We wish all of our readers a great Thanksgiving. I hope we can all reflect on how much we have to be grateful for even in these difficult times.

Tradition holds that we should all flock to the stores on Friday and shop online Monday. Some crafty retailers are even unlocking their doors on Thanksgiving, hoping to draw the most devoted of shoppers. For the sake of our economy, I hope the predictions for retail sales are overly pessimistic.

Now, here’s a tip from the Tightwads: You don’t have to deal with the crowds and lines to get a great deal. There will be hot bargains aplenty everywhere online. To help you get started, here’s a group of links to our time tested affiliates.  Over the years, we’ve bought from this group and have found them to be a cut above in terms of honesty, reliability and service. You’ll also be helping to support Tightwad Technica when you shop using one of our links.

Amazon.com

Black Friday Turns Pink at TigerDirect.com

Best Deals @ Geeks.com

Cyber Monday Price Drops from Buy.com! Save up to 70% while supplies last! Exp 12/1/09

Holiday Deals at B&H

Black Friday Specials - Buy Factory Refurbished and Save Up To 80% @ RefurbDepot.com

Is it just another pricing engine or coupon site? Not exactly. It looks like Ask.com is trying to aggregate bargains from a number of other sites with the addition of deals uncovered by its own staff. While it’s not strictly a tech products site, money not spent elsewhere buys more gadgets., so its worth a look.

Ask Deals is expected to launch Tuesday, blending links to coupons from a plethora of online coupon aggregation sites alongside search results for certain types of queries, such as “cheap jeans” or “plasma TV deals,” said Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks. There will also be a link to a Deals page off the Ask.com home page, which will have a “deal of the day” type promotion as well as links to other opportunities for savings.

The company had noticed that searches for coupons on Ask increased 50 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, likely a result of the state of the economy, Garell said. But it thought it could do a better job organizing and presenting those coupons than the dozens of coupon sites have done to this point, with the added benefit of having additional information about the product come up within search results.

Ask’s index is drawing from about 40 coupon sites, crawling some sites and partnering with others to bring the coupons to the service. It is also overseeing the coupon aggregation with a team of employees tasked with sorting out coupon quality. (Cnet)

Slide deck here

We figure our readers would find this discussion interesting as some hard numbers are provided and the architecture is given as well.

This talk was provided by the President of HotPads. Some interesting background. HotPads is a real estate listing service with a bent toward rentals. They receive 800k uniques, 4.5m page views. So they are not even in the ‘large site’ category. But I would consider it healthy for their particular niche.

What is particularly interesting is that HotPads moved off a managed service provider to AWS. Did they save money in doing so? Only marginally. But what is defined in the slides and talk is that they gained a greater level of flexibility by moving to AWS.

The trend I am starting to see coming out of people who use AWS are the following —

• If your demand curves are highly variable something like AWS can be a great boon to your cost management. CPU instances can be tuned to the demand curve.
• Storage-transport costs are competive to local storage if the data sets have to be a shared resource.
• Cloudfront can save $$ for highly transitory pieces like images. (Right from the presentation)
• If you have a low usage, steady state requirement one might find hosting their own servers and paying a premium for higher bandwidth a cheaper solution.

A good deal of data to scrape from this.

Linky.
HT: InfoQ

As in ‘Vista Capable’ that is. Case anybody remembers there is a court case still rumbling in the background over what those stickers meant. Well not this time around. The lack of them could also cause MS problems should the lawyers take note of that fact —

Meanwhile, Microsoft has confirmed to The Register that it has no plans to slap Vista Capable-style stickers on machines worthy of an upgrade from the unloved OS to Windows 7.

The company has ditched those marketing tactics after a heap of bad publicity and a lengthy lawsuit that continues to limp along in the US.

But as the infomercial says, there’s more! –

A leaked memo has revealed that Best Buy will begin pre-selling Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system on 26 June in the US.

The retailer confirmed late last week the date people can start buying Vista-based computers and subsequently qualify for a free upgrade to Windows 7, when it lands in October.

Engadget has published a copy of the memo here. It outlines prices for upgrade versions of Windows 7 Home Premium ($49) and Windows 7 Professional ($99), both of which will be available via the Best Buy website.

It looks as though the prices listed may in fact be promotional offers, as according to the memo the program will only run for 16 days.

The Best Buy memo thing is rumor. Treat it as such. It is interesting that the promo will only run 16 days. Last time Redmond did this promo deals ran for at least a month. What has my curiosity up is whether you only get the promo if you use Best Buy’s inhouse tech staff for the install.

Linky.

The digi cam market had been on quite a roll until a few goofballs in the world’s financial markets ran the business cycle in the ground. The very high volume point and shoot has been having a very tough year. Now the high end that was previously thought to be recession proof is also facing slow sales:

Worldwide camera shipments are expected to drop 6 percent to 129 million units in 2009. Single-lens reflex (SLR) shipments won’t be hit as hard, but still will drop 5 percent to 9.2 million units, according to an IDC forecast released Monday.

