Webware

The stock market may be showing signs of a rebound, but consumers still have a lock on their wallets at retail.

Shopping online for the right products at better prices can be quite overwhelming, but with some know-how, it's less intimidating and certainly worthwhile. These 12 tools will not only help you save cash, but they might also make you more confident about your purchases. I am.

Cash-saving tools

Frucall: Frucall is a really great service. When you're at a brick-and-mortar store checking out a product, you can either call Frucall's free telephone line, text-message the company, or access its mobile site and compare the store's price with online pricing. When you input the name or bar code, it returns the pricing on the product from Amazon.com, Shopping.com, and other services. It's quick and easy. Plus, it's free, though standard text-messaging rates do apply. I really liked Frucall.

Google Product Search: Formerly known as Froogle, Google's Product Search is a relatively useful tool for finding cheaper prices on desired products. It will return a good portion of the online stores currently selling products that match up with your search terms. It also lists their seller ratings, based on customer reports. It's a nice tool, but it doesn't quite stand up to some of the more useful sites in this roundup. Consider Google Product Search a backup.

Personal savings site BillShrink has a new feature: a gasoline pricing database that directs you to gas stations based on the route you take on your daily commute, not just how close you are to the stations.

The Web app isn't just for finding prices. It actually helps you plan your refueling stops along the way. You start by telling it about your car and its mileage, and your home and work addresses. You get back a results page that shows you a Google Map of all the gas stations along your route. You can zoom in and out to expand or limit the search area.

Beneath the map is a listing of all the gas stations BillShrink was able to find, followed by their location, price, and amenities. I found the design of the results pages simple and helpful.

BillShrink's results page is well done.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

It is a good new take on the gas price-finding trope but, depending on how long your commute is, it may be overkill for the cost savings it yields. While BillShrink's tool calculates the real cost of gas by taking into consideration the distance to the station, most of the results I saw in a demo showed a difference of only a few cents. Peter Pham, the company's founder, told me that BillShrink will be able to save people $200 per year in gas costs, assuming distances are long and prices are different. In my trial, the price difference between the closest station and those that were farthest away was less than 10 cents. BillShrink's demo didn't convince me that I would need the tool to help me save a significant amount of money.

Worse, it's only available on the BillShrink site, which means you can't send it to your GPS device or access it while on the road, unless you have Web access on your smartphone.

I do admire the fact that its gasoline price database takes into account more than just per-gallon prices, though. BillShrink's Gas Savings tool should be available now on the company's site. If you want to try it out, it will require an e-mail address to register.

Deep dialing service Fonolo is now open to everyone. Previously in private beta, the tool lets you browse company phone trees and dial straight to that section, skipping having to sit through tedious voice menus or remember specific buttons to press. Better yet, it does it all without you having to actually dial the number on your phone.

Since we last wrote about the service it's increased its list of companies from 50 to over 300. Still missing, however, is the option to record calls, which should let people easily document horrific or wonderful customer service experiences to share with others.

For a holiday angle on this, tools like Fonolo can be helpful if you're trying to save time calling hotels, car rental places, airlines, and retailers about return and exchange policies. In the case of Alaska Airlines I was able to go in and save about a minute and a half by using Fonolo to get to the right department.

The service will apparently remain free throughout its beta period. Possible monetization routes include pre-call advertisements, and a premium service that tacks on more features. There's also an iPhone app in development that will let you browse through and call companies, which is due in early 2009.

Fonolo's system lets you dial to a particular part in a company's phone tree. The service is now open to everyone.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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, which "powers Web 2.0-style online malls for media, lifestyle, content, and social-network publisher sites." In essence, Kriyari, with the help of iStorez, aims at creating interactive "malls" filled with online stores and brands. As each visitor clicks on a product, it dynamically adapts to create a "mall" that's tailored to the user's interests.

iStorez, which has been in operation since January, will take that vision and the new funding to offer a more robust offering, the company claims.

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 print, leaving things like large Flash ads, site menus, and other clutter off of your precious bathroom reading.

To do this you just plug in the page's URL. You then have the options of simply clicking the parts of the page you want, or getting rid of things like the site's background and images. There are also some handy tools to change the text size, along with a font changer in case you're printing something off a page that insists on using undersized, illegible fonts.

The service is completely free and worth bookmarking. Power users will want to make use of the bookmarklet, which lets you print any page you're looking at without having to jump back and forth. Just one click and it brings up the special PrintWhatYouLIke interface.

Related: Extra page killer Green Print

[via Lifehacker]

When you run a URL through PrintWhatYouLike it's simply a matter of picking what you actually want to print from the page. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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 early September, but I got a sneak peek Monday. There are just 50 company numbers in the listing, but there should be several hundred by launch. One of the best uses for this technology is for calling department stores and banks--both of which can have five or more sub-menus that you must suffer though to reach a human. Digging around in Circuit City's listing I was able to find the department I wanted to call in just a few seconds, whereas it probably would have taken me about five minutes if I had called in.

