AllThingsD » NCAA

Can This Broken Robot Help Save Cisco Systems?

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:00:11 +0000

If you watched Sunday’s two conference-championship football games in the U.S. and paid any attention whatsoever to the commercials, there’s a good chance you saw the ad spot (embedded below) from Cisco Systems.

The spot depicts a batch of assembly-line robots busily building cars, as an instrumental version of the 1979 Gary Numan hit “Cars” plays happily. All is well until one of the robots experiences trouble and complains to the others, “I’m broken.” No problem, one of the others says, fixes his stricken comrade, and all is again well. Cue the voice-over, saying something about assembly lines that repair themselves. Then cue the corporate logo, aaaand … out.

The spot — which has exactly 100 percent less Ellen Page than the last series of Cisco TV ads — is part of a significant new advertising offensive that Cisco is launching today on television, in print and online. The TV spots will appear during the NCAA basketball games, the National Hockey League’s All-Star Skills Competition, and on CNBC and other business-oriented programming. However, it notably won’t appear during the Super Bowl.

Those robots will be seen again, disassembling and reassembling sections of certain Web sites as part of a series of “site takeovers,” including CNBC and The Street, among others.

The print portion is a six-page “manifesto” that explains ways that Cisco’s “Human Network” plays important and unexpected roles at banking companies and companies that sell chutney, and helps the National Basketball Association push its video around the world. The manifesto will appear in The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Economist and the New York Times.

There will also be a social campaign via LinkedIn that goes after 140,000 C-level executives registered on that network. It will be the first time that embedded video will be used in a LinkedIn campaign. More TV ads will come later this year, as will localized versions of the campaign for international markets.

Last week, I talked with Blair Christie, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, who said that the manifesto in particular is about using the voice of its customers to show how Cisco’s technology can help companies do things they couldn’t do before. Of course, the point they’re supposed to get is that a Cisco intelligent network is what’s enabling them to do that.

Christie says it’s all part of Cisco’s effort to simplify how it communicates about itself. There’s no more muddling of the message. There’s no more consumer division to eat into the perception that Cisco is anything but an enterprise- and service-provider-focused networking company, so no more need for cute ads that overdo awkward jokes about teleconferencing, or showing a giggly twentysomething woman in a virtual fitting room. Cisco is now about transforming how companies do what they do, either by doing it better, or seeing new opportunities. It’s a big message, and a tricky one to get across in 30 seconds during a football game.

I asked Christie about the state of Cisco’s brand before this campaign, and whether or not there were any perceived weaknesses, given its recent troubles, that this ad effort is meant to shore up. “There was actually a lot that was right with our brand,” she told me. “The opportunity we had was clear and simple. Our customer voice is our talent, and that’s what we’re showing, and it’s consistent with our strategy. We use our customers as a test bed, so why not use them as a reflection of our brand? It wasn’t rocket science. But it was the customer voice that was missing.”

Simplifying and streamlining are themes that Cisco is certainly acquainted with of late. It has been doing a lot of those, and indeed, even shrinking itself as part of a broad-based restructuring. The results of that effort are starting to show up in Cisco’s results.

Time will tell if this new advertising campaign will help Cisco effectively reintroduce itself to its core customers; fight off strong competitive thrusts from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, whose networking division marketed itself aggressively against Cisco in 2010; and perhaps press a perceived advantage against Juniper Networks, which has been having its own problems.

What I find notable, or maybe missing from the campaign, are recognizable names of customers doing innovative things. Yes, there’s the NBA, but in the print manifesto, who’s the bank that’s using Cisco’s video TelePresence to interact with customers? Who’s the small chutney company that turned “browsers into buyers”? And who’s the car company with such smart assembly-line robots? It’s a good message that, to my mind, could be made a lot more effective with more specific examples.

And while I grant it’s often difficult to get customers to agree to be named in ads like this — you could almost hear CEO John Chambers’s frustration about not being allowed to name a certain banking customer, about which he was obviously proud, on a recent conference call — the biggest networking company in the world shouldn’t have such a problem. It should be able to brag that this or that household-name bank is an enthusiastic Cisco customer, and that Cisco networks powered the manufacturing of that popular car everyone is talking about right now. That would add some real oomph, and really serve to remind potential customers that Cisco is still, despite its recent missteps, the networking world’s alpha dog.

