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Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot, PDFMeNot, and RetailMeNot have a new site called Beat My Price that helps you find the lowest price for online goods. You simply plug in the link to something you want to buy, and it will compare that to prices it, and other users have found.

All the while, the system takes advantage of companion site RetailMeNot. This lets you see if you can save even more with the use of online coupons. These coupons don't change a product's total price listing, but you can quickly eyeball ones that might save you … Read more

Girly blog company Sugar Inc. has announced a new affiliate marketing program for bloggers, based on ShopStyle, the social-shopping and product-search site that it acquired last year. It's called ShopSense.

Here's how it works: if style, culture, or shopping bloggers write about a given product that's in the ShopStyle directory, they can add a ShopStyle widget so that readers can actually buy the product or can use the ShopStyle API to further customize the app. The blogger gets a cut of the revenue.

Sugar started as a content company, with an inaugural celebrity gossip brand called PopSugar, … Read more

Sometimes the greenest technology improvement is going back to the old low-tech option.

Amazon.com announced Monday it's working with retailers to cut back on the packaging you'll need to open to get to your goods.

The Seattle-based company plans to start shipping items in plain brown cardboard boxes, instead of putting a pre-boxed or plastically sealed item inside another Amazon box. The cardboard box will have Amazon, and in some cases the retailer's name, on the front.

Memory cards, for example, are often sold in disproportionately large clear plastic packaging to prevent shoplifting at physical stores. Transcend's memory cards when bought via Amazon will be shipped in a recycled cardboard envelope. Children's toys, such as a Fisher-Price pirate ship set, will be shipped in a plain brown box with cardboard padding and a plastic bag holding the toy people and whatnot.

So, in addition to being less annoying to open, the new packaging will also be more environmentally friendly, according to Amazon.… Read more

If you're buying a budget computer, it's worth your time to look into the Compaq Presario SR5610f desktop. It's not far off from a barebones machine, and you don't get a ton of extra features, but the price is so low that it's hard to complain. You get a dual-core 2.5GHz AMD processor, 3 gigs of ram, an integrated video card, and a 320GB hard drive, which should be enough power to get you through the standard applications, stuff like word processing, streaming video, mp3 playback, etc...but you definitely shouldn't expect it … Read more

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

WindowShop is a new content-viewing layer for Amazon.com. If you've ever used Cooliris' PicLens before, you'll feel right at home, as WindowShop turns Amazon's selection of online goods into a giant wall, which you can scroll back and forth across, and zoom in and out of to find things to buy. The tool was built by Amazon and runs entirely off its S3 storage service.

Within the giant wall of product thumbnails, each of Amazon's sales categories is broken down into interactive tiles which can take up nearly your entire browser window when zoomed. Movies, … Read more

Nobody likes to find a good deal that ends up being a bad one because of exorbitant shipping costs. In the jungle of online retailers indexed in Google's Product Search (formerly Froogle), nothing is more common. To solve that problem, Google has begun a voluntary program for retailers to include their shipping and tax information so that potential buyers can see what the total cost will be before clicking.

The new system runs through Google's Base product, letting retailers note whether they charge tax. It's also set up to let them set tax and shipping amounts by … Read more

Online retail growth will slow for the first time this holiday season as a result of the weak economy, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

The market research firm estimates that $44 billion will be spent online by consumers during the holiday season; that's up 12 percent from last year, but it's the slowest rate of growth for online retail to date.

It's important to note that the Forrester report refers specifically to e-commerce, not to the hordes of people who show up at Best Buy at 5 a.m. for Black Friday deals. But … Read more

We welcome Russ Frushtick back on the show for his third appearance, and to make up for our humiliating fumble on his last appearance, we make this an extra video gamey show. We go over some of the holiday's most anticipated titles, speculate on the livelihood of the industry, and even get to a few kooky stories from the Internet. Don't worry about the threepeating, Russ, a little creme will clear that up in a few weeks.

Although it's true that I don't get the same fuzzy feeling in my loins that Jeff does for video games, I'm glad that Russ is here today to help lay it all out for me. "Little Big Planet," "Dead Space," "Rhythm Heaven," and my personal favorite, "Call of Doodie." Wait, that doesn't sound right. Anyway, to update you on the PS Yu foundation, I'm still working on God of War for the original PlayStation console, and, man, that game is hard! I might have to use UGO's newest site Game Cheats to help me get through the last few levels, and look! They have it! "God Mode?" This game is about to get a lot less frustrating. Next, I'd like to try my hand at some more skateboarding games. So who was it that offered me Tony Hawk a few months ago? Back to the basics!