“Countries will emerge from the global recession in mid-2010, starting with the U.S. However, unemployment will lag behind the recovery, dampening consumer spending for the next two years, particularly on big-ticket items like digital SLRs,” analyst Christopher Chute said in a statement. (Cnet)

That means, fellow tightwads, that prices are going to drop or at least go sideways for a while. If you’ve been thinking about a replace or an upgrade camera, it may be time to start shopping.

We have touched this subject once before in regards to the Amazon system and the dust up over Belkin. We have also noted that this being done by others in the Amazon system. Well it is not an exclusive to the Amazon ratings itself.

It appears that Royal Carribean the cruise line is also in the play. The are offering consideration to posters who offer positive feedback on various cruise blogs. The RC effort is not a lone VP trying to bouy business. Its a concerted effort by a selected group of less than 100 individuals to influence the overall PR appearance of RC image. That itself is not evil. Companies do this all they time via public events, press releases and sport sponsorships. What is pernicious is the lack of disclosure on the part of the posters.

The companies (Amazon, BizRate, etc) need to actively take hold of this issue. If they do not it will destroy the validity of the concept and damage their own brands as a consequence.

More at Consumerist.

The biggest problem for the devoted tightwad shopping for tech products is knowing that most tech products get cheaper over time. The other problem is most fo the real bargains are only found online and you never really know how good a product or vendor is until you put your hard earned cash on the line to give them a try.

New shopping engine Gazaro does more than just data mine a short list of vendors for products when you do a search. It also aggregates customer reviews and pricing trends to give you a “deal score” on the product search results. Will it sift through more of the noise to truly find the best deal? It’s new and needs forther review over time to be sure. At the very least it’s worth adding to your list of shopping resources. You’ll find we’ve added  a comveient link on our left sidebar where we have a growing group of pricing resources.

A report over at ChannelWeb indicates that Apple retail sales are slipping. Not just Mac but consumer line items like the iPod –

Blame it on the absence of Steve Jobs, or blame it on the economy: No matter how you slice it, retail sales of Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) iPods and Macs are taking a hit.

After crunching the numbers, researchers at NPD Group found that sales for Mac units dropped 6 percent in January, compared to the same period a year ago, with an 11 percent decline in product revenue.

NPD vice president and industry analyst Stephen Baker believes Apple’s core problem is not about Jobs, but rather the thorn in every company’s side: the crumbling economy.

“To some extent, Apple has been struggling in the last few months — there were some issues with overall pricing problems during the holidays and afterward,” he said.

Those issues, Baker said, have nothing to do with Apple product quality, but the willingness of consumers to open their wallets.

“Right now buyers are not looking for price and value,” he said. “Something may not be the best product out there, but if it has a low price point they will be willing to spend.”

Linky

Huh? Well its a long story but bottom line is Geeks.com (a TT sponsor) has ‘hired’ the FBI to monitor its website for security reasons. In some ways, this gives Geeks an unfair advantage against competitors. More after the jump –

Geeks.com, a large online seller of computer hardware and software, has agreed to allow federal regulators to monitor its website security for 10 years to settle charges it violated federal laws requiring it to adequately safeguard sensitive customer data.

The agreement, which also applies to sister site computergeeks.com, settles a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission that accused the online retailers of misleading its customers about the safety of their personal information. Names, addresses, credit card numbers, and other data were routinely sent unencrypted to authorization services, making them ripe for identity thieves, the complaint alleged.

What’s more, the sites carried privacy policies that claimed the company employed “secure technology, privacy protection controls and restrictions on employee access in order to safeguard your personal information.”

So how does the FBI having security control over Geeks website an advantage? Real simple. Right on the front page you do something like this —

You imediately bring to you the mantle of authority that the FBI as an arm of the federal government garners. You turn sour milk into cheese. Lest you scoff at the idea keep in mind that the tobacco companies did exactly that. They turned a large court loss into a PR campaign. Several other companies have done the same thing. There is precedent for this kind of flipping.

Overall I think the whole thing is a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong, Geeks should have been required to face the music. But I don’t think the FBI really wants to be in the website security business. Nor do I think the etailers want to be shills for the FBI. It presents a slippery slope that we may regret going down sometime in the future.

Linky.

Just a reminder that in many cases that online retailer leaves cookies on your web client. Which when you return indicates you as a other than new customer. These days customer retention can and is being used against you. You come back and you may not see as many sweet deals as before.

You can get around that by flushing your cookies before you hit a site. That way the system thinks you are a new entrant and might give you a better deal than otherwise. By the time you get to checkout and enter your login and password it is generally too late.

Linky.