Keeca.com Blog

Office Moved

2009-06-10T00:09:00.000-07:00

We had moved ... well ... just a little bit ... to the building next door. Lower rental fee per square foot. Pretty sweet.

Recommended Coupon Sites

2008-04-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

Months ago, Judy's Book, an online shopping site for women was reported with plan to scale down. That news pretty much cast shadow on one of our sister site which also caters toward female shoppers online. Amidst the housing crunch down turn these days, some people feel being frugal is now more important than before and predict discount shopping section should benefit from the increasing awareness of online coupon usage. I hope so too. In the discount shopping section, I personally think two sites, Boddit and RetailMeNot, are two coupon sites that widely covers online offers. I'm not sure why them two looks so alike in presentation. Maybe they're related. If you know, feel free to comment and share with our readers. For our sister site - HerCoupon.com - designed primarily for women, I encourage you to pay a visit and give thoughts to share as well.

RSS Marketing Podcast Mentioned Keeca

2007-06-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

This RSS marketing podcast is probably the first one that mentioned us. Specifically, the host said our coupon RSS feed is ... brilliant. You can download and listen to 2007-06-21.mp3. Keeca was mentioned at around 9 minutes and 30 seconds from the beginning of this podcast. By the way, our site 'Keeca' should be pronounced as in 'key-ka', not 'key-sa', aiming to help online merchants keep their customers coming back often.

Keeca.com Hits 1000 Merchants Mark

2007-06-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

We finally crossed the 1000 mark in terms of number of online merchants we cover under Keeca.com deal search today. Yes, please feel free to refer our service as online deal search.

Shopper-Driven Interests

2007-05-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

If you like the concept of Reddit, Digg, or del.icio.us, we have something similar to offer - user-driven popularity - an extension to our recently launched most popular click-to-merchant deals.

All deals were not issued equally attractive. One may think a deal is attractive, the other may have different opinion on the same deal. We'd like to leverage statistics generated from users of our site who are all potential shoppers, and name such level of attractiveness as 'interests.' 'Interests' is all about shopper-driven popularity within a limited time frame no longer than its lifetime during which a deal is valid (non-expired). To calculate and derive 'interests', every deal is automatically and implicitly voted on by anonymous shoppers when they click on a deal listing (promotional code, coupon, sale, or product deal listing) and go onto merchant site.

As a result, on a merchant's deal page, we start to present listings in the order of 'interests' as voted implicitly by shoppers. The implicitness should void the concern of user-driven content equals courtroom danger, and respect the anonymous status of all voters. I personally feel the approach is really useful to present merchant with handful offers not easily fit into one short page so readers can quickly spot great deals.

Keeca Pick, You Save!

2007-05-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

We ditched our old site tagline and launched our new site slogan of,

"You find. You Shop. You Save"

in late April amids some minor homepage rearrangement. To assure you'll save money online, we've decided to better utilize Keeca.com premium homepage placement to present our pick of great shopping deals. In stead of rotating through several computer-picked hot deals a day, we'll take up the efforts of finding you a couple REALLY good deals of our editorial pick with 125x125 images by putting real human brains behind our picks. We name it KEECA'S PICK. KEECA'S PICK is now on Keeca.com homepage.

Similar to Woot!, each Keeca's pick will be an awesome deal. Unlike Woot, we'd focus on selecting generic online coupons and web sales as Keeca's Picks for the most part, rather than specific products unless the product is a super hot deal in our view. If you're a Woot-addicted already, we don't blame you. Come and check out the face-off between Woot and Yugster.

Merchant List

2007-05-16T00:47:00.000-07:00

The lack of a comprehensive view of what online merchants are included in Keeca.com Deal Search has ended. Last night, I put up a page on which all merchants that are affiliated with Keeca.com are now listed. To date, we have affiliated with more than 950 online merchants and growing.

If you run an online store and would like us to cover your store, consider advertise with us.