Anyhow, my critique aside, here’s the robots spot. Enjoy:

Cisco Robots from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

CaptainU Builds the Mint.com for Student Athletes

Drake Martinet — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:15:37 +0000

One sure path to making money on the Internet is to find a business that people can get emotional about — that is, enough to type in their credit card number.

CaptainU, a start-up that serves the families of young athletes, may have found the most emotional business of all.

The San Francisco-based company has positioned itself between student athletes and the college teams that might recruit them, in much the same way that financial Web app Mint.com placed itself in between people building their financial goals and the banks and credit card companies seeking new clients.

But don’t call CaptainU a recruiting service — that might run it afoul of the NCAA.

CaptainU users sign up and then build a profile that includes the student athlete’s statistics, team affiliations, training camp attendances and GPA.

The site also provides templates for tracking statistics, displaying highlight videos and all the other ephemera college coaches might look for when recruiting.

But, according to co-founder Mike Farb, CaptainU’s real service — like Mint’s — is about helping users make decisions with more information.

Once they decide they want to play at the college level, “students really need a road map for what they should to do, to develop athletically and academically,” Farb said. “Today, most families just rely on high school coaches and other parents.”

What CaptainU provides, after analyzing all the data added to a profile, is a realistic set of goals and prescriptions for achievement.

Want to play lacrosse at Duke? CaptainU can tell you what GPA you should shoot for, whether or not you are on the right traveling lacrosse team, and which coach you should get in touch with.

Farb, like other founders wary of nailing down claims of early traction, wouldn’t share user numbers in detail. But he acknowledged that CaptainU currently had “hundreds of thousands of users.”

Users can sign up for a free “rookie” profile, or trade up for an expanded services profile, which runs between $20 and $40 per mont — pricey, but not when compared to something like a bag full of top-tier hockey equipment.

Farb said that he didn’t think the financial future for his bootstrapped company, which is looking to raise an A round of funding, was in paid user accounts.

“We can now connect families with videographers in every state, so that they can get highlight footage taken,” he said. “We want to provide the same connections for private coaches, camps, and anyone else who provides services for athletes families.”

The plan for CaptainU is to become a platform for all of these partners to connect and transact business with the start-up’s growing user base. CaptainU takes a small cut of each deal, and charges admission for trainers, camps and other service providers to be listed on the site.

This “platform play” isn’t new, but Farb said that growing the sales and marketing staff, which CaptainU organizes by sport, is the next step.

“After all, how many former college athletes do you know that end up in sales?,” he asked and then answered. “All of them.”

Here is the video of an interview I did with Farb:

[ See post to watch video ]

Early Adopter: LateralSports.com–Kayak for College Sports Online

Drake Martinet — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:29:17 +0000

If you’re a big fan of collegiate sports, the prospect of locating all the games you want to watch can be daunting.

Assuming the game you are looking for isn’t deciding some crucial tournament that lands it on ESPN2, where do you go? A school’s athletics Web site? The site for the specific team? For the venue? What if the game is out of conference or pre-season?

And while these issues may seem like the lament of the crazed sports fan, Tom Bleymaier, co-founder of LateralSports.com, believes he’s onto something thinking there’s a problem to be solved.

“There are 347 Division One schools in the NCAA, which means about 6,500 teams total,” explained Bleymaier in a recent interview. “We want to be the one place online that fans can go to locate the games they want to watch–we want people to search with us, and be confident that if we aren’t listing it, then it just isn’t available.”

He and his co-founders, his brother and sister, built LateralSports.com not only to connect users with the hard-to-find games, but to highlight games fans didn’t even know they were interested in.

Indeed, a quick search for San Diego State Softball, where a friend is a coach, showed where I could watch online this weekend. Searching for my hometown ZIP Code revealed 42 active collegiate athletes from my high school alma mater, and showed where I might watch the games of those currently in season.

This sort of discovery seems to be exactly what Lateralsports.com is designed to elicit.

Said Bleymaier: “Big name schools think that people who want to see their games know where to find them. We agree that all of their existing fans may, but there are 200 kids and their new freshmen’s old high school who would watch the game if they knew about it. We can send alerts to anyone from that hometown to tell them when games are on, and connect them with where to watch.”

The alerts, emails and texts could be more helpful than they sound–and not just for the fans.

