The bill organizing service Manilla launched at Demo this week. The pitch: it's a portal for your household bills. It will collect bills from your service providers, as well as bank statements and other financial data for you, and remind you what's due, to whom, and when. Furthermore, it'll keep records of all your bills and statements for you securely.
It should work with nearly any billing company, and in some special cases, you can use it to turn off your paper bills, doing your bit for the environment.
Using Manilla to receive and file electronic statements (… Read more
My guest today is CNET editor Seth Rosenblatt, who's going to help us keep our shiny new iPad 2s safe from harm. Also, I test the new Synology DS411slim home server, we opine on using a DVR as an archival store for videos, and more.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, call us with your questions to get on the next show: 877-438-6688 or e-mail rescue@cnet.com. No question is too basic, so if you've got a tech problem that's been getting under your skin, please call us and we'll try our best to help you out.
It's important to know who you're talking to. But in our e-mail in-boxes, we're deluged with messages from people we don't know, companies we're not familiar with. Even messages from our friends and coworkers could be better handled if we had social or business context with the message.
To see what I mean, try at least one of the these three good tools: Xobni, Rapportive, and a new kid on the block, WhoSent.It. These tools all give you dossiers on the people e-mailing you by using data gleaned from around the Web, including Facebook profiles, Twitter postings, and, for business users, data from apps like Salesforce.com.
Of these apps, Xobni is for Outlook users. Rapportive works nicely with Gmail and Google Apps. WhoSent.It has a clever twist that makes it work with anything.
If you're an Outlook user, get Xobni. Like the other apps, it pulls personal data from Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and company data from Hoovers. Xobni also gives you relevant data from within your own e-mail archive: It gives you links to e-mails you've exchanged with the sender, and also shows you which other people the sender communicates with (taken from multi-addressed to: and cc: fields). Xobni's sidebar data panel looks great and is the front-end for a ton of additional info, though on a crowded notebook's screen it can be a little intrusive. … Read more
I've said before, and not too long ago, that only people with poor impulse control buy things at retail prices. But I've recently come to understand that deal-seekers, people who habitually try to save money by using social-shopping sites like Groupon or coupon directories like RetailMeNot, may actually be even more valuable to the retail industry than people who buy stuff at list price. Because they spend more.
Cotter Cunningham, CEO of WhaleShark Media, which runs RetailMeNot, explained to me recently why his straightforward coupon site is working well, and how the Internet is changing how pricing and consumer marketing is done.
Affiliate marketing--paid links to commercial destinations--is the third-most efficient way for consumer goods and services companies to get online business, after e-mailing existing customers and doing good SEO. Coupons make for very effective and trackable affiliate links, because users have to click on them to get the deal, not just visit the site selling the product they want.
And coupon sites succeed because the business of aggregating coupons is very strong: each link is a CPA, or cost-per-action link, which pays out at a much higher rate than CPC, or cost-per-click advertising links.
The goal is to become the big site with the most coupons, as getting into that position makes for a virtuous SEO cycle: the more coupons you have, the more people link to and visit the site, and the higher you rise in the search engines. RetailMeNot pursues this strategy by including even nonaffiliate coupon deals in its listings. Unlike some of the original coupon sites, where each coupon has an affiliate or CPA link attached to it, RetailMeNot encourages its users to submit coupon codes they find around the Internet. These coupons don't generate direct revenue for the site (although pages they're on do serve ads), but they do serve the incredibly important function of improving RetailMeNot's depth and thus its SEO juice and its traffic, making its paid links bigger revenue drivers. … Read more
Today we're joined by CNET Senior Editor Rich Brown, who schools us in his area of expertise: desktop computers. Sure, there are more laptops sold than desktops, but the old workhorse form factor isn't going away, and Rich explains why. Rich and I also critique the latest in keyboards. Also, your questions answered, as always.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, CALL US with your questions to get on the next show: 877-438-6688 or e-mail rescue@cnet.com. No question is too basic, so if you've got a tech problem that's been getting under your skin, please call us and we'll try our best to help you out.
Topher Kessler writes our great MacFixIt blog, and today he's with us to help answer vexing and confusing Mac tech questions.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, CALL US with your questions to get on the next show: 877-438-6688 or e-mail rescue@cnet.com. No question is too basic, so if you've got a tech problem that's been getting under your skin, please call us and we'll try our best to help you out.
CNET's Brian Cooley joins us today to talk (complain, actually) about a form of tethering: connecting your Wi-Fi devices to the Internet over a mobile cellular-to-Wi-Fi gateway, like a smartphone or a dedicated device. Also, your questions answered, from video routing issues to the inevitable upcoming drought of new IP addresses.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, CALL US with your questions to get on the next show: 877-438-6688 or e-mail rescue@cnet.com. No question is too basic, so if you've got a tech problem that's been getting under your skin, please call us and we'll try our best to help you out.
Today, it's a networking extravaganza. Our guest rescuer is Darren Kitchen, of Hak5, and the inventor of the WiFi Pineapple. We saved up networking questions for weeks for this show.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, CALL US with your questions to get on the next show: 877-438-6688 or email rescue@cnet.com. No question is too basic, so if you've got a tech problem that's been getting under your skin, please call us and we'll try our best to help you out.
There are several ways to get your music and video files out of the prison of your computer of portable media player and into the wide-open expanse of your living room or elsewhere in your house. Today on Rescue, special guest Donald Bell discusses several solutions, including Apple's own AirPlay and the popular Sonos line of media streamer products.
Also on this episode: How to manage an archive of music you've made and recorded yourself, how to stream your music into a car, the best way to stream video into your living room, and more.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, e-mail rescue@cnet.com or call us to get on the next show: 877-438-6688. No question is too basic.
Every year, CES breaks Las Vegas' Wi-Fi. So we bring mobile hotspots. And they break. CNET reporters try to cover live events, but we run out of AC power. And we can't find a places to sit and do our reporting. If you've ever attended a big conference or convention and tried to work at it, you may sympathize. So this week, we reveal how we (try to) get around these constraints, and how the lessons we learn can help you compute at your crowded events. Plus: Your questions answered, of course.
If you have a tech question for CNET to the Rescue, e-mail rescue@cnet.com or call us to get on the next show: 877-438-6688. No question is too basic.
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