Deal News RSS

2007-05-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

I wanted to let you know about the recent enhancement we've
made to the Keeca website to support RSS 2.0. Our RSS feeds are powered by FeedBurner. During the past week we've added Keeca Deal News RSS subscription points of the following categories:

Beauty
Clothing & Accessories
Computer
Gourmet Food
Health
Home & Garden
Jewelry
Office
Software
Sports & Outdoor
Toys & Games

Wherever you see an orange RSS icon, click on it will lead you to a page that guide you to sign up the feed using your preferred RSS News Readers software. Subscribe to our RSS is a good way to stay on top of the deal news. You may do so using your feed client such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or as part of your iGoogle.

Homepage Rearranged

2007-04-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

Starting next month (2007 May), we will have our homepage be rearranged to become 2 columns only, down from three. The change will make our homepage more focus on showing deals manually flagged 'hot' by our shopping specialists, and also give better placement to user-driven popular deals. The rearrangement includes a sub-section named 'Special Savings' in the right columkn with a bunch of links to our special selected saving services:

Classified
Free Software
Grocery Printable Coupons
Insurance
Other Printable Coupons
Rebates (MIR)
Travel.

We hope out efforts will further support our recently polished site slogan:

You find. You shop. You save.

We are still offering web search, but we'll focus on discount shopping services and will leave searching everything else to Google, our Keeca web search provider.

Most Popular Click-to-Merchant Deals

2007-04-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a good argument about deal popularity ...

Popular deals should be specifically defined as deals that get the most interests from shoppers and also get the most attention from those shoppers toward redemption. Under such argument, deals that get the most eye balls (impressions) along do not fully qualify them as popular deals, but just deals that may be popular, just may be. A truly popular deal should be a deal that is not only viewed by readers but also be clicked upon a lot, which indicates potential buyers are not only interested in reading about the deal, but also have intention to take further steps toward going on to the merchant site. Such definition of popularity is user-driven.

Digg has a Tech Deal topic ordered by digged time that they call it 'upcoming stories' in the Tech Deals topic and I found it useful. Their popularity are based on number of 'diggs' posted by registered users on Digg.com. The stories might be fresh, but the deals the stories cover might be out-of-date already when you get to them.

Unlike Digg that bases the popularity on number of Diggs, popular coupon deals and product deals listed on Keeca.com homepage are based on real statistics collected from anonymous visitors' go-to-merchant actions in a given time frame. Those deals that we know are expired already are automatically excluded from the popular listings on Keeca.com in order to avoid promoting deals that are dead already. Multiple go-to-merchant actions/clicks originated from the same browser are only considered one and only one votes for the deal, which make the statistics more objective.

Deal Page Redesigned

2007-04-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

After closely reviewing deal search results page on keeca.com and the those pages dedicated for affiliated merchants on which merchants' deals are listed, those pages where deals are listed have been 'redesigned.' The change includes moving away from 3-columns presentation to adopt 2-columns layout as you can see at Buy.com Deal Page, adding more deal images if available, and list the deals to the left and moved them up a bit toward the top of the pages.

I hope to continue improving usability of the site by using 3-rd party tool that visualizes our site visitors, and further enhance our in-house stats tracking and deal tracking mechanism to improve our services that let you find, shop and save.

Savings in Red

2007-03-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

~~$699~~
- $49.01

$649.99

Recently, we made a minor improvement on product presentation on deal search result pages. On showing deal search result listings, you'll notice some deals (if not all) deals have extra pricing information in red denotes amount of saving and your price after discount applied. Such saving information is shown right under the deal image so you know what the saving can be buying from the deal we recommend.

Similar saving information can also be found else where on keeca.com. For example, on deal news headline pages.

Deal Headlines by Categories and HOT Ones!

2007-02-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

Headlines, more deal headlines.

We've just extracted out recent 50 hot deals and add a link to the keeca.com homepage so you can see what hot deals are tagged as hot deals by us. These headlines are ordered in the reverse chronicle order, latest first.

Most visitors came to our homepage do a deal search, which accounted for more than 65% of total traffic landed on keeca.com homepage. Even though, we think giving some hints by listing some categories might help guiding shoppers what to look. Last night, we rolled out 6 categories - Beauty, Clothing, Computer, Health & Garden, Jewelry, Sports, Toys - listed on the left of Keeca.com homepage. All headlines are listed from most recent going backward, same as the way we show deals 'for her', 'for him', and 'for kids.'

Deal Headlines for Him, for Her, for Kids.

