shopping

Daily deal-aholics now have another avenue for purchasing discounted local offers, thanks to the arrival of the new Google Offers app for Android.

Simple and straightforward, the app immediately serves up a list of location-specific deals upon first launch. You can swipe up and down through the list, or tap any deal to see its price, number of purchases, and time remaining. From the deals list, you can also swipe left to see your Google Offers history, including Purchased, Saved, and Used or Expired deals.

The Google Offers app (download) is available now for free in the Android Market. And … Read more

Amazon subsidiary A9 has just launched the Flow iPhone app. It's yet another visual shopping aid: you point it at a product, and it looks it up and gives you a price and an ordering link.

The difference is that Flow is more real-time and more fun to use than other apps, including the Amazon app and eBay's RedLaser. Just point it at a boxed item and it will recognize it and pop up a "buy" link. If you do nothing, the link will just fade into your log of scanned items. Keep pointing your phone at products, and it just keeps collecting links. It's like the Furni scene in "Fight Club" come to life. … Read more

Digital Folio today announced $1.2 million in funding that it will use to expand its comparison shopping technology and go after the crowded market.

That level of funding isn't going to grab headlines (oops, it just did) but price comparison engines are powerful and steady money makers. Look at the success of PriceGrabber.com, Nextag.com, Shopathome.com, Shopzilla.com, Pronto.com, ShopLocal.com, etc.

Founded this year and fresh out of beta, Denver-based Digital Folio lets shoppers drag and drop items from major retailers, including Amazon.com and Target, into one shopping list. Prices for the items … Read more

As if stretching a mighty slingshot from Finland aimed at the heart of Beijing, Rovio says it will open its first Angry Birds retails stores in China this year.

Speaking at the TechCunch Disrupt conference in Beijing this week, Rovio Chief Marketing Officer Peter Vesterbacka laid out plans to bring the company's own merchandise outlets to multiple spots within China, its fastest-growing market, in hopes of generating more than $100 million in revenue there next year.

There are no details yet on exactly where or when these stores will open their doors, but the shops will sell Angry Birds tie-ins such as stuffed animals, toys, T-shirts, smartphone cases, shoes, and other merchandise that the billion dollar Rovio claims accounts for about 10 to 20 percent of its business, according to Bloomberg. … Read more

Google Offers continues to expand.

The daily-deals arm of the search giant announced 14 new deal partners and new personalization features making the process of finding and receiving relevant deals in one location more seamless for consumers. Google Offers also branched out to four new cities this week: San Jose, San Diego, Minneapolis and Baltimore.

"If deals aren't relevant or don't match your interests, they're spam," Nitin Mangtani, product manager for Google Offers, told CNET. So to broaden its consumer appeal and make deals more targeted, Google is adding new inventory categories such as luxury … Read more

Facebook, the world's largest social-networking platform, is tapping eBay's commerce platform to create new social shopping experiences for hundreds of millions of consumers.

Specifically, eBay is integrating Facebook's new Open Graph 2.0 functionality into its global commerce systems, which come under the umbrella of a new business unit called X.commerce, and include eBay, PayPal, and Magento (which has built shopping sites for 100,000 merchants). The news was announced at Innovate, eBay's developer conference, being held today through Friday in San Francisco.

"Facebook is now linked into the largest commerce ecosystem," Matthew … Read more

If you spend a lot of time perusing sites like eBay or Craigslist, you know what a pain it is to open each individual link for a sale to take a look at the pictures and information. Whether you open the link in your current tab and press Back often, or are a multi-browser-tab master, there has to be a better way to do this, right? Google found a better way by incorporating previews into its search results, so why not use that same idea across the entire Web? That's where the ezLinkPreview extension for Chrome comes in handy. … Read more

Best Buy will hire fewer seasonal employees for this year's holiday stretch as wary consumers and competition weigh heavily on the company's business.

Speaking to Reuters in an interview published yesterday, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said that his company plans to hire 15,000 seasonal workers this holiday season, down from the 29,000 the retailer hired last year. Permanent employees will be asked to work overtime to make up for the lost hours, Dunn said.

"The consumer is being really careful about where he or she is spending the dollars, and I think that will … Read more

While its sibling Photoshop Elements is turning 10, the younger Premiere Elements just gets the digits. And this update to Adobe's consumer video-editing software is even less jingly than the image-editing package when it comes to new bells and whistles. But this does represent Adobe's first 64-bit port of the package--Windows only, unfortunately--which is an essential step for future development of the product.

Adobe has beefed up the Organizer a bit to improve its video support, since it's now serving Premiere Elements as well as Photoshop Elements. It allows for hierarchical tagging, as well as Smart Tags … Read more