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For readers who remember the classic Father of the Bride scene where the wedding is almost called off because the groom bought a blender for the bride-to-be, there's a new service called Gift Girl, which might put an end to such mistakes. The site is designed to help men buy gifts for their female significant others by offering up a small, targeted selection of items for womenfolk, hand picked by the site's creators, one of whom, incidentally, has that newfangled XX chromosome.

Gifts are broken down into basic categories like jewelry, clothing, and "accessories." You can … Read more

It's happening again.

If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.

Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until … Read more

I'd like to pass along a press release from one of my favorite Silicon Valley start-ups. It's a place you can go to make chips... but I'd better explain that.

A lot of people do woodworking at home. The equipment is moderately priced and there's plenty of support available from TV shows such as Norm Abram's New Yankee Workshop on PBS and a variety of woodworking shows on the DIY Network.

But for those of us who like working with metal instead of wood, things aren't so simple. The equipment, for example, is much … Read more

Digby has partnered with well-known retailers like Barnes & Noble and Fossil to create a downloadable shopping app that lets you purchase goods from your (RIM 4.1 or above) BlackBerry smartphone.

Digby has done a good job minimizing typing and fast-tracking purchases with select retail partners. Simply scroll through the brand list, clicking deeper within the stripped-down interface to see items and special deals. You can set the alert function to nag you to buy a gift before an important occasion. You'll have to do much of that buying on faith, though--there's no built-in functionality to preview an item or research product ratings for items, at least none that I perused.

When the purchase is nigh, enter your locally-stored password and Digby will do the rest, passing the transaction along to the vendor to process. Credit card information is password protected and stored, encrypted, on the device.… Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--If you've never seen a machine that makes 3D models out of sugar, you should.

But unless you're part of a relatively small group of people who went to the Maker Faire in California in May, or are one of a few other people who know the machine's creator, you probably have never even heard of the device.

Similarly, you may not be aware--or at least the general public probably isn't--that there is a whole movement going on right now to build advanced, digital, relatively inexpensive personal fabrication and robotics tools that can do or … Read more

People often complain about the high cost of organic foods, hybrid cars and pesticide-free bamboo T-shirts. GreenDealsDaily, which launched this month, attempts to bust the myth that living a more eco-friendly lifestyle is only for the well-heeled.

The site lists the latest price drops, coupons and freebies for green products, as well as lifestyle tips from IdealBite, Treehugger and other blogs. Hurry and call ConEd now, for example, if you want free compact fluorescent bulbs for your Manhattan apartment. Or get thee to Gaiam for its 75 percent discount while the organic cotton bedding lasts.

You can register with GreenDealsDaily … Read more

Rainbow-hued blog network Sugar Inc. is on one heck of a shopping spree: last month, the women's media company purchased social shopping site ShopStyle, and now it's bought fashion-centric blog hub Coutorture Media.

No financial terms were disclosed.

Coutorture, which will remain a standalone site despite the new Sugar affiliation, isn't a blog network in the traditional sense. The 230+ blogs that it counts under its trendy umbrella aren't officially run by the site, nor are they part of an advertising network like Glam Media; they're the fashion-related blogs run by Coutorture readers who have … Read more

Today I heard about Tjoos (no relation to Tjoon), a new price-comparison engine that adds a wrinkle to the standard model: It scans for quantity and coupon discounts.

That's the whole story, but it's a smart one. On standard shopping engines, like NexTag, PriceGrabber, and MySimon, you're given prices for single products (or boxes of products). Many consumer items are bought in multiples, though, and Tjoos' crawler deciphers the quantity discounts in the sites it covers.

Even for items that aren't usually sold in quantity (digital cameras, for example), the addition of store-specific discount codes to … Read more

Blog network Sugar Publishing, which operates a popular array of pastel-hued women's lifestyle and entertainment titles, has agreed to acquire social shopping start-up ShopStyle.com for an undisclosed amount.

ShopStyle, which competes with sites like ThisNext and StyleHive, aims to make it easier to search multiple retail sites at once and lets members create personal "look books" and network with other digital shopaholics.

In addition, the San Francisco-based blog network has officially changed its name from Sugar Publishing to Sugar Inc. "to better reflect its growing reach and expansion over the past year." Presumably, that'… Read more