savings

iStorez captures $2.3 million for more penny savings

iStorez, a company that collects specials and coupons from online stores and bundles them together to help visitors find savings across the Web, announced Monday that it obtained $2.3 million in first-round funding from Norwest Venture Partners

Although it's competing with services like Savings.com and SilkFair, iStorez doesn't focus as much on the social element of savings like the others do. Instead, iStorez offers a series of weekly newsletters from major online retailers and coupons that allow visitors to save a little extra cash before they make a purchase.

iStorez is owned by the Kriyari network, … Read more

Sharp LCD beats bands, belittles electricity bill

It's been awhile since we reviewed a Sharp TV. The last big-screen model was the company's LC-52D64U from more than a year ago. At the time we liked most aspects of the TV's performance, but there was one big problem we noticed in that TV and in models we reviewed in previous years:

The bad: Uneven uniformity manifests as irregular bands across screen.

Judging from the new 52-inch LC-52D65U we reviewed, Sharp has finally beaten the bands. We noticed no untoward uniformity issues with our review sample, and its picture quality was all-around decent given its entry-level place in the big-screen LCD totem pole. This Energy Star 3.0-compliant set is also one of the most efficient we've tested, thanks in part to a new power saving mode.

Read the full review of the Sharp LC-52D65U.

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PrintWhatYouLike makes any site printer friendly

There's nothing worse than trying to print a two-page article from the Web and have it print out in a half-inch column across 37 sheets of paper. It happens all the time, and if the site you're on doesn't have a special printer friendly option, your only other method was to use special software, or attempt to save the page as a PDF then print it out later.

A service called PrintWhatYouLike takes all the work out of this, and does you one better by letting you select only the parts of the page you want to … Read more

State attorneys general push online child safety snake oil

Updated:This post originally contained incorrect information about Sentinel's products. That has been corrected (see below).

Attorneys general from a number of states have given their support to a collection of weak and ineffective age verification technologies, all of which aim to protect children on the Internet. At a meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard University on Tuesday, the consensus seemed to be that while none of the technologies actually work, doing anything at all was better than nothing. Simply put, no one wants to be blamed for inaction against online child predators.

Kicking off … Read more

The 404 159: Where Justin burns down the 404 studio

On today's show: In Jeff's absence, Justin takes over the studio and all hell breaks loose. Natali Del Conte rushes in to save the day! Wilson sits back and laughs, and we discuss a few stories about free Olympic condoms, annoying neighbors, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, and lost light sabers.

When Jeff's away, the SPig will play! That's right, Jeff's on vacation in Atlantic City, New Jersey, gambling his salary away, so I decide to take up the reins and jump into the hot seat! And trust me, you don't want … Read more

Fonolo lets you skip phone menu purgatory

Getting stuck listening to automated phone menus can be downright dreadful. Some systems require half a dozen or more menus to get you to an actual human being. A service called Fonolo is trying to make this experience a lot easier by listing the entire phone tree on one page and giving you little call buttons to skip right to that part of the menu. The best part is that it actually calls you when it's time to talk to someone and you don't even have to do any dialing!

Fonolo is officially launching to the public in … Read more

Iterasi getting public RSS feeds and widgets

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

Also being introduced is a new widget that can be tacked onto your blog or favorite start page like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It will display a reverse chronological stream of the latest pages you've tucked away. Each item is just a thumbnail, but when users click on it they'll be taken to the fully archived version of the page, complete with working links. It's the same basic experience seen when the service launched its sharing feature.

"What's surprising is how many of our users were asking for RSS feeds," Iterasi CEO Pete Grillo told me. Grillo acknowledged that the current Iterasi user base is a bit on the early-adopter side, and he thinks the widgets will help open the service up to a wider audience.

He also expects more people to jump onboard as the platform expands to include Mac users, which should be happening in the next few weeks--right around the time the long-awaited auto-archiving feature makes its way into users hands. "We're close to having it ready," Grillo said "and RSS is going to make it far more useful than we originally intended." Once in place users, will be able to schedule when they want the service to take snapshots of their favorite pages. It will continue to do so as long as the computer where the extension is installed is running.

I've embedded an example of the new widget after the break. It'll continue to update as more pages are saved.

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Just in time for summer, an air-conditioned bed

Do you want your air-conditioner but are too eco-minded to turn it on? The Japanese may have the perfect solution: the Air-Conditioned Bed, or Kuchofuku. This really is just a soft bed covering with two dual fans at the foot of the bed that pull and circulate air through the membrane. Japan Trend Shop sells it for $399, which is a lot pricier than the Bed Fan. But it's a whole lot kinder to your electricity bill since the low-power fans apparently guzzle just a mere 24 cents a month, based on 8-hour days. Not to mention that you'… Read more

New technology could reduce power in data centers by 80 percent

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Power Assure was started a year ago by Donnie Foster and Clemens Pfeiffer, former Hewlett-Packard executives. For the last ten years, Pfeiffer--the CTO and brain behind Power Assure's patent pending Holistic Power Management technology--ran his own company, International SoftDevices, developing software for monitoring and restarting servers after they had failed.

"We realized one could use this to automate the switching on and off of servers, and we saw a business opportunity," recalled Pfeiffer, who is CTO of the start-up based here.

Power Assure's Holistic Power Management collects power usage data every minute … Read more