The Shop Savvy app allows you to easily compare the price of an item at every store it is available. To get the prices of an item, you must use the app to take a picture of the bar code. Shop Savvy uses the picture of the bar code to determine what item you are scanning. After the bar code picture is taken, Shop Savvy will display the price of that item all of the major stores in the area. Using Shop Savvy will allow you to never overpay for anything ever again.

Coupon Sherpa

Coupon Sherpa allows you to find if there are any coupons available for an item that you are about to buy. Coupon Sherpa lets you search for coupons at just about every major store. Once you find the appropriate store on Coupon Sherpa, the app will display all of the stores current coupons. The apps pulls coupons from several different sources and even has several coupons that are exclusive to Coupon Sherpa. All of the coupons on the app can be scanned at the cash register of every store. Using Coupon Sherpa allows you to take advantage of the deals at every store, without having to spend hours cutting coupons.

If you use the GasBuddy app, then you will never over pay for gas again. GasBuddy uses the GPS in your smart phone to determine your location. Once your location is determined, GasBuddy will display the price of gas at every gas station near you. This allows you to be able to find the cheapest gas in the area before you leave the house. If you are not sure where the gas station is located, GasBuddy will even give you directions to the gas station from your location. With the rising prices of gas, the ability to save a few cents is very important.

Groupon

While the previous apps allowed you to save money on gas and retail items, Groupon allows you to save on just about everything else. Groupon displays all of the great deals on all of the various restaurants, hotels, spas and other services in your area. None of the deals featured on Groupon can be used as coupons, but they allow you to buy the services at a discounted price. Gift certificates to restaurants and hotel rooms can be purchased for over 50% the normal price. Groupon constantly updates with new deals, and the good deals can go quickly. Having Groupon on your smart phone allows you to constantly search for great deals to make sure that you never miss out on something special.

Kayak

Kayak is one of the most popular travel reservation websites, and you can now get all of the deals from your phone. Kayak finds you the cheapest price on flights, hotels and car rentals for any destination. Kayak searches every travel site to find you the best deal possible, and everything can be booked on the phone through the app. If you plan on traveling, then Kayak will save you a lot of money. You can even track the status of your flight using the Kayak application.

Sim only contracts are great way to reduce the cost of using a smart phone. Why pay the high costs of a regular contract if you do not have to? Combining the contract with these apps allows for your smart phone to pay for itself, and allow you to have more money for your other expenses.

This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a freelance writer for technology, travel, and music production topics. When he’s not writing or making music, he’s enjoying a good post-apocalyptic novel or playing RTS Strategy online game. Ruben’s writing resume includes websites like SIM Only where you can get the best Sim Only contracts as well as other websites that help you save on your tech purchases.

Images courtesy of Todd Barnard, sarahintampa, smgoller, Sean MacEntee and Rob Enslin

This blog is all about shopping and in particular shopping online so I really know what I’m talking about when I say there are a lot of benefits to shopping online. Here are just 10 of the reasons why shopping online is a great idea:

1. It’s private. You can get yourself that saucy but if nothing that passes for lingerie, interesting toys, even medication that you don’t want to be seen picking up from the store.
2. Convenience that is unbeatable. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your chair much less get up get dressed and into a car. You can shop in the middle of the night if you so wish, the internet is never closed!
3. Wide variety. Your bricks and mortar store, can stock only a limited inventory. However when you make purchases from a central location, they are bound to have a better and wider stock that a local store or branch.
4. Cost. Since there is no cost of a bricks and mortar shop, shop assistants, overheads such as rent, electricity and so on, the benefit of lower cost can be passed on to the consumer. Also the fact that there are no middlemen involved in the deal helps the consumer greatly.
5. Less likelihood of impulse shopping. When you are in a store you see a lot of very strategically placed items that are meant to tempt you. At the checkout you may end up with a bunch of stuff you did not originally set out to buy.
6. Sending gifts is a breeze. You simply pick out what you want to send (with the aid of helpful suggestions it has to be said) and make the payment. Everything else gets taken care of. There is no need to go out, make a purchase, pack the item properly and then go out again to have it shipped. Distance becomes immaterial.
7. Best for browsing. The best part of shopping online is that you can do it at your own speed, taking as much time as possible to browse and select what you want. I find it particularly great for buying books, because you can not only browse by title, author and genre you can also check out reviews side by side.
8. You can compare prices. You don’t have to visit just one or two stores, you can take your time, and find the best prices available for any given item
9. You don’t have to battle the hordes. This is particularly important during the holiday season, that you don’t have to jostle with a thousand harried shoppers to get what you want
10. You can have the benefit of pre-owned stuff. The internet has produced the best second hand exchange opportunities where one man’s cast off can easily be a bargain deal for another.

Now this one may not be for everyone but I do know a certain someone who would simply love this roll up wireless keyboard. The sale page for this roll up keyboard informs you that for $17.99 you can get yourself “wireless freedom” with this 2.4 GHz Wireless Flexible MultiMedia Portable Keyboard, which can be rolled up for easy portability making it an ideal portable keyboard for notebook computers.

OK now for some reason I think back pack laptop bags are way cooler than your common or garden variety of briefcase type laptop bags which can be a teeny bit boring and exec type. Cooler and way more practical as well if you have to take the bus or metro etc. I think it is particularly great for school and college kids and particularly so because it actually leaves the hands free. So I can think of several happy recipients of this back pack laptop bag, with the original price of $39.99 which is available for a fifty percent discount, down to $19.99.