“NCAA rules actually restrict who a college can send such alerts too,” said Bleymaier. Those rules don’t bind Lateral Sports, and we could be a pretty useful middle man for athletics departments.”

The real bet for Lateral Sports, though, seems to be on a new kind of social connection between would-be fans and the games they could be watching. The connection it hopes to build on is something different than the jersey-wearing hero worship that might bring fans to pro sports.

“Part of our growth will be tapping into that wiki-like loop. If someone is a big Alabama fanatic, and they send us a good link for where to watch a game, we need to put that up,” he said. “People are already doing that work, but it’s on message boards and forums, not one, easy to use, central place.”

Bleymaier said that today the LateralSports.com site has complete listings of where to find games and live statistics for baseball, lacrosse, golf and tennis–the larger spring sports. That list is far from complete, but not bad for two weeks after launch.

The company is currently part of the Stanford design school’s (d.school) Launchpad class, run by Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn.

The class takes new and existing ideas through an accelerated process of prototyping, user testing and iteration–and has developed somewhat of a reputation for attracting interesting ideas.

It was the same Launchpad class that birthed the Pulse news reader less than a year ago.

Although he dodged questions about being the “next Pulse,” Bleymaier said the long-term vision for LateralSports is to scale up and include all college sports from all divisions, and later plugging in high school and pro level play as well. He wants fans to be able to log in and track a player’s career from the high school JV squad through their retirement from pro ball (whatever ball that might be).

I talked with Bleymaier, who looks every inch the all-American boy, on his way out of a session of the Launchpad class. I grilled him on the idea and some of the barriers to scale–all the while dodging every sports metaphor that came to mind.

[ See post to watch video ]

For the iPad, Apps With Their Own Wow Factor

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:01:46 +0000

In the days since the launch of Apple’s iPad Saturday, there has been an explosion of apps to run on it—3,000 and counting. They are mostly free and incorporate new ways of navigating one of the largest screens on a mobile device that relies solely on touch technology.

On this large canvas, people work differently and apps can behave differently depending on which way the device is turned. Apps can (and must) incorporate creative ways of navigating—in addition to the usual multi-touch gestures like flicking, two-finger swiping and pinching. Thus, although it runs most of the 150,000 apps already available for the much smaller iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad is spawning a new type of tablet-specific app.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I’ve been testing some of these iPad apps that give users novel ways to interact with the device. These are designed to take advantage of a larger touch screen by using things like fly-out menus, multi-panel layouts, 3-D images intermixed with text and newspapers that can be read almost as easily as their paper counterparts.

Since most of us haven’t used apps like these or a device like this before, many apps install with brief tutorials on how to navigate them. It’s obvious that the makers of these iPad apps are still tinkering with what works best for a large touch surface. And ads appear in several digital newspaper and magazine apps. Unless otherwise noted, the apps listed below are free.

News

Multi-tasking isn’t yet possible on the iPad, but the NPR app allows people to do certain things simultaneously. While browsing news stories, a player in the bottom portion of the screen lets you listen to programs, interviews or songs. I played Jakob Dylan’s “Women and Country” song while reading an article about NCAA basketball. Content can be saved to a playlist for future listening.

The Marvel Comics app

The Wall Street Journal app’s home page displays a horizontal row of newspapers representing the past seven days’ editions and a “Now” edition, with late-breaking news, all of which can be read when the iPad isn’t online. These editions are designed to use the full screen to display easy-to-read newspaper layouts and videos that play right within the articles. A finger swiped from the top down skips to a different section of the paper, while pinching any screen with two fingers returns to the home page. And you can save articles and sections. The WSJ iPad app also can access saved data from a WSJ.com account.

The app is free to download but requires a subscription for full access, which costs $4 a week or is free for a limited time to existing online or print subscribers.

The New York Times (NYT) app is called Editors’ Choice and looks like a roomier version of the newspaper’s iPhone app. Five icons at the bottom of the screen instantly jump to different sections of the paper, or you can flick a finger across these screens to page to more articles. It doesn’t require a subscription.

The USA Today app brings the Gannett Co. (GCI) paper’s color-coded blue, green, red and purple sections to the iPad. Its popular charts of information (called “Snapshots”) pop out from the bottom left of the screen and include polls that can be voted on using the device. The USA Today app looks less like the print edition of the paper and more like a list of news points with color photos beside each. This list can be scrolled with a simple finger flick up or down.

