savvy

How to get the best deal on your purchases with Savvy

There are plenty of ways to watch for the best deal online and in stores, but let's face it, there are just too many places to monitor and often times we end up missing out on the best deals.

Enter Savvy. Savvy is a unique service that will monitor your recent purchases, as well as items you plan on purchasing to ensure you have received the best deal possible.

After you make a purchase, take a picture of the itemized receipt from a supported retailer (the list is long and will continue to grow), and Savvy will add the … Read more

Shopper's helper

If you believe in comparison shopping, do yourself a favor and download ShopSavvy. The free, ad-supported app seeks out prices for goods when you either scan the barcode with your Android camera or type in the product name. ShopSavvy then spools out online prices and local offerings at major brick and mortar stores. You can read other peoples' product reviews, and can save what you like to a wish list. When you select a Web entry, you can view it in the browser, e-mail the link to a friend, or broadcast your find on Facebook or Twitter. ShopSavvy's price … Read more

Shopper's helper

If you believe in comparison shopping, do yourself a favor and download ShopSavvy. The free, ad-supported app seeks out prices for goods either by typing the name or scanning the barcode with your camera. ShopSavvy then spools out online prices and local offerings at major brick and mortar stores. You can read other peoples' product reviews, and can save what you like to a wish list. Too bad you can't e-mail that list out to others. ShopSavvy's price alert feature is a nice touch, alerting you when a product's price meets your criteria.

As neat a concept … Read more

Games not just for girls: Style Savvy hands-on

Different games are made for different people. I can understand that. Nevertheless, it's disappointing that Nintendo addressed its new game, Style Savvy, exclusively to girls. An adaptation of a Japanese game that Nintendo has already found great success with, Style Savvy is entirely devoted to fashion. You buy clothes, you sell clothes, you dress up your avatar, and you open your own boutique to sell your fashion solutions to the world. When Nintendo sent its alerts and asked us here at CNET to check out the game, we were slightly less than excited about it. That doesn't seem like great news for a game that's front-and-center in Nintendo's holiday lineup, but then again, we're not the target audience.

I am far from interested in fashion, and the box design looked a lot like other DS shovelware released by many, many companies already. To be honest, my colleagues thought I was crazy to even be covering this game in the first place. Still, I was curious. I said I'd give it a try. And so a copy found its way into my DS. And, to my great surprise, it's still in there days later.

First off, this game is a retail/shopping simulator. The main focus is on greeting new customers, listening to their shopping requests, and then recommending a piece of clothing to fit their budgets. It might sound boring, but the reward is guessing right and getting a very satisfied customer who might buy even more, adding valuable income to your supply. With that money you buy more items from the design center (10,000 items cycled by season and randomness adds up to an Animal Crossing level of diversity). An in-game fashion magazine even shows off new fashion trends for the season, which parallels actual time.

The game starts you off as a store employee and then puts you in charge of your own store, where you try to succeed as well as you can. Everything you wear and how you behave also affects your performance, creating a surprisingly casual, yet deep, experience...and as you can see, I pretty much became hooked. I'm not embarrassed to admit that. The game is also controlled via stylus and with the DS turned on its side in "book" format. Its pace is slow enough for a subway ride, and the many small interactions create a persistent microgame that can be played in intervals as small as a minute.

My main issue, however, is that this game is officially targeted at girls.… Read more

Enterprise cloud computing coming of age

One of the most interesting aspects of the weeks leading up to and including this year's VMWorld was the incredible innovation in cloud-computing service offerings for enterprises--especially in the category of infrastructure as a service. A variety of service providers are stepping up their cloud offerings, and giving unprecedented capabilities to their customer's system administrators.

In this category, enterprises are most concerned about security, control, service levels, and compliance; what I call the "trust" issues. Most of the new services attempt to address some or all of these issues head on. Given that this is the … Read more

Reducing IT infrastructure costs via outsourcing

New research commissioned by Savvis shows that infrastructure outsourcing and cloud computing efforts are being taken very seriously by CIOs. IT leaders appear to be more oriented to reduction in infrastructure spending, where other industries such as media and retail, focus on staff reductions.

67 percent of all IT leaders are under pressure to do more with reduced budgets. (I would have expected an even higher percentage.) 52 percent of IT executives noted that the greatest cost savings will emanate from reducing infrastructure costs, reducing staff levels (49 percent) and a virtualization strategy (44 percent) 72 percent of IT executives believe cloud computing will play an important role in the future of IT in helping companies gain efficiencies and reduce cost.

One immediate way IT execs could save money on infrastructure costs would be through the use of open-source alternatives, but the research questions were geared toward outsourcing and not software alternatives. Interestingly, financial services respondents reported that virtualization would provide their biggest cost savings.

Top cost savings in 2009 by industry:

Financial services--virtualization strategy Media--reducing staff levels Health care--reducing infrastructure costs & standardizing IT infrastructure solutions Business & Professional services--standardizing IT infrastructure solutions Retail--reducing staff levels Manufacturing--reducing infrastructure costs Public sector--infrastructure consolidation

… Read more

Shopping with Google Android: Which app is best?

ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner (by the ZXing team), and CompareEverywhere (an Android Challenge winner) are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.

At their core, they're nearly identical, using the phone's camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year. (You can also search by product name.)

While these shopping apps share a back end, the front ends are distinct. Unfortunately, they all produced varying results that … Read more