Now I cannot think of a single person who wants to have their camera, iPod, memory stick, portable hard drive and goodness knows what else connected to their computer at all times, who would not appreciate this one: a 4-Port USB 2.0 Mobile Hub. And then there are still some of us who have no USB port in the front of the computer tower who would also really appreciate this one. A bit pricey for $14.99 but I thought it was very sleek and really compact.

Now this is a gift I wouldn’t mind getting myself: Disney Create your own skin. You can get these for your laptop, MP3 player, phone etc and have  a lot of fun customizing your gear and help protect it from scratches and scuffs as well. Here you can be creating your own unique skin by choosing your device or browsing popular character designs and even background color. You can see how you can go about it at the Disney Store here.

I find I have a great time choosing gifts for friends and family so I am going to do some more of this in coming posts; stay tuned!

I had a few requirements. They should have clear, big sound, if possible several pieces to give that real surround effect and they should look good! These are the ones that struck my fancy:

Now I tend to trust instinctively when ‘It’s a Sony!’ and that these Sony SS-F6000 Floor Standing Speaker - SSF6000 I thought were really sleek and attractive. I looked at a few sites for these and they seemed to be the cheapest at buy.com. AT $129 they fall within my budget. However I am going to look for them in a store because the shipping cost here is rather high. I am loath to fork out 55 dollars for shipping.

Now these I found to be a little freaky looking, but find myself strangely drawn to this Soundsticks II Multimedia System for $111.15. For sheer novelty value and the fact that they are available for free shipping over at ebay, I am tempted by these.

This set of Acoustic Research AW-877 900-MHz Indoor Wireless Speakers – Pair has some really great features: they are the cordless variety with a 250 foot range  and Battery or AC Power. I rather fancy the idea of carrying the speakers with me from room to room, wherever I happen to be. The list price of the speakers is $199 but they are available for a hefty $70 discount so I am very tempted by these for $129.99.

If any of you got some good deals with computer or home theater system speakers, do let me know. I would value your input.

Help for hard drive recovery is at hand from dtidata.com. It is an incredible relief to realize that your data, work, photos, music, videos and all the things that you so painstakingly collected and collated is all safe and that your hard drive repair is possible. (It felt like I had felt when I lost my iPod at the mall and went back 4 hours later to find it safe and sound!)

The great thing about this is that unless there is 100% recovery of your data, there is no charge! Obviously the exception to that rule is if you have gone on and done some tinkering yourself; I obviously did not, technophobe that I am.

Class 100 Clean Room:

The software that they sell is developed in house. Again technologically challenged that I am, I did not know what a clean room is (dtidata.com has one and apparently that is a pretty big deal since very few companies actually have them). Just FYI this is what Wiki says a Clean Room is, “A clean room is an environment, typically used in manufacturing or scientific research, that has a low level of environmental pollutants such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosol particles and chemical vapors. More accurately, a clean room has a controlled level of contamination that is specified by the number of particles per cubic meter at a specified particle size.”

One more interesting feature is their blog, which is littered with terms such as Slave a Laptop Hard drive to USB, RAID configuration and Parity Check, and MFT Data Recovery, all of which are rather Greek and Latin to me, but I have resolved that through regular reading of their Data Recovery Resources, I shall transform my tech challenged self into a veritable techno-geek! A worthy ambition methinks.

I would really recommend the services of this company, their services were quick and fairly simple and painless. You can request a quote by filling out a simple online form. They also have a formidable list of clients including Ford Motor Company, NASA, the US Military, Cisco, etc. so I am in good company there!

Other helpful links:

SEO Guide and Tips

So we began reading about booking a domain and hosting a website and everything else that goes with it. Words like Name Servers, hosting plans, MySQL databases, downtime, support tickets etc started making a lot more sense to us than they ever did. We got a lot of information from this web host rating website. They rate web hosting providers based on user reviews. We learnt that a multiple domain hosting account is much better since you can add unlimited websites to the same hosting account later thus saving money in the long run and having better manageability. A cheap web hosting is not necessarily bad and an expensive one is not necessarily good. The idea is to find a cheap and good web hosting provider! The writer definitely thinks like me!

There are a lot of factors that you can check to determine whether a particular web host is going to provide good service or not. These web hosting articles are a great help for anyone wanting to know about how and where to host a website. They guide you through the procedure of finding a good and cheap host that will ensure least downtime and excellent support.

GreatPricesHere is hosted with BlueHost. I have had a good experience with them so far. The downtime has been negligible. If you, my readers, have ever noticed a snag in my website, had an error thrown up when you try to load it, or find it loading extremely slowly, please do let me know through your comments. Now since I understand all this tech stuff much better, I’ll try to do something about it.

This website can help any office or home owner with a good use for their printer a lot of money. InkjetDeals.info lists a number of stores that sell good quality Inkjet cartridges at a small fraction of the cost of the original. To top that, they also provide coupon and discount codes for these stores that help you avail an even lower price. You could get a further discount or save on shipping. So overall, you could get an ink cartridge that is as good at about 20 – 30% of the price of the original.

I found the best code for myself. An All Ink Coupon Code giving a 15% discount on any order of any amount. That’s the one I used to order my stock.

Another plus is their section on Printer related articles where they give you Ink Saving Tips and help with Troubleshooting Printers. For instance, did you know that when the cartridge is apparently empty, you should take it out and sway it a bit? This helps you use the last bit of ink. I tried it with my printer cartridge (the one I had exhausted) and it did print some more pages before dying out completely. They also have a section telling you about the top 6 brands of printers.

Finding sites like these really makes my day. If any of you come across other sites that offer great stuff for a low price, please let me know and make my day!