Magazines

Digital magazines on the iPad seem to be experimenting with different payment methods. Rodale Inc.’s Men’s Health, for example, is a free app and includes previews of magazine issues, but then it charges $5 to download the actual issue. Bonnier Corp.’s Popular Science app costs $5 up-front and includes an issue that must be downloaded within the app.

Popular Science really uses the iPad’s larger surface in creative ways. Instead of just letting you page ahead with each finger flick as if reading a regular magazine, you can read articles by flicking a finger down or across a screen. In some articles I read, images appeared to be floating in the background behind text. Two fingers flicking up from the bottom of the screen show shortcuts for a table of contents and previous magazine issues.

Music

Pandora’s iPad app makes good use of the device’s screen real estate by showing artist information, now-playing details, album art and a list of personalized radio stations all on the same screen. I found myself more likely to read about artists on the iPad than on my smaller iPod touch. But like many Pandora users, I like playing music in the background as I work on other tasks, and this isn’t possible on the iPad because it doesn’t allow third-party apps like Pandora to multi-task.

Entertainment

Scrabble app

The Marvel Comics app displays stunning, large illustrations and moves you across the screen to see them as if the comic is one continuous strip and there’s no division between one screen and the next. A finger swipe moves you ahead in a guided view that jumps you from one character’s dialog cloud to the next in the correct order. This app is a free download and a handful of free comic books come with it, but each additional book costs around $2.

Scrabble for iPad costs $10 and includes options for playing with friends by passing the iPad back and forth, and an additional free app enables connecting an iPhone or iPod touch to the iPad to use these smaller screens as tile racks. You can play against your Facebook friends or the computer, and things like “Best Word” and an option to shuffle tiles make the game a little easier to play for some. Scrabble will even play your iTunes music in the background while you’re dragging tiles onto the board using your finger.

With Real Racing HD, you see a 3-D view of racetracks and steer a car by leaning the iPad in the direction you need to turn (a built-in accelerometer senses where you’re moving the iPad). I played this $10 game while sitting in the back seat of a moving car and got a bit dizzy since the race is so realistic.

Education

A great example of how the iPad can be used for education can be seen in an app titled “The Elements: A Visual Exploration,” developed by Touch Press. This costs $14 and displays the periodic table of elements stretched across the screen. Selecting one element brings it forward and spins a dazzling image of it so you can see all sides of it. A link to the Web pulls in real-time information about that element.

iPad apps like The Elements: A Visual Exploration, above, make good use of the larger touch screen.

Others

Apple’s (AAPL) iBooks and Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle are two terrific e-reader apps that bring digital books to the iPad. There’s a strong argument for using the Kindle app, since books bought through it can be accessed on a variety of platforms in addition to the iPad, all in sync right where you left off reading, while iBooks are currently limited to the iPad. But the books in iBooks are displayed in an arresting way, with animation that resembles real pages turning.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers are Apple’s versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and they cost $10 each. When installed, these programs can convert documents from Microsoft’s (MSFT) formats and let you work on them. They present rich, PC-like features controlled by touch. Pages, also lets you convert the documents back to the original Microsoft format.

TruPhone and Skype will make calls over the Internet using the iPad when you’re online, and in one test, this worked relatively well.

The Houzz Inc. app is a digital look book for interior-decorating ideas that’s updated with current images of decorated houses. It displays large images of decorated rooms across the iPad’s screen, allowing you to search and save certain looks for offline access or sharing with others.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

More iPad Coverage »

NCAA March Madness Brings in More Viewers Online

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:32:30 +0000

The NCAA basketball tournament, with its array of games played at conflicting times during the workday, has long been discussed as an ideal sporting event for online coverage. And based on numbers out today from CBSSports.com, more people are indeed watching games on streaming video this year. On the 2010 tournament’s first day, CBS says, the games drew 3 million unique visitors to on-demand video, about 11 percent more than on the first day in 2009.

The network said people watched 3.4 million hours of live streaming video and audio, a 21 percent increase from last year’s first day. The most-watched game online was the double-overtime Florida vs. BYU game Thursday afternoon.

