Shopping information management (SIM)
With the holiday gift buying season in full gear and Internet shopping the best way to avoid getting trapped in a mall parking lot. But finding and organizing all of that shopping information can be a challenge with so much information available and the same product being available either retail or at lower cost auction, discount, or used product sites. I have always been a fan of the price comparison sites like pricegrabber and froogle but they generally add more options and not less for shopping. The folks at Intellext have an interesting solution in the newest release of their Watson sidebar that integrates with ebay and Amazon to provide searches for products while you shop on other web pages. It is similar to a move that Pluck had made last year to push content from Amazon, eBay, and shopping.com RSS search feeds into their RSS reader as a way to support the free reader. From what I can see a year later the Pluck people have downplayed that aspect relative to when the integrations were first made available.
The Viapoint Smart Organizer is a great tool for tracking your gift purchasing and holiday cheer sharing activities. If you have all your friends already added to a grouping you can add them to a grouping called "Holiday gifts 2005" to track which ones you have purchased presents for and which ones haven't. You can also organize your holiday gify buying research by collecting links for products that would be appropriate for each of your friends and family members and associate them with each person or groups of people. Since tracking gift giving doesn't require the Outlook adapter you can do it easily with the free non-registered version of Viapoint so please enjoy it if you are interested in doing so. We'll be tracking what is happening with the Intellext new free consumer release to see if it is worth adding more of the ultimate consumer features, things that help you buy stuff but there is room in everyone's stocking for the free version of Viapoint.
Happy Holidays and good luck shopping online or finding a strategic parking space at the mall.
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