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Frucall for Comparison Shopping

Frucall (www.frucall.com) is a free service that lets you comparison shop by calling a toll-free number (1 888 DO FRUCALL, try it!) and entering a product’s barcode. You are then given the lowest prices online, at which point you can bookmark a particular price and vendor if you have a Frucall login, and access the information later when you get home, or get connected to the vendor right there and then. You can still use the service if you don’t register, though.

Frucall recently added Frucall Text and Frucall mWeb which…well, you can guess what they do. I’ve used this service several times and find it particularly useful when I’m out at a store wondering whether I’ve found a good deal. More often than not Frucall will find a lower price online. They’ll even give you an estimated total including shipping and handling if you provide a zip code.

Gridskipper, the Urban Travel Guide

Gridskipper is a fantastic resource for finding not-so-touristy things to do in many cities, both in the US and abroad.  Each “post” has a city tag and often another tag such as “shopping” or “nightlife”.

I used this on a recent trip to London and found a neat coffee place called Flat White, which is an espresso shot in a small cup of milk.  Also worth checking out is Red Veg, a vegetarian restaurant in Soho.  They have breaded sweet corn.

Del.icio.us for sharing your bookmarks

I use del.icio.us to organize and share my bookmarks. Del.icio.us allows users to share bookmarks by giving out their personal del.icio.us address. In case there’s a bookmark you don’t want others to see, you can mark it as private.

The key to del.icio.us is their tagging feature, which lets you group your bookmarks by topic. For example, I have a photography tag. You can group tags into bundles, which makes for even better organization. Another neat feature is the “hotlist” which displays links that are…hot.

Adding a bookmark to del.icio.us is a matter of clicking on the “tag” button that you can install into your browser’s toolbar when you sign up for del.icio.us (no spam!)

BillMonk keeps track of IOUs

BillMonk is a free service that keeps track of shared bills and money lent or borrowed. Let’s say you go out for dinner with a couple of friends and decide you will pay the whole bill and have your friends pay you for their portion later. Log in to BillMonk, enter your friends’ email addresses (no spam!) and the amounts they owe you. They’ll get an email with the details, and have the option to settle up in person or by using Obopay, a service that lets you send money using your cell phone, similar to Paypal.

I have not tried settling up using Obopay yet, but have been using the rest of BillMonk’s features for about four months now. It’s a simple way to keep track of who owes what without having to do any hounding. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that settling up at the end of a meal is no fun.

Some other neat BillMonk features:

• Itemized bills
• Recurring bills (rent, for example)
• Ability to add comments and tag bills
• “Library” feature which provides a way to keep track of things you’ve lent and borrowed
• Add bills by phone

Google Gears for reading and working offline

Google has released a beta version of Google Gears, which allows users to work offline with content that previously required an internet connection. As of now, Google Reader and Remember The Milk have implemented this feature. All you have to do is install Google Gears (note this is beta software) and access a Gears-enabled site. Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to read your Reader posts and update Remember The Milk while you’re offline. When you reconnect and access either of these sites your data will be synchronized.

The real power of Google Gears will be apparent when they implement it into Google Docs. One of the major limitations of Google Docs is the internet connectivity requirement. Who isn’t online all the time anyway?

Links:

• Tutorial on setting up Google Gears and Reader, with screenshots
• Official Google Blog post
• My post about Remember The Milk
• Lifehacker’s  post
  

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is an online to-do list that does more than your post-it note will ever dream of doing. Here are a few features that I use regularly:

• Add to-do items to lists (one or multiple) or tag an item to be added to a particular list automatically.
• Send to-do items to other users.
• Add an address to a to-do item and see all of your items on a map. For example, if you have to pick up groceries, go to the mall, and get an oil change, you can map these out to figure out the best route.
• Sort tasks by list, due date, location.
• Get a text message notification of today’s to-do items.

There are a few advanced features that I’ll write separate posts about:

• Set up Remember the Milk to work with Getting Things Done. (Here’s the tutorial I used to get started.)
• Have YouMail send voicemail notification to Remember The Milk as to-do items. (Check out my previous post on YouMail.)
• Forward certain email to Remember The Milk as to-do items.
• IM tasks to yourself, or use Jott to leave yourself voice messages which are transcribed as to-dos.
• Add tasks using the Remember The Milk Widget for Mac.
• See your to-dos on iCal, Google Calendar, and others.

Now use your last post-it and write “Check out Remember The Milk”. Poor post-it.

YouMail voicemail service

YouMail is a free service that replaces your mobile phone carrier’s voicemail service, and adds some great features.

• Custom greetings for individual callers. For example, when Mum calls YouMail greets her with my recording “Hello Mum, leave us a message”. There’s a default greeting too, for everyone who doesn’t have a custom greeting.
• Check messages on the web, or have them emailed to you as an attached audio file.
• Create a list of numbers you wish to block.
• Save messages indefinitely (most carriers delete messages after a while).
• Works with your phone’s voicemail notification.

The YouMail website guides you through the setup process, which takes about five minutes, and they provide you with instructions on how to switch back to your carrier’s voicemail service.

I’ve been using the service for about a year and really like being able to check my voicemail on the web, which is very convenient since I’m on the computer most of the time, plus I save my minutes.