So, I’ve been testing Digital Folio, a new, free software product to be announced next week. It’s a browser add-on that lets you save and view potential product choices in a single place, and quickly see how their prices compare among some major online retailers.

You just drag links to products that interest you into a sidebar right alongside your Web browser. This module stays with you regardless of what website you’re viewing, and its contents can be shared with friends.

Best of all, for certain kinds of products from certain merchants, the sidebar will almost instantly show price comparisons for the same item from other online stores—even if you aren’t viewing the other stores’ websites. If you decide to buy an item, you just click on its link in the sidebar, and you’ll be taken to the retailer’s site, where you can place your order as you normally would.

Digital Folio is labeled as a beta, or test, version. But, in my tests, I found that, despite some limitations and rough edges, it’s a powerful piece of software that I believe could save shoppers both time and money.

Its maker, a small startup from Denver of the same name, has been showing and testing Digital Folio for awhile, but finally feels it’s ready for wide use. You can try it now at digitalfolio.com. The company makes money by getting a small cut of purchases made by Digital Folio users at partner online merchants.

Before getting into the details, it’s important to lay out three key limitations of Digital Folio today. First, while it can save potential choices for any kind of product from any site, Digital Folio only generates automatic price comparisons when you save product listings from its five online retail partners, which it calls “Smart Retailers.” These are Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and Sears.

Second, even at the partner retail sites, Digital Folio’s price comparison feature works for only 13 categories of items, all of them electronic products or appliances. These include cameras, computers, TVs, printers, refrigerators, dishwashers and microwaves. Oddly, two of the hottest such product categories—smartphones and tablets—aren’t included now in the price-comparison feature, but the company is planning to add more products.

Third, it only works with the two most popular Web browsers: Internet Explorer on Windows and Firefox on either Windows or Macintosh. And you’ll need relatively recent versions of the browsers and the computers’ operating systems. I tested it using the latest versions of the two browsers on the latest versions of Windows and the Mac OS.

Mobile versions are planned in the coming months for Windows Phones and Apple mobile devices, with an Android version coming later.

There are other comparison-shopping products, but none that work like this.

Digital Folio’s sidebar has two main sections, marked by tabs at the top. One called My Folios stores your lists of possible purchases. These can be divided into sections, or folios, for different products. For instance, in my tests, I set up folios for cameras, laptops and TVs. Each folio can also have sections, like laptops with screens in a certain size range.

The second tab is called Compare, and it provides the varying prices at the five partner merchants, though these prices don’t yet include shipping and handling costs.

Digital Folio shows you the best price among its partner stores for any given item.

Here’s an example of how it worked for me in my tests. While shopping for a pocket-size digital camera, I noticed on Amazon a certain Canon Powershot model. So I dragged its link into the Digital Folio sidebar. It was $129 on Amazon, but Digital Folio immediately advised me that Sears had it for about $113, and Wal-Mart for $119. It also listed higher prices at other of its partner merchants.

An even more interesting thing happens when you go to a retailer’s page that lists many items in a category, say a page at Amazon that lists TVs. The Compare tab starts pulsating and, in seconds, it generates a list of all the items on the page, along with prices at the other partner merchants.

In my tests, this allowed me to see that a certain Samsung model was cheapest at Amazon, but a Vizio model that also caught my eye was a lot less at Wal-Mart.

Unlike items you’ve deliberately dragged into Digital Folio, these instant comparisons at list pages don’t stay in the sidebar. They disappear when you navigate away from the page. But they’re amazingly dynamic. For instance, if you narrow down the selection on the list page by, say, brand, size or price, the Digital Folio list with price comparison changes along with it.

So what are those rough edges I was talking about? Well, I found setup to be clumsy on Internet Explorer, requiring multiple steps. I also much preferred using the product on Firefox, because, when you click on an item in the sidebar to revisit its original page, that page opens in a tab. By contrast, in Internet Explorer, it opens a new window and has to slowly reload the Digital Folio sidebar.

Also, you can’t drag an item directly into a folio in the sidebar. Instead, you have to wade through a dialog box to choose the folio where it should reside. And you can’t automatically, or rapidly, set up a new folio for a new category of item you find on a site; you have to first manually establish a new folio.

The product also doesn’t automatically refresh itself on one computer, if you’ve made changes to your folios on another. And it crashed Firefox repeatedly on one of my test Macs, though not on another.

Still, despite its early limits and design drawbacks, I believe Digital Folio is a good start toward making complicated online buying decisions simpler.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:05:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1552 It’s official, the holiday shopping season has begun and it’s time to get serious about gift lists. This week, I took a closer look at some online services that could help you—or those shopping for you—find and buy the right gifts.