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CBS Releases Online March Madness Stats

Marisa Taylor — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:44:59 +0000

The NCAA basketball tournament is over, but CBS (CBS) Sports is basking in the glow of its March Madness-related traffic surge.

CBSSports.com reports that its March Madness on Demand video player had about 7.5 million unique visitors by the end of the tournament, a 58 percent increase from 4.8 million users over the same period last year. The first four days of the tournament saw more unique visits–5.6 million–than last year’s total traffic.

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Weekend Update, 3.21.09–March Madness Edition

Beth Callaghan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:10:23 +0000

Technically, the term refers to the frenzied flow of games and the intensity of the contenders for the NCAA Championship crown. But the NCAA doesn’t have a corner on “March Madness”–those descriptors work well in other instances, too. To wit:

BoomTown posted from various spots in Europe this week, yet managed to follow the geek-tastic goodness of Silicon Valley’s own contender, Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, who competed while injured this week on “Dancing With the Stars”–and escaped elimination via the love of viewers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Another founder made the headlines this week–BoomTown noted that Steve Case appeared at a huge pep rally at Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. Case and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis gave their support (and a lucky green tie) to new CEO Tim Armstrong. Elsewhere, Pure Digital, the maker of BoomTown’s favorite gadget–the ever-present Flip digital video camera–sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock, and BoomTown urged Silicon Valley to remember it’s not immune to the recession, to put its nose to the grindstone and to avoid party-hearty inanity.

Guess no one’s taking heed of the warning, though: MediaMemo reports that no one’s getting anything done at work–CBS (CBS) says its March Madness Web traffic is up 57 percent compared to last year. On top of that, television viewership rose various percentages throughout the week. MM wasn’t watching much basketball this week, though–there was plenty to blog about: The New York Times (NYT) cracked down on unauthorized use of its photos; Discovery Communications (DISCA) announced a patent infringement suit against Amazon and its Kindle Reader; Palm (PALM) delivered dismal third quarter results, putting even greater pressure on the success of the Pre; and in a Q&A with BusinessWeek editor Stephen Adler, Steve Ballmer said he’s open to a phone call from Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz whenever she’s ready to talk. Oh, and in case you were wondering what happened at SXSW, MediaMemo got a Google (GOOG) guy to explain it.

Digital Daily’s March Madness started with a liveblog of Apple’s St. Patrick’s Day press event to unveil version 3.0 of its iPhone OS, a chronicle of the myriad features displayed onstage and a live photoblog to back it up. DD noted that sales of the iPod touch and iPhone have outstripped RIM’s (RIMM) combined BlackBerry sales by a factor of… well, by a LOT. Kind of supports the data that say mobile Web use doubled over the last year. Which is good, because Mac sales were no good in February.

In Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed the latest release of Microsoft IE8 (MSFT), its most comprehensive release in many years. His verdict? Mixed, of course. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt talked to readers about the many models of BlackBerry phones and how they differ from one another, the new iPod shuffle and its earphone compatibility and upgrading Vista to Windows 7. In the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret reviewed the Ee Top, Asus’s first foray into the all-in-one PC market.

More next week. Go Woz!

Hackers Target Basketball Fans With March Madness Malware

Marisa Taylor — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:39:49 +0000

Basketball fans, beware.

Hackers are taking advantage of bracket-related Web surfing and initiating some madness of their own, with tactics as sneaky as spreading malicious software through March Madness blog posts.

Online security company Websense discovered two March Madness-related malware scams earlier this week, one in the form of URLs posted in blog comments that took users to a phony anti-virus scanning site, and another as a search engine optimization scam that infected basketball-related terms and pushed them to the top in Google (GOOG).

It’s a clever and common tactic, particularly for an event like the NCAA tournament, which has fans checking sports sites, blogs and mobile devices for updates on their favorite teams. Websense’s chief technology officer, Dan Hubbard, says that hackers try to capitalize on popular events or stories on the Internet, whether it’s a major athletic event such as the Olympics, the recent presidential election, or a celebrity breakup that drives Web traffic. Users need to be wary of links to fake anti-virus scanners that urge installation. “Just because something comes up on your screen and tells you to install it doesn’t mean you have to actually do it,” he says. “That’s a really hard message to get across to the consumers.”

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Cull Web Content With Alerts

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:28:02 +0000

It can be hard to find just what you want in the 24-hour news cycle that constantly churns content out online.

