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RAM - 2 X 256MB DDR-400Mhz SDRAM 184 pin

I’m selling this on Craigslist. Feel free to contact me, and I will make you a great deal.

Go to the Google Checkout page on the Monday after Thanksgiving to find great deals provided by Google. At least that is what they are touting on their site.

To jumpstart your holiday shopping, Google Checkout will be featuring holiday gift ideas and special holiday promotions. Come back on Cyber Monday to learn more. 

Since you will be shopping for your kids, or kids you know at all of the great sites I lilsted in a previous blog, please be careful with your purchases and make note of the age limits for the toys you want to buy. An article posted by Texas Children’s Hospital, “Buyer Beware: Those shopping for children should heed warnings before fullfilling holiday wish lists“, warns parents and others shopping for children of the more than 50 toys that contain some sort of hazard such as choking, toxic chemical exposure, hearing loss, strangulation hazards, and other dangers to children. Please read and keep this list in mind as you do your shopping.

According to Vendio(TM), makers of Dealio(TM), the leading comparison shopping toolbar on the Web, 78% of consumers are planning on shopping online this holiday season.  Over 50% of these people will be comparison shopping and are anticipating on saving 15% using online comparison tools.

If you are planning on doing the same, there are several shopping and shopping comparison sites out there to help you make your decisions. Kiplinger.com compiled a list of “20 Websites to help you find a bargain“. Some of them are:

• Deals of America
  
• Able Shoppers
• Slickdeals.net
• DealTaker
• ShopLocal
• PriceGrabber
• Shopping.com
• Shopzilla
• Fat Wallet
• eBates

These are all great sites that will help you save a little money over the holidays. Now you can sell your SUV since all of your items can be shipped, allowing you to save even more money. What a deal!

Last week I wrote about a new shopping engine called Like.com. I forgot to mention its parent company Riya Visual Search, which seems to be the pioneer of visual search. Well, maybe not the
pioneer, but instead the “…guys who are going to change the way people search on the Web, by using object recognition in images instead of plain text.” Riya itself is fun, but not that useful; what is useful is the new shopping search Like.com. Check out Riya, but use Like.com for your holiday shopping, unless of course you like stuff from L.L. Bean.

Wesabe is a new personal finance tool that allows people to pool all of their financial information into one place. Is that safe? You use Google, right? Who needs privacy? Wesabe allows its members to not only track their finances, but to see spending trends and read advice from people with similar spending habits. It is quite cool.

Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members’ personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

• Watch the Wesabe how-to video

They say they do not share information with others, or sell it. I believe this statement. I guess a concern would be if they ever were compromised. Do they have the same insurance and security as a bank or credit card company?

Here is their response in the FAQ:

We’ve taken a very strong approach to security, and we’ve made every effort to ensure that using Wesabe is just as secure, or in some cases more secure, than using your bank’s or credit card’s web site. Of course we use industry-standard encryption, so none of your data or passwords are ever sent over the Internet in a form an eavesdropper could read. Unlike other sites, we do NOT ask you to enter your bank or credit card passwords into our web site. Instead, we offer a unique feature — a software program that runs on your computer and keeps your passwords safe, uploading only the data we need to help you get more for your money. Wesabe never has access to your passwords in any form. For people who want absolute control over access to their data, we provide a manual tool for uploading. Once your data is uploaded, your account is not associated with your name, email address, or similar identifiers.

So it is safe… but it looks like it takes a lot of work to get everything set-up. At the end of the day, it comes down to your expected ROI.

Comscore came out with the October search results for the major engines today. Google and Yahoo! both gained ground while Microsoft and AOL Time Warner decreased. No numbers were dramatic, but Google has seen a 6.4% increase since October of last year while Yahoo! has fallen by 1%.

Here is how they shakeout:

Google - 45.4%
Yahoo! - 28.2%
Microsoft - 11.7%
Ask - 5.8%
AOL Time Warner - 5.4%

Does this mean that the thousands of other 2nd tier search engines are fighting for 3.5%? Yikes!

This is based on 6.8 billion searches done during the month of October. A 33% increase in search from a year ago.

I was on the MSN Live blog this morning, and came across this banner ad on the site:

What could be going on? When will they make the official announcement. Is Google and Yahoo! next?

ublip.com - location matters - Share your favorite locations, places from the past, and photos with friends, family, and anyone in the world from your desktop or mobile device.

Ublip is another mash-up that seems to be waiting to be swallowed up by one of the big players such as Google or MySpace. Actually, this would be a really cool feature on MySpace or FaceBook now that I think about it. It has the daring creativity of the youth of today, with the “look at me” aspect that the same generation is dying for. Think about it, as you are jamming to the latest Christina song on your friend’s MySpace page, at the same time you can see where they ate last night. McDonalds or Starbucks? Good times.
With that, what is Ublip?

ublip is a free service that lets users easily share their favorite locations with friends and family. This could be your favorite restaurant, your high school, your work, a recent vacation, concert, upcoming party, favorite store….the possibilities are endless! We believe that locations matters^TM when having a conversation, and our mission is to let our users capture this and share it with the world.

It is the week of Thanksgiving, so blow some time checking out where others are travelling, and the let the world know that you ate a Coney at Sonic last night. You should do it, people are anxiously refreshing their browsers waiting for the next blip to blop.

It seems that the folks at Google are not too concerned about start-ups who are looking to oust them from their search throne. The search giant sees these new companies as organizations who are not able to scale at Google’s level, and can only contribute a small piece to the overall search puzzle:

At least that is what Louis Monier, the French founder of Alta Vista, seemed to imply in an interview with Times Online:

“Every time, they have maybe one small lever that they suspect is huge. They don’t realise that [all] they have [is] a better door latch on a [Boeing] 747. Now all they have to do is build a 747. None of those ideas I’ve seen are compelling.” (I imagine Alta Vista had the same thought when Google came on the scene several years ago.)

Is Google and the rest of the search giants so big that nobody will be able to overtake them, and only be acquired or destroyed by Google and the rest? Many a giant has fallen, for example, look at the current battle between Toyota and GM? Who would have ever thought that a small start-up out of Japan, would ever be able to compete with the goliath GM? It’s happening.

Hopefully Google is smarter than GM and will keep on innovating and focusing on the customer and the industry, and not get caught up in its own hype and arrogance.