While there are many services around, I’ll just touch on a handful of them, including some that take advantage of social networking and group buying.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List. Starting Wednesday, this feature lets people add items to a saved wish list by simply check-marking an on-screen box in shopping search results. Shopping search results are displayed by clicking the Shopping tab in Bing search results or by selecting Shopping on Bing.com and going from there. Once an item’s box has been checked, a small, in-browser visual of all items added to the wish list is displayed in the lower left corner of the browser window. Lists are saved between sessions, so you can close your browser and open it another time and work with the same saved list.

In addition to collecting a list of wished-for items, the Bing Shopping List lets people share those lists with their Facebook friends, giving them a chance to see and buy items from someone else’s wish list. Or people can use Bing Shopping Lists to select just a couple items, share them with the Facebook community, and ask for friends’ opinions about which product is better. Users may get feedback from friends they wouldn’t otherwise know were experts in certain areas.

A Microsoft spokesman said the impetus for this came from trends the company saw taking place on the Web—specifically, people using Facebook to solicit opinions about what to buy and to tell others what they want.

A downside to the Bing Shopping Lists is that they don’t yet offer a way to share items with only certain people, which might mean sharing a private gift with all your Facebook friends. And you can’t yet create multiple lists. A way to share items with only certain people and options for create multiple lists are on the product road map for next year, according to a company spokesman.

Speaking of social networks, Sears is taking a unique approach to the group-buying concept with Wish Together, a program launched in mid-November. With Wish Together, Sears puts at least one new item on its Facebook page (facebook.com/sears) each day. If enough people click on the item’s “Like” button before a certain time, a steep discount on the item becomes unlocked, like a diamond necklace that originally cost $285 will cost $100 at its Wish Price if it gets the required 200 “likes.” People can see the number of necessary “Likes” and time remaining (down to the second) displayed on the item’s Wish Together Facebook page.Once a Wish Together deal is unlocked, it’s available to everyone—not just those who originally “liked” it. But those who “liked” the item get an email notification from Facebook as soon as the deal is unlocked so they can buy it while supplies last.

Bing is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List

The tried and true Amazon Wish List, which has been around for 11 years, can be used to add wish-list items from any website, not just Amazon.com. This works using the site’s Universal Wish List. It can be set up by dragging an “Add to Wishlist” bookmark (http://3.ly/G82n) into your browser’s bookmark bar. Then you just click the bookmark whenever you’re on the specific Web page of an item you’d like to add to your Wish List. A small pop-up menu lets users designate a specific Amazon Wish List or add their own notes about an item. Universal Wish List browser extensions, or shortcuts built right into a Web browser, are available for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Some online retailers like ModCloth.com, save you a step by offering “Add To Amazon Wish List” buttons right on their websites. Amazon Wish Lists can be shared to friends through Facebook or Twitter using a link on the list’s webpage.

There are many Facebook apps for creating wish lists and sharing them with Facebook friends. I tried a couple apps, including a basic one called Fulfill My Wishlist (http://3.ly/3u3d). It let me search a shopping portal (that uses Google Shopping in the background) for items to add to my wish list, or let me copy and paste a link for any item to appear in my list. A notes section for each item allows room for describing details like preferred size or style. This list can be emailed to friends or viewed through the Facebook app by friends who use it.

If you’re planning to go in on buying a pricey gift with several other people, a group-gift option like eBay’s might be the right tool for you. EBay introduced its Group Gifts feature (groupgifts.ebay.com) in November. It lets several people pool their money to buy one item without one person chasing down those who owe money.

One person chooses an eBay item and selects the Buy It Now option (auction prices aren’t applicable when you need to tell the group how much they’ll definitely owe). The initiator tells the group how much he or she will pay and then shares the item with others via email, Facebook or Twitter, in hopes of getting contributions. A PayPal account is required for at least one person in the group to ultimately pay for the item, but gift contributors can chip in using credit or debit cards, and they can add their own notes to a gift.

Thanks to technology, there are many ways to direct your friends and family toward exactly what you want for the holidays, taking much of the guesswork out of giving and receiving this year.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100414/abc-sees-success-in-ipad-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20100414/abc-sees-success-in-ipad-app/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:00:24 +0000 Ethan Smith http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=23906 ABC is the only television network so far to offer an application for watching its shows free–with ads–on Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) new iPad tablet computer, and it says its business model is proving fruitful.

The network said that in the 10 days since the iPad’s debut, its TV-show watching app has been downloaded 205,000 times, giving the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) unit a presence on nearly half the 450,000 devices that Apple says it has sold. Moreover, users have watched at least part of 650,000 television episodes using the app, generating “several million” ad impressions, according to an ABC spokesman, although the precise number is still being calculated.

Disney-ABC television President Anne Sweeney says the network is pleased with the initial results.

