shopping sites (sites such as shopping.com , froogle.com, yahoo shopping)as their shopping guide/tool.
• Yahoo is going to offer "cheap PC- to- phone calls". Well what made them do this? Is it because of skype (eBay acquired them)? I guess so..Check out some rates.
• Sony Communication Network is going public, and its IPO price is valued at $286.4 million.
• New Website TMZ.com has been launched by AOL, that focuses on latest Entertainment news.

That's it for now...I will be back tomorrow talking about Comparison Shopping sites in details..

Bye.

Lawsuit Against Google

It's not easy to be popular and maintain the status. One will be under watch all the time. Someone is always trying to find the weak spot and attack.

Speaking of such, recently Google was again in the news. "Click Defence", wanted to withdraw as lead plaintiff in the lawsuit it had filed against Google. However, AIT(Advance Internet Technology) stepped up to lead in the lawsuit against Google.
They were saying that the ads by google is not fair to the advertisers, since many users click on the ads that has nothing to do with the business, and as a result can cost a lot to the advertisers. I m sure the advertisers are also aware of such possible unwanted clicks.
So why not the advertisers complaining about it? May be they are not getting as much unwanted clicks.

.EU Domain Names

Web domain ".asia" was available not long ago.
Now its .eu. Internet domain name ".eu" is now open for registration.
I think its going to be crazy. I m sure many especially Europeans will be registering under .eu.
But what about Dutch and French people (You know what I m talking about right?). Do you think they will go for .eu name? I think they might..at least those who wanna make money out of it. Who cares about constitution when it comes to money...
people are already registering them. I already tried for some domain names such as Toyota.com, honda.eu, host.eu and no luck...
Price for those domains is not cheap compared to what we get these days for .com, etc. It's about $19.99/year on godaddy.com
Can't wait to see the buzz. Bye for now, coz' I need to join the band wagon and get some names for myself.

Gwen Stefani-Digital Song of The Year

Did you guys watch Billboard's Music Award last night?
I did...
Like any other award shows..Billboard Music Award also had several categories. But one category was kind of interesting...and shows how powerful the internet is, and ow it can have an impact on entertainment field as well..

Can you guess which category I m talking about?
Well its "Digital Song of The Year" category. It's a new category, and Gwen Stefani (vocalist of "No Doubt"--I m not sure whether she is still with them) secured the award in that category for the song Hollaback Girl."

So what does this "Digital Song of the year" mean? It means the number of times the song is downloaded (paid download) online. "Hollaback Girl" was downloaded more than million times, and of course it was a paid download.

This is an example of how internet has an impact even on entertainment and led Billboard to come up with a new category.

You can see the list of all winners by clicking here.
Will write more...

• This is my second day on this blog.
  So what's happening on Internet? Too many to list right now. But I will try my best to do as much as I can in the coming days/weeks/months or even years.
  
  Here is some of the recent ones..
• Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) is tightening its rules for those who is going to submit.
• .Asia is now approved as web domain. How about "xxx" as web domain?
• Web content can not remain free. Recently European publishers were complaining about it..Especially targeting Google.com. The head of the EU Publishers Council attacked google, saying that google is making money by collecting content from other parties. But at the same time there are many users of google's service who would want the way google is carrying out its program.Lets see how far it goes...
• Another one --involving google. Both Google and Microsoft is trying hard to get a partnership deal with AOL in terms of Internet advertising. According to some analysts, AOLpartnership would bring around 2% -4% of Google revenue. Read here for more
• Kazaa, popular file-sharing company has been accused by Some Australian record companies, saying that Kaaza is "ignoring a court order to install filters aimed at curbing music piracy by Kazaa users".
• Now both Mac and Linux users will be able to get hold of music online. Thanks to Real Networks who launched a web-version of online music subscription service.
• Bill Gates will be visiting silicon valley outside of USA...i.e India.

Thats all for now...Will Add more tomorrow..

Wow!!!What's next now?
I m sure some of you have already heard about this news...
Adobe has acquired Macromedia. To me its a big news,yet I didn't see this on any headlines on yahoo news or even google news.
Did I miss that?

About Internet Salsa

So here I am starting to blog. I don't want to be left out in this blogging world. I have been with internet for a long time. To be exact...since 1993 while Jerry Yang and David Filo were working on to create Yahoo and oh yeah!!before Sergey and Larry came up with Google.
Over the years internet has revolutionize the world. It has brought lots of goodies and have also brought bad stuff. I always had a thought of sharing some information/views related to internet/websites with others. I do lots of research online and surf a lot. So I will try to write something that catches my eye online. So this will be a like a test for me also.
So lets get started....and help me with this...