2007-01-26T23:41:00.000-08:00

News are rarely deals, but deals are definitely news. As we continue endless efforts to pull together deal news from merchants, we tried our best to categorize them into 'for him', 'for her', and 'for kids' and list them on Keeca.com homepage. It might be stereotype to category all techie listings as 'for him', all intimate apparel as 'for her', and games as 'for kids', but please understand a girl is more than welcomed to scan through all gimmicks and there's nothing wrong about it. We just want to try some intuit ways to put deals into buckets to show you what we have chronically displayed with some sense of freshness. Maybe the headlines can be expanded to other themes and categories. Your comments are welcomed.

SketchUp and Audacity are Free

2007-01-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

2 free software - SketchUp and Audacity - just added to the pack of software that we recommend.

According to Google, SketchUp is a

"powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool that combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. From simple to complex, conceptual to realistic ..."

In addition, under Audio category, Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Audacity is extremely popular application for podcasters. For a full list of feature, see here.

SketchUp and Audacity are completely free.

Krugle Search Finds Code Finds Answers

2006-12-03T17:32:00.000-08:00

Krugle.com was added to our collection of vertical search engines today. Krugle is based in Menlo Park, CA. Similar to Google CodeSearch, Krugle goes beyond just returning source code snippets as Google Code Search simply offers. Both sites are selected by us and are listed on Keeca Web section.

By comparison, Krugle stands out as the best vertical search for software developers and beats Google Code handily. Krugle stretches an extra mile to show you related tech pages and open source projects found on the web, which is a very useful featured demanded by software engineers. Simple and useful. The simple pulldown allows you to narrow down to a specific programming language. Search results are useful enough to provide sample code and related web sources to educate yourself.

Among the code search engines that we recommended, Krugle is the only one that is capable of giving me useful answers to specific needs. Let's say I'm looking for a Perl solution - a module or a direction of some sort - to be able to grab Web images from the Web and store them locally for later use. For this, on Krugle, I found what I was looking for by clicking on 'Project' tab, selecting 'Perl' in the language pulldown. In the search box, I typed in 'grab image'. I got:

GrabCartoons BSD
GrabCartoons is a program for generating a "comics summary" page. You can use it to avoid having to manually visit multiple pages for comics you want to view. It is extendable, and easy to add modules for new comics.

Image Arcadia LGPL
Image Arcadia is a Digital Asset Management server package. It runs on NT or *nix under Apache and Perl. Incorporates an extensible file type manager so that any type of file is supported. There is a strong plugin architecture that supports thumbnail

Internet Imaging Benchathlon Artistic
The Benchathlon is an international open initiative of researchers to build a common benchmark for content-based image retrieval systems

Image Display System GPL
A perl script that generates a photoalbum website (with thumbnails) on the fly. All you need to provide are the images. Uses HTML templates so you can customize the look of the site.

ImageBackup
'ImageBackup' is an automatic incremental backup system for digital pictures. It creates backup CDs, one at a time, until all images have been backed up. You run the program regularly; it will gather images until another disc is full. Once a disc is full, it can use AutoScrapbook to create Web-based index files, automatically generate an ISO image, and reset the staging area.

Image::Size
The Image::Size module for Perl lets you retreive image dimensions (and type, when unknown) from graphics files in a variety of common formats. It is a pure Perl extension requiring no C compilation or XS linking. It is meant to be used in CGI application development to allow run-time derivation of image sizes, so you don't have to hard code such data in applications or HTML templates.

QuikKopy Image Copier GPL
Command line utility which copies images from a source directory (e.g. mounted USB filesystem/digital camera) to a destination directory, creating a structured library of digital images. Provides batch resizing/manipulation of images using ImageMagick.

ImageSorter image browser/file manager GPL
ImageSorter is image browser/file manager for unix systems writen in perl/glade/gtk and uses imlib graphic library. It has many advanced features like multiple panes, viewing multiple images, regexp selections, drag-n-drop, finding duplicate files,...

EIGHT: Easy Image Gallery GPL
EIGHT: Easy Image Gallery is a perl CGI script to help automate the maintenence of a web based collection of images.

HTTP::GetImages GPL
A CPAN perl module that allows one to recover and locally store images from the web, including those linked by anchor and image map.