As part of the sign-up process, you give Fonolo various numbers it can call--be it your office, home, or mobile line. Next to each option there's a call button that will let you pick which number you want the call sent to. You can track how long the call is and actually hang up from your browser; Fonolo is simply the routing the call.

Eventually the service plans to let you record these calls (potentially for sending to the Better Business Bureau or other such organizations), although the feature is currently disabled. You can sign up to use Fonolo before its September launch on this page.

Fonolo shows you how to skip some of the annoying automated phone menus you run into when calling many large businesses (click to see entire tree).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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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Web bookmarking tool Iterasi just launched the first version of its Firefox extension to people who have signed up for the beta. The service, which I wrote about in January, lets you capture a Web site in its entirety, complete with links, formatting, and a time stamp to help sort it out later.

The company was set to release the plug-in back in late February but has been busy for the past few months resolving some security issues, as well as tweaking usability with a small group of beta testers. One of the reasons for the delay was to ramp up the sharing feature, which now lets users embed a notarized page on their blog or Web site like I've done below. I've had a chance to use the service over the past day, and it's definitely got the makings of a really engaging bookmarking tool.

All your saved pages can be browsed and sorted quickly with Iterasi's dashboard (click to enlarge).

Once installed, Iterasi puts a small selection of buttons in your browser's toolbar. There's a button to skip to your notaries, as well as two ways to notarize whatever page you're on: either a full option that lets you add tags and put the page in a special folder before filing, or a quickie option that will save the page with one click. My immediate qualm is that all of them have identical little icons and letter shortcuts that aren't exactly intuitive, however, as soon as you've used it once, you'll know where everything is.

The service is on the slow side when it comes time to "notarize" pages (aka slurping up all the content), but once it's been captured it's incredibly snappy to browse through. Users must first wait for whatever page they're on to load completely, and then it will slurp it up and file it away. Creating folders and tags is a snap, and you can quickly amass a huge collection of pages you've captured, which can be sorted in about a half dozen ways.

Sadly missing at this time is the scheduling feature that lets users automatically capture snapshots of their favorite sites at whatever times they choose, something I was looking forward to setting up to capture the front pages of several news and social bookmarking sites. I'm told the scheduling feature will be in place in the next 30 days, the creators just wanted to get a simpler working version out to people to try out before ramping up the servers to scale with the influx of captured pages. Also worth noting is that your computer must be on or in standby mode for pages to be captured, as the capturing is done on your side and not Iterasi's--something that might change with the introduction of a Pro plan later down the line.

Iterasi is currently in a private beta, but you can sign up for it on this page or grab an account anytime someone has shared an Iterasi saved page with you. Below is a capture of the front page of Digg.com from yesterday. Since then, all of the stories have received more diggs and run off the front page, but this captured it like a live screenshot.

Here's a clever site that can help you sock away money for purchases you're hoping to make some day: SmartyPig. You tell it what you're saving for, how much it costs, and when you want to buy it, and it will tell you how much you need to save each month (hard math, that). Then, if you let it, it will automatically deduct that amount from your checking account each month until you make your goal.

It pays interest, too (currently 4.3% APR). Plus it lets other people contribute to your fund--if you like gifts of the monetary kind. There are widgets for social site profile pages. And in a final twist of clever business, once you reach your goal, you get your money in a Mastercard debit card or you can take payout in a gift card. The gift card option will get you an extra bonus, up to 5%, depending on the retailer. SmartyPig buys gift card dollars in bulk, and at a discount, so the company makes additional revenue every time someone wants their money this way.

SmartyPig is not monetary rocket science. It's really an exercise in retail financial packaging. The company works exclusively with Iowa's West Bank (chosen by the founders due to its proximity to their homes and its reputation, I was told). There's nothing wrong with this at all, but SmartyPig is not a service you could plug into your existing Bank of America account if you wanted to.

And there are some odd restrictions: You can't take your money out in cash nor have it transferred to another bank for free. Withdrawing by check costs $25. You can, though, close your account at any time and get the debit card. Co-founders Jon Gaskell and Mike Ferrari told me they are looking at other withdrawal options. But, as Gaskell told me, the symbolism of the gift card or the debit card is important to SmartyPig customers. ""People like the idea of having the goal and sticking to it, and not using SmartyPig like a bank bank." The service makes it easy to save and easy to spend the savings on what you've saved for, but not quite as easy to shovel your savings back into your general checking account. That's by design.

Make your savings goals public.

SmartyPig is the weirdest online savings account I've seen, but it appears benign. It brings a disciplined approach to savings to consumers. And if SmartyPig isn't right for you but you think it might be good for someone you know, you can--surprise!--buy the other person a gift card to SmartyPig itself to get them started on the service.

See also Some Notes on SmartyPig in The Simple Dollar. And Leverage: A bank for your gift cards on Webware.com.