More Online travel tools to choose from.

Despite the the turbulent economy, a large batch of new Online travel tools have surfaced this past year in a ever crowded market field. These new travel services offerings range from price alerts on a ticket for a specific flight, to an automatic travel journal generator to sites aggregators.
Among a few sample of these new sites, are, Yapta who goes beyond the traditional e-mail alert on a cheap ticket to alert you on a price drop on a specific flight or flights. One of the nice things about Yapta service, is that it offers its users a refund in the form of a travel credit if a ticket price drops after they have made their purchase. It also tracks the availability of reward tickets that its users plan to buy with frequent flyer miles, therefore, taking away the need for its users to regularly check with their airlines to find out when rewards seats are available. For more of Yapta offerings, check their site at Yapta.com.
Another interesting travel site, is TripJane, at TriPJane.com.

For more see, IBD.com

Microsoft to become the default search provider for Verizon.

Despite an intense competition with Google, Microsoft is close to becoming the default search provider on Verizon Wireless cellphones. Under the agreement being finalized, Microsoft would enter into a revenue sharing deal with Verizon for the ads shown next to cellphone Web searches. The deal would also guarantee Microsoft payments to the carrier of between $550 million to $650 million for the next five years.
That may have been the sweetener that helped Microsoft clinch the deal. There are some separate negotiations under way right now which if they come thorough, would put Windows Mobile software in more Verizon devices.

For more, see thestreet.com

VideoSurf offers a new way to search for videos Online.

With today's overwhelming popularity of Web videos and the many sources that make them available, the biggest challenge now is to know exactly what to look for and where to look to find it. For most of the Web video sites like YouTube, their contents are catalogued by the their original publishers using tags and keywords or "contextual metadata" before they are uploaded for the search engines to be able to find them. One of the drawbacks of that practice is the results can be very unpredictable as they depend on the accuracy of the tagging itself. And since there was no way for a human or a machine to double checking the tags and keywords used, the potential for abuse and misleading were very high. Now, a few start-ups have seized on the need for a more reliable way of sifting through millions of videos and pick the right one. One of those start-ups is a California based company called VideoSurf Inc. What distinguish this video-search site from the rest, is its revolutionary concept to conduct search by "seeing" through a video's images for a particular content as well as using metadata. The company claims to have analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments lifted from various Web sources at its site VideoSurf.com. Another unique characteristic of the site, is the way it displays the search results in a film stripe like format differentiating one scene from another. It also allow users to search by showing only people faces' , useful if you are looking for a particular person in a movie or a long video. The site is in its public beta phase which may explains its lack of a hundred percent accuracy for displaying the right video or listing the actual available ones. It plans to be much improved and fully operational early next year.

For more, see WSJ.com

Fees and rates increase for credit-cards

Despite the Federal Reserve cut of its benchmark rate to 1%, a lot of people are still being hit by higher rates and rising credit-cards fees.
To make up for their mounting operational losses, many credit-cards companies are raising rates and fees across a broader range of existing customers. For that matter, even customers who pay their bills on time, are not immune. Here are a few examples of credit-cards issuers recent rates or fees hikes:
- Chase J.P. Morgan plans to raise its rates on credit-card cash advances and over-draft protection as well as default rate triggered by late payments or balances going over the limit. Chase will also start charging a new $10 monthly service fee to cardholders carrying large balances for at least two years, while raising their monthly minimum payments for outstanding balances, to 5% from 2%.
- Citigroup and American Express have for their part been notifying cardholders about impending interest rates raises by 2% to 3% .

For more, see WSJ.com

Bush administration hurries up business regulatory changes.

Following what seems to be a tradition from past administrations in their last weeks in office, the Bush administration this week hurried up to pass several regulatory changes sought after by various business groups.
Among the changes are new rules that open the way for commercial development of oil shale on federal land; a new requirement in the Family and Medical Leave Act that allow employers to ask an employee's health care provider to give the reasons why a medical leave is necessary; the extension of the maximum consecutive hours for truckers to be behind the wheel to 11 hours.
All these new changes are opposed by Democrats lawmakers and some of them are proposing legislation to make any changes by an ongoing administration within its last three months, to be approved by the relevant incoming administration.

For more, see WSJ.com

PC makers are slashing the prices

Faced with rapid declining demand, PC makers are racing to cut prices in anticipation of a gloomy holiday season. Dell for instance is offering 20% to 30% discounts on new notebook models; recently, an Inspiron laptop with a 13.3' screen who previously sold for $984, was on sale for $713 plus a free printer on its Web-site.
Other PC makers like Asustek Computer Inc are selling their products in non traditional places like Toys "R" Us and Target in order to broaden their customers base to include children and women.

For more, see WSJ.com

Google Flu Trends to track the spread of flu.

Last week, Google introduced a new service called Google Flu Trends designed to predict faster and more accurately, flu outbreaks. The service developed in collaboration with the Center for Diseases Control or CDC, analyzes information gathered from flu related search terms. The key idea here is that the more people in a certain geographical region are searching Google for flu related terms such as coughs, fever, headache, runny noise etc, the more likely there will be a flu outbreak in that area. The CDC is helping validate and refine the model and is providing data over a five year period. The new system is said to be capable of predicting flu outbreaks in a particular area up to two weeks faster than traditional methods.

For more, see Bloomberg.com