Savvy shopping for geeks, chic

Tis the season for spending to ramp up a touch in anticipation of gift-buying and glitz-laden events of Christmas and New Year, and Savvy Circle has teamed with an eclectic and still-expanding coterie of electronic, household and fashion goods purveyors to bring online a free service to that may add value to your shopping experience.

With its bookmark plugin, Savvy Circle members may browse a directory of stores and easily tag and save to the site a shopping list of everything from a coveted home theater system to that couture piece epitomizing timeless craftsmanship. When the item’s price drops, the user is immediately notified. Simple, swish, and easy.

The site will soon sport features that will make the service even more unique and compelling. For now, consumers may price watch items from smaller boutiques as well powersellers including Amazon, Best Buy, Ikea, Target, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys New York. Useful whether you are

• propeller head cool, in search of digital gadgetry,
• furnishing the home in geo-pop contemporary,
• a haute bohème fashionista
• comparison shopping for Microsoft’s X-box 360
• sorting out some holiday reads,
• shopping for a Walmart toy,
• purchasing a Chanel acid jolt makeup palette,
• appliancing the kitchen,
• looking for a gourmet gift,
• thinking on a new PDA with style + function,
• or pregnant and merely in need of rockin some new pants.

A few of the available merchants:

Case in point: If you are in the market for a cheap and portable computational device, CNET points out that the demand for laptops is reaching an all-time high this holiday season. “Best Buy is countering Wal-Mart’s offer by selling a Toshiba L25-S1192 laptop with an Intel Celeron M370 processor with 256MB of memory, 40GB hard disk drive and wireless capabilities for $379.99.”

Bookmark such comparable items on various sites, and you will hear it first from Savvy Circle when prices further fall.

Written October 20, 2007

Google OpenSocial: Open

In short, some early hour technology news for Friday:

The Google OpenSocial site is now live here.

The OpenSocial team has a blog here.

Plaxo has support available here for OpenSocial.

Ning is working to get the beta available to its network tonite.

Orkut, Plaxo, and Ning are first with OpenSocial support.

Music for Fri: Rilo Kiley / Silver Lining

Cameron Sinclair = Hawte

“I believe there’s no such thing as utopia. All problems are local, all solutions are local.”

Eat your own clinic: Open-source architecture to house the world. A passionate man + articulate, feasible ideas. Showing that design does not exist in a vacuum; it both influences and is influenced by our ever-changing environment. My friends and I are some-time fans.

Cameron Sinclair demonstrates that the ideals of design can inspire innovation, and in turn, innovation can take shape to conform to designing for sustainable living. Architecture For Humanity, now in San Francisco, is the brainchild of Sinclair, winner of the TED 2006 prize and regular contributer to Worldchanging, a sustainability blog.

I love the TED acceptance speech vid clip below, but it is being rather rebellious, so I’ve included the actual link here.

Clip description: Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is “Design like you give a damn.” Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe.

Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world. Click here to see the results of his TED Prize wish.

Wired Magazine, 2006 Rave Award
Living Scotsman, Design on the front line

In the bag

Laptop, music, a novel tale of mythic proportions, webcam, camera, toothbrush, dress, two pairs of jeans, heels, a few assorted shirts, liberation swimsuit in case, sundry etc., aviator shades.

So am low maintenance nowadays, and I much prefer it. Early days, sorting clothes for anything would involve detailed lists on stylistic slight of hand coordinating of what ivory blouse with the tweedy pencil skirt to be worn on which occasion. Now, I toss a few things in and quicker than a dervish fifteen, am out the door. Simple and swish.

Perhaps I should return to listing everything, as am distinctly more organized that way.

…..

Tangentially, while acknowledging that is impossible to live without, the ego is still the apparatus as well as the biggest hurdle in any relationship. My ardent idealism is always intact, as well, my penchant for oftentimes stating the obvious.

Photo: Coffee @ TM’s

Video: The National “All The Wine” / ATX

Myspace, Six-Apart Joining OpenSocial Coalition

Point and counterpoint. Checkmate? MySpace and Six-Apart To Join Google OpenSocial (confirmed)

Update: Beebo has joined the fray.

“Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook,” writes Techcrunch co-editor Michael Arrington, “and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.”

And so the plot thickens. Microsoft + Facebook will likely have to join in the OpenSource coalition. With Google’s open architecture, I cannot see how the duo can compete. It’s early yet to render judgement, but these are impromptu witterings.

