Technically Speaking

Santa.com is helping to bring the magic of Christmas to children and parents across the world, with a new easy to use, interactive and engaging online destination the whole family can enjoy.

Information and activities on Santa.com include games, music, stories, crafts, eCards, recipes, videos, and even the ability to write and send a Letter to Santa. Thousands of personalized Gingerbread eCards and letters to Santa have already been sent this season. Additional features on
Santa.com:

– Online Shopping — As the ghosts of Christmas Past have illustrated,
shopping online continues to be a favorite in lieu of long lines and
crowded stores.

– Donate — Since Christmas is the season of sharing, Santa.com also includes a special donation feature to provide visitors the ability to give back to those who may be less fortunate.

– Blogs from Santa and the Reindeer — Just as the world has moved online, Santa and his reindeer are online, too!

Santa.com is located in San Jose, Santa.com is privately owned by Small’s Seed Co., LLC.

Technically Speaking, there are more choices than ever before for online shopping this holiday season. wedding flowers

EVO announced that evo.com is open for business to provide shoppers with the widest selection of green gift items on the web. EVO has prescreened millions of products for their green attributes and only offers products for sale on evo.com that earn an EVO rating of one to five leaves. EVO has partnered with Trees for the Future to plant a tree in the name of everyone who joins the evo.com community, and has pledged to plant at least 100,000 trees this holiday season.

In addition to toys, evo.com features gift baskets, clothing, jewelry, bath and body products, food, home accessories, gadgets, and even eco-travel packages, cars and solar energy products. Retailers offering products and services on evo.com range from specialty brands to large retail giants and include American Apparel, Baby Center, Burt’s Bees, Comet Skateboards, Eileen Fisher, GE, Hanna Anderson, HP, Home Depot, Macy’s, Method, No Sweat Apparel, Nordstrom, Patagonia, REI, Target, Toys “R” Us, Toyota, Under The Canopy, Whole Foods, Victoria’s Secret, Viva Terra, and more than a thousand other sellers.

EVO, the world’s largest green shopping destination, provides consumers with easy access to better green information, products and services. EVO’s founders envision a community of millions of people all voting with their dollars to increase demand for eco-friendly products and services. The company’s ultimate mission, developed over three years with significant input from green thought leaders, is to leverage the power of business as a tool for social and environmental change.

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t figured out by now that GREEN is where we are all headed, you need to wake up and smell the organic coffee. OR you missed the Google Green announcement post.

Shopnik let’s you search and compare items in an intuitive, easy to understand graphical environment. With its sleek, superfast interface featuring product aimed at informed buyers 25-40 seeking the top tiers of technology and performance, Shopnik streamlines the process of finding the product you want with the features you need both quickly and at the best possible price.

With its advanced shopping model, Shopnik lets tech-savvy users plug in a specific set of features, technical specifications and a price range to rapidly hone in on the products they seek. Beautiful multi-angled product shots, in-depth feature and spec sections and a smart comparator that includes the ability to save and store your product homework all combine for a fast, easy, specifics-driven shopping engine found nowhere else online. The site features LCD screens, Laptop Computers, GPS Systems and
Digital Cameras, and dream cars.

Technically Speaking, I’m really cheap and frugal except when it comes to looking at the possibilities of picking a flat screen in the near future. No idea why, I don’t watch much TV; guess I just want one? makeup mirrors

Comscore released an update of holiday season e-commerce spending covering the first 26 days (November 1 - 26) of the November - December 2007 holiday season, including spending totals for Cyber Monday (November 26). More than $10.7 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking a 17-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year.

2007 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2006
Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore, Inc.

* Corresponding Shopping Days, Not Calendar Days

Some other notable findings for Cyber Monday 2007 include:
– The number of online buyers was up 38 percent compared to Cyber Monday 2006, while the average dollars spent per buyer was down 12 percent. The decline in dollars per buyer may be due to two factors — deeper and broader price discounts offered by online merchants this year and the fact that “new Cyber Monday buyers” tended to spend less online than returning buyers.
– 6 percent of the Internet users on Cyber Monday made an online purchase.
– 44 percent of Internet users on Cyber Monday shopped online (i.e. visited an online retail site or used a comparison shopping engine)
– 60 percent of dollars spent online on Cyber Monday came from work computers, with the balance coming from home and university computers.

A site that really benefited from Cyber Monday is the site called just that - Cyber Monday! They show a 56% increase in traffic on this past Cyber Monday. Great name for a site that takes advantage of the date.

comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world. This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

Technically Speaking, you might still consider the 7 steps before spending all your money this holiday season!

Barcle.com, the upstart online mobile shopping tool, passed its first big test after launching last week — it helped shoppers across the country find the lowest price for theexact product they were looking for and made it easier for them to buy it. The United States launch is being followed up with websites in Canada, Europe and Asia.

Barcle.com is a no-nonsense pricing search engine that lets you instantly discover who is selling what you want to buy for the lowest price — all by using an item’s unique barcode. And you can do it standing right there in the store using your web-enabled cell phone at mobile.barcle.com

A shopper standing in a store just has to enter the product’s 12 digit barcode number into their web-enabled cell phone and Barcle.com will not only tell them who is selling it for the lowest price but let you go directly to that store’s website to buy it. You could also just walk across the street to that store.

Partners include Bestbuy.com, Target, Kohl’s, Buy.com, Kmart.com, eBay.com, Overstock.com, Macy’s, TigerDirect.com, Circuit City, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, Drugstore.com, KB Toys, Office Max, Barnes and Noble and many other great retailers.

