TicTap Blog

You can find a number of digital camera reviews, tips and tutorials at Point Click Review.

The articles are scoured from reputable digital camera reviews sources from the net and conveniently placed at the blog. Attributions are included at the end of each post.

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The images says it all. 7.3 billion pages, folks. Is that a mistake by Google? Last time I checked, we have a few million items at TicTap only.

I’ve just launched a new shopping site that you might call a ’simpler TicTap’. It’s called 109things.

It doesn’t work for small screen devices and screen readers. But it has an AJAX interface to ensure that you do less work.

It also has the innovative currency converter, email alerts. But 2 of its coolest features are bound to delight authors and sellers - sales rank and price trend history.

The data is shown graphically using a flash chart, so you can move your mouse over to see each day’s figure.

The about page gives you a quick overview of what 109things offers.

As usual, this service is powered by Amazon Web Services.

The Amazon Unbox service is a video-on-demand service that allows you to buy and rent videos from a selection of more than 10,000 movie and TV titles. You can download them your Tivo via the internet or download them to your computer and watch them there.

The good folks at Amazon.com just released an Amazon Unbox widget so you can catch previews of some of their best titles.

Here it is!

We’ve been running Adsense on TicTap for the past month.

The results have been mediocre, and in fact the ads have been irritating for some users.

Most of our users reach TicTap from search engines. We’ve learnt that they want information, not more ads.

So we’ve decided to remove quite a bit of ads, and replaced them with Amazon banners instead. This way, you can hop over to Amazon.com if TicTap doesn’t give you what you want.

After months of struggling, we’ve shut down the SMS service.

It simply wasn’t profitable, and we had numerous problems with the network operator.

Today, we relaunched TicTap. It has a simpler interface, and we’ve removed features that weren’t popular with users. The cool things you’ve come to expect from TicTap are still there, such as:

1)Cluster search
2)Search results that are even better than Amazon.com’s own search!
3)Currency conversion (for non-US users only)
4)Set price alerts and be informed via email
5)Simple, uncluttered interface
6)Wireless and screen reader access

We’re also experimenting with Google Adsense. If you think it’s causing more pain than gain for you, let us know ok?

Did you know that Amazon.com has a price drop policy?

What they do is credit you the difference if the price of an item you bought in the last 30 days has dropped. You only have to ask for the credit.

But you need to know if the price has dropped right? That’s where TicTap’s Price Alert helps you greatly.

Just do a search for your product in TicTap, go to the product page, scroll down until you get to the TicTap Price Alert feature, then enter your purchase price. We will inform you via email if the price drops below your purchase price.

Of course, Price Alert is useful too if you want to buy something when it’s within your budget.

Once you get the email from us, you can use the Amazon Return and Refunds Form to get your cash back.

One more BIG reason to buy from Amazon.

There is a discussion in the Amazon ECS forum about negative reviews hurting book sales.

That lead me to wonder if people actually read reviews. Or do they look at the stars and read those reviews with many stars or only 1 star? Or even worse, do they make a decision to purchase based on the star ratings only?

Reviews are meant to be read in order to make informed choices. We think that if a person is not willing to read a few pages of reviews, then he’s better off not buying a 200 page book.

At TicTap, we show the title of the review and the review itself. We do not include the star ratings precisely because we do not want people to skip reviews. We hope readers will make up their minds themselves. Often, we have encountered reviews that were given 2 stars that did not seem as negative as the rating would have suggested.

What do you think?

TicTap now shows alternate formats for books, if they exist.

With this feature, it is easy to check if your favourite book (in hardcover) is also available in paperback, audio CD, and even MP3.

Try this Rich Dad, Poor Dad book for an example.

This is a shameless plug for a project I’ve been working on during my free time.

I read a lot of news everyday, and I’ve been wondering why I have to visit 10+ sites to read them.

I could use a RSS reader, but it doesn’t fulfill some of my needs.

So I went to build a tool that’d work *just* for me - News Hawker.

News Hawker is an AJAX news site. A must-have feature was related articles for every article. The search feature only searches articles from those sites. Don’t try using it as a general search engine.

As I mentioned, I built News Hawker to scratch an itch. And if you have feature requests or feedback, let me know.

http://www.newshawker.com

Alex