In other news, GOOG broke through $700 a share in trading yday, closing at $707. Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It’s Google’s Share Price!

Screencast: Google OpenSource

Marc Andreessen, serial entrepreneur, blogger and Ning cofounder [co-author of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications and Loudcloud --> Opsware], puts forth a more visual explain on Google OpenSource. The segment shown below is running on live code.

Andreessen has a brill article on the new world of open web APIs, which may be found on his blog.p.marca.

Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators

October 31, Wednesday

Sweet, I thought, peeling back a smartly tied box a friend brought over. Picking through half of the candy selection then [atypical], it was only natural that I should succumb thereafter to a spiraling sugar sticky of too much, too much.

Following din, thought to step out for a few drinks, but got a touch lazy. Instead, I checked typescript on Le Script. I am a rough bit in, and though some parts of my writing are too raw and visceral for my taste, nonetheless, there are sections I am very happy with. At least I haven’t been blocked, and this in itself lends me a reasonable sense of competency.

To celebrate, I opened a beer and spent an evening spanner with J, watching Hulu. The picture quality was nice, streaming video swish. I did not encounter any 404 error during. Granted, I was on around than 10pm CDT.

So when the episode wrapped, I found myself feeling soft and densely misty-eyed.

Since when did The Office become close to the bone and, erm, emotionally tugging? Have I missed something here? Perhaps a bit of drama gets to me more now, not having watched anything for a long spanner. Maybe the solution is more Hulu.

My family loves Heroes, and I’ve only recently heard of the show, but it sounds like something with many spidering subplots and sub-subplots, like Lost, which is better DVD fodder.

Scene From The Startup Capital: Seesmic & Vinvin

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur gets it on with French funnyman and blogger Vinvin. Loic and Seesmic’s caffeine fueled CTO Johann Romefort are incredible. They are hard at work ’round all hours and having obvious fun with the process. How could the below be anything but?

Retro-comment: From yday

Tethered to the laptop still, but must run.

Two clinks to GOOG, with its empire of $10.6 billion revenue last year comprised of mostly ad sales, with a model built from simple and brill distributing [ + unifying ] of other content, for rewriting the rules yet again with OpenSocial.

One to watch for: The Gphone.

It will be compelling to see how Microsoft will try and play catch up.

What does FB’s valuation look like today, I wonder? On us all a little rain must fall.

Empire Strikes Back: Google OpenSocial

So that was my fix of drama for the evening.

Am as indolent as all get-out now, so just a few lines. It has been an eventful week in startup schemes, but today’s twilight highlight is summarized in one sentence:

Google OpenSocial debuts this Thursday.

Hosts include

- social networks Orkut, Ning, Friendster, Hi5

- business connection sites LinkedIn, Viadeo

- organizational service Plaxo

- CRM application company Salesforce

- industry heavy Oracle

On the developers side, enter

- movie fan community Flixster

- application and widget provider RockYou

- social music site iLike

- photo and video media creator Slide

Orkut, Ning, Friendster and Hi5 tall up to roughly 100 million users. No mention on Facebook or Myspace. One of my favorite bloggers and Ning Founder Marc Andreessen comments that Facebook and Myspace are not included, at least in the duration, for applications have already been developed for their audiences.

In the words of Rob Hof of Tech Beat:

The Google platform, called OpenSocial, potentially lets software developers create programs that will run on any social network that accepts the standards (though each site will have control over which programs, or widgets, will run on its real estate). Google’s Joe Kraus says it’s not just about making Google social, but “making the entire Web social.”

“This is an open version of what Facebook has done,” says Andreessen.

“This definitely poses a real challenge” to the prospect that Facebook would have the biggest platform for social programs on the Web. Developers can potentially reach even more people than on Facebook alone, and other social Web sites don’t have to persuade developers to write just for their sites, which
they generally don’t have the resources to do.

“Developers found their new gold strike,” Michael Arrington writes, “and they will soon all be there, mining away.”

…..

Thinking tangentially and relationally, here is a Bill of Rights for usage of the OpenSocial web, authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington.

…..

Gigaom, OpenSocial, Google’s Open Answer to Facebook
Techcrunch, Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial to Launch Thursday

Blog.P.Marca, OpenSocial: A New Universe of Web Apps..

Techworking, Why Google Didn’t Shed Tears For Facebook

Tech Beat, Google’s OpenSocial: Take That Facebook!