Barcle.com is owned and operated by Huron PM Inc. which designs, engineers and installs symbology driven, middleware-based integration control systems for industrial and project applications. Huron PM Inc. maintains offices in Stowe, Vermont and Montreal, Canada.

Technically Speaking, never have heard of this company, but sounds like it launched at a fantastic time - holiday shopping time. You may prefer to learn 7 steps that are essential in being like the millionaire next door.

Glimpse.com is trying to do what many shopping sites have failed to do and that is to entice the consumer to keep coming back. Most of us online will do research online, and for some hard to find items, we will purchase them online.

Even this NY Times reporter admits that she just bought her latest white shirt at a mall. Quickly looking at the site, you can tell they mean business even though they are still in beta. This is not a Powell furniture store, this is high end fashion.

One of the more interesting features is the left side bar. It’s organized into four main categories: featured looks, featured brands, featured stores, and sale.

Under the featured looks category as an example, you can click on one of the listed ladies such as Drew Barrymore, and you will receive back a “Rockin’ Steals under $100″ listing. This is feature is the key to how the site works. The results that are brought back are not just for one store, but the entire mall’s best picks. This mall is not only mainstream real stores, but they also include online only stores.

Glimpse is currently in beta, and the mall is loaded with merchandise aimed squarely at the 24-32 year old single female.

*This post is written by Kittymama, who I have known quite a long time. We go WAY BACK. She has a very successful blog which at the current time of this posting is ranked at number 3,634 on Technorati. For those of you keeping track — that is UP 34 more places from yesterday!

Ever set up an Amazon wish list? I know I have, but I haven’t checked it in awhile. Half the stuff on there I probably already have or isn’t for sale anymore - LOL. I was just thinking the other day that
I should really take the time to go in there, update it and then repost it on my blog, but I have now found something even better.

It’s called Wisheus and it’s a free website you can join where you can make a wish list and then turn
it into a widget to put in your blog. It’s really cool how you can upload pictures of your item, name it and enter your own description. Once you have completed your Wisheus wish list, you can turn it into a customized widget to post in your blog for all of your friends to see.

Who knows, somebody may even surprise you and send you something off of your wish list In addition to a wish list, there is also an “I have” list where you can post some of your favorite new items. Your friends can comment on your wish/I have lists, too. I think this is a very cool new thing and it’s going to catch on in the blogging community very quickly. In fact, I’m going there to make my own wish list!

Is a online mall guide really necessary? Apparently NearByNow has convinced enough investors to drop another $5 million on their company. This goes with the $2.5 million they have already raised.

I personally think that a site like BrowseGoods is worth more money. I believe that more money should be spent online for something that works well or will work well, vs something that is another way to map online retail madness. It certainly beats driving to the mall, finding a parking spot, and then weaving your way around the screaming teenagers and the pushy rude people you find there. Not to mention the fact that everything in a mall is overpriced to cover that mall tax the stores must shell out.

Technically Speaking, maybe Mae can shed more light on this later today.

Sunday Morning! My favorite News day!

In the news today I found an article that was a toss up on if it was something that RD would want to digest or Mae, who enjoys covering the shopping scene, wanted to cozy up to…but I said no. Duff would want to report on the mega-pixels and gig-tawat’s (yes, those are large numbers of WTF’s) and all of the things that make this geek-a-fided. And Mae would be telling you all how this is the best thing to hit the shopping scene since Discount Shoe Warehouse started accepting credit cards.

Nope, this one comes from right up the road in Plano, TX. So I am taking this one…

Leave it to the number two leading area for Technology in the nation and the number two location for fashion shopping to come together to develop the number one item every grocery shopper can’t live without….

Yes, it had to happen so get ready to see this in your locate grocery store…the Computerized Shopping Cart. Yep, that is right, finally a shopping cart on steroids.

And you thought that when Albertson’s added the nifty calculators on the handle of their shopping carts that it could not be topped. Now these Techy Carts have a monitor on the front of the cart and a modified keyboard on the handle… something I know every four year old will find fun dismantling while mom is looking for their Coco-Puffs.

As RD would say, ‘Let’s Amp This Up to the GMAFB level and set off all of the WTF alarms, while Mae would say, ALRIGHT! I can’t wait!”

How this works is you download your shopping list to the store’s site and when you arrive you log in on your shopping cart and then follow the “Yellow Brick Road”

But Cheryl Miller, columnist for the Dallas Morning News, reports on this best, so read on my blurry eye Sunday Morning News readers…

Click Here to learn more about Duke

Oh how I love to shop! Tonight I was browsing through my feeds and checked out fabsugar and came across Milk. Milk is a unique and fabulous West Hollywood boutique that is sure to meet your fashion needs. This site features fashion styles from big name European designers such as Derek, Lam, Luella, Missoni, and Aquascutum. They have many creative styles for men, women, and children.

Milk offers a easy to use website and totally represents Hollywood’s laid back style. I was impressed with the website and found out James F. Dean brought the brilliant and retro look to Milk.

The downfall to this one-stop-shop destination is the prices! Some items are not too outrageous, but again I am a college student and my spending money is limited. If you have the cash to spend and love unique designs, this is the website for you! And if you are feeling generous and want to see Mae’s wardrobe refreshed with a splash of milk, donations are accepted. Just Kidding! Happy Shopping!!