Advertisers on the iPad so far include Clorox (CLX), Lexus, AT&T (T), Heineken, Sears (SHLD) and Target (TGT). For now, Disney is delivering the same kind of 30-second spots seen on television.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100414/abc-sees-success-in-ipad-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/ http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:07:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=24558 Add another name to the list of opponents of the Google Book Search Settlement: Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights. In testimony before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Thursday, Peters tarred the deal as “fundamentally at odds with the law” and villainized Google, saying the company is making a “mockery” of the copyright protections in the U.S. Constitution.

“The settlement would alter the landscape of copyright law, for millions and millions of rights holders of out-of-print books,” Peters said. “It would flip copyright on its head by allowing Google to engage in extensive new uses without the consent of the copyright owner–in my view, making a mockery of Article One of the Constitution, that anticipates that authors shall be granted exclusive rights.”

The settlement, as Peters sees it, will allow Google (GOOG) to profit from the work of others without prior consent. “It could affect the exclusive rights of millions of copyright owners, in the United States and abroad, with respect to their abilities to control new products and new markets, for years and years to come,” she said. “In essence, the proposed settlement would give Google a license to infringe first and ask questions later, under the imprimatur of the court.”

One of the more blistering attacks on the deal to date, especially given its source: The nation’s top copyright official. But Google nevertheless dismissed it as unfounded: “We think the settlement is legal, and we think it is structured well within the guidelines of what you can do in a class action settlement,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said during the hearing. “It certainly is not usurping Congress’s authority to do whatever it wants.”

A typically arrogant response from Google, though the company does appear to be conceding a bit of ground in the face of widening opposition to the deal. Responding to Peters’s criticism and claims that the deal will essentially grant Google a de facto monopoly over out-of-print books, Drummond said the company plans to make those works available to any book retailer.

“For the out-of-print books being made available through the Google Books settlement, we will let any book retailer sell access to those books,” Drummond told the committee. “Google will host the digital books online, and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore will be able to sell access to users on any internet-connected device they choose.”

Sadly for Google, that conciliatory gesture did not go over well with critics of the deal. “The Internet has never been about intermediation,” Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said of the company’s offer. “We are happy to work with rights holders without anyone else’s help.”

The Internet Archive’s Peter Brantley was even more disdainful. “I fail to see what’s really new here,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like Macy’s telling Sears, ‘You can sell Macy’s clothing.’ There’s no fundamental change of the conditions under which Macy’s acquires those clothes. Google remains in control.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081203/cyber-monday-web-traffic-up-what-does-that-mean/ http://allthingsd.com/20081203/cyber-monday-web-traffic-up-what-does-that-mean/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:34:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1605 Web traffic to the top online shopping sites jumped 10 percent on Cyber Monday compared to last year, says Nielsen Online.

So what does that mean? Nothing, really: Assuming the data are accurate, we still don’t know what people actually spent, and what they spent it on. We’re likely get a few more pieces of the puzzle today, when/if comScore (SCOR) comes out with its online commerce numbers. But the most important data are still locked away in retailers’ databases, and that stuff won’t be public for some time.

[UPDATE: ComScore says sales were up 15 percent.]

One way to tell how retailers really did: Ask somebody who sells Web advertising. An ad exec for an online publisher I spoke to yesterday told me that December sales had “stopped cold” because his clients wanted to see what their Black Friday/Cyber Monday numbers looked like before committing any more ad dollars this year.

He’s hoping for good news. As of last night, he hadn’t heard a peep.

In the meantime, here’s an array of data points from Nielsen and rival Web measurement firm Hitwise. Here are Nielsen’s top online retail destinations, ranked by unique visitors. Note the big increases at Amazon (AMZN), Best Buy (BBY) and Sears (SHLD). Why is Netflix (NFLX) considered an online retailer? Got me. (Click to enlarge)

And here’s Hitwise’s summary of Cyber Monday; note that its take on traffic seems to differ from Nielsen’s when it comes to overall visits:

• Among the top 500 Retail Web sites, the percentage of U.S. visits was down 1% on Cyber Monday 2008 compared with 2007.
• U.S. visits to Brick and Mortar store Web sites (100 total) were down 4% on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to Online-only Web sites (100 total) were up 5% on on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to the Comparison Shopping Web sites were down 21% on Cyber Monday.
• U.S. visits to the Catalog Web sites were down 4% on Cyber Monday.
• The top visited Retail Web site on Cyber Monday 2008 was Amazon.com, receiving 10.77% of U.S. visits among the top 500 Retail Web sites. Walmart.com was the second most visited with 8.55% of visits, followed by Target.com with 4.56%. BestBuy.com was the fourth most visited with 3.81%, and Sears.com was fifth with 2.74% of visits.
• Amazon.com’s traffic increased 21% on Cyber Monday 2008 vs. 2007. Walmart.com’s traffic increased 6%.

[Image Credit: Respres]

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