One way to find the information you want is by setting up computer-generated alerts. These electronic notifications are relatively simple to use and offer a range of helpful services, from a virtual heads-up when your name is mentioned online to messages about a product’s price suddenly dropping.

For years, I’ve used Google Alerts as a way of keeping track of myself online. If my name is mentioned in a blog or if this column appears on the Web, such as on the site of a newspaper that syndicates it, a Google Alert sends me an email about it. Google Alerts can work for you to find a variety of things, such as telling you if a video of a favorite band popped up online or that a blogger posted something about last night’s episode of “Mad Men.”

In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails. Google (GOOG) certainly isn’t alone in the alerts arena, as Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (TWX) are also players. This week I tried two small companies that recently joined the mission to help users find the Web content using alerts.

Pinpointing Searches

I tried Alerts.com and Yotify.com, and found worthwhile features in both. While Google Alerts does a good job of finding search terms in news, blogs and videos, Alerts.com and Yotify use forms that are a cinch to fill out and let you pinpoint your searches.

Alerts.com offers to notify users via email, SMS text messages or even voice calls to a cellphone or landline. The site organizes your alerts on a personalized Web page and uses a desktop application called Elertz to tell you when an alert has generated results. I liked this site’s flexibility: It not only gave me different ways to receive notifications, but also enabled a variety of options for time-specific deliveries of alerts.

But Yotify has advantages of its own, including the ability to integrate with FriendFeed and Facebook so friends can offer their recommendations or opinions. It also lets users search for event tickets or items auctioned on eBay (EBAY). And a smart preview panel gives you an idea of the type of results your search will return before you submit the request for an alert.

Viewing Results

For now, Google Alerts and Yotify will send alert notifications only via email, though all three services will let you view your alert results online. All three are free, but SMS alerts sent to a cellphone via Alerts.com may not be, depending on your plan.

All in all, I found there were certain things each service was good at doing. For example, Alerts.com lets me know college football scores when I want them: only after the final score; at the end of each quarter and after the final score; or at the end of each quarter, after the final score and after each time a team scores points. Yotify gave me detailed options in a Craigslist search for furniture, including showing only listings with photos or just those that included the word “sofa” in a title; it will even hunt for a specific price range.

For the person who wants to spend minimal time creating basic alerts, Google Alerts will do the trick. These can be narrowed down to show results that fall into the News, Web, Blogs, Video or Groups categories, or you can perform more-blanketed searches using a Comprehensive category.

Alerts.com offers plenty of simple alerts that require only a bit of scheduling to set up. Each alert appears as a widget that can be expanded, edited or deleted with a simple click, and this page has a clean look with attractive, cohesive graphics.

I didn’t care much for Elertz, the desktop component of Alerts.com, because once installed, it notified me of new Alerts data using an irksome star that glowed red until I checked my notifications. Elertz didn’t work properly on my Windows XP machine until Alerts.com fixed a bug.

But Alerts.com’s price watch and price protection alerts are incredibly useful. Price watch looks to see if an item’s price drops into a lower price range, at which point users are notified. Price protection watches to see if products you bought are now on sale so you can get a refund. I tried both, and I’m hoping I’ll hear soon that a specific pair of Anthropologie boots is on sale.

Yotify uses the idea of virtual scouts that scour the Web for specific information. Scout findings can be condensed or expanded in one click, and results can be filtered for more specific findings or shared with friends via Facebook or FriendFeed.

Scout Work

But some scouts took too much work to set up. When I tried to set up a scout for college football scores, I didn’t see a sports category (Alerts.com had a colorful NCAA icon right on its home page). Instead, I had to choose News, then select ESPN, then NCAAF and finally enter “Penn State” in a key word box for my scout. And after all that, the scout offered results only daily or hourly via email.

I would also prefer if I could better organize my scout lists. As it was, all of my results appeared in one list: The NCAA scout was right above the scout that found Obama mentions on Huffington Post, and below that were results for YouTube’s most-watched videos. Yotify says it will add ways to more neatly arrange data in the next month or so.

On average, Yotify returned more results instantly, such as 10 instant Craigslist sofa results compared with Alerts.com’s two in the first few hours.

Overall, these sites are worth trying so you can find which alert system works best for you and stop wasting time searching the Web the old-fashioned way.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com