Krugle returns super fast and is the best to give a specific direction to dig into, while other code search engines including Google Codesearch fails to demonstrate such a strength. Software developers used to take hours to search using generic search engines now only cost a couple minutes of time for the same task. Save time, save cost, save money. Use Krugle!

Free LocalCooling Software

2006-11-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

Free software for Wiondows, LocalCooling is the latest pick added to Keeca Pack - our recommendation of software to you, totally free. LocalCooling let you optimize your PC energy savings in minutes and fight global warming from your desktop. The meter shows how much oil and trees you save, or your group save. If you're influential in your community to have this software installed, you'll be able to track how much your organization save the earth as a whole.

Find Lowest Price

2006-11-22T00:09:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to recommend you the Keeca Product, a product search feature which just joined our collection of services to provide price comparison on tangible goods. Occasionally, the newly added 'Find lowest price' link will appear next to the deal search result related to specific product listings, as in:

Free Shipping on IPod Nano - Apple Computer

New iPod nano from Apple: 2GB, 4GB and 8GB starting at $149. Free shipping and free engraving, only at the Apple Store. Offer good until 2006-12-30.
More Apple Computer deals - Find lowest price

Shoppers can't be too smart without price comparison. To find the lowest price of a product, use the product search on keeca.com.

Same Flights, Different Prices.

2006-11-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

Booking flight online is easy, much easier than going through traditional travel agency. I used to call my travel agency to book flights. It turned out that for a couple times, I could give the agency hints or specific options that I found online with specific lower prices than they suggested for me. Pretty soon, I changed my shopping behavior to be in favor of online travel booking, rather than embarrassing traditional travel agency with better flights deals that I know of from the Web. That was around year 2004 and 2005.

Travel search is a big sector, too big of sales amount so it has to be excluded from e-commerce statistics for people who closely monitor 'traditional' e-commerce market. Flight booking, hotel reservation, vacation packages, etc., are aspects of online travel market. Getting bigger and bigger, and trickier.

Take flight as an example, assuming going from point A to point B, leaving on date one and come back on another date, I tried to pick a specific airline to compare prices. Unlike I compare prices of tangible goods online, travel package comparison is a bit different, but at least I figured to 'fix' all variables to focus on one round-trip flight to see if the prices are the same, or different, offered from the SAME airline but sold through different online travel sites.

The short answer is no. I didn't get the same price for the same flight booking of the same airline, same route. Prices differ from one online travel site to another (See the quotes extracted from my shopping basket below). One site would charge me for $1,477, another for $1,973. What gives?

You have to believe and know to try a couple more places for your flight tickets. The difference may be as big as $500 bulks as demonstrated here. Go to the right place to do your smart shopping decision.

Allow me to make 2 simple recommendations, try Keeca Travel and TravelLocation.

United Airlines	Flight # 831
	Departure:	San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport, USA 2006/12/01 1229
	Arrival:	Taipei, Chiang Kai Shek, Taiwan 2006/12/02 2110

United Airlines	Flight # 830
	Departure:	Taipei, Chiang Kai Shek, Taiwan 2007/01/01 1010
	Arrival:	San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport, USA 2007/01/01 0806

All prices displayed in
USD

Adult

1 x 1235.00

Taxes

1 x 242.01

TOTAL

1477.01

	San Francisco, CA (SFO) to Taipei, Taiwan (TPE)	Friday, Dec 1

Flight info

Dates

Misc

Fares

United Airlines 831
Boeing 777

Dec 01 12:29 pm depart SFO
Dec 02 9:10 pm arrive TPE

stops: 1

Class: Coach
Fare Basis Code:
BLEX
Booking Class: B
Fare Rules

Delete

	Taipei, Taiwan (TPE) to San Francisco, CA (SFO)	Monday, Jan 1

Flight info

Dates

Misc

Fares

United Airlines 830
Boeing 777

Jan 01 10:10 am depart TPE
Jan 01 8:06 am arrive SFO

stops: 1

Class: Coach
Fare Basis Code:
BLEX
Booking Class: B
Fare Rules

Delete

Total Airfare (including taxes and charges):	USD 1973.01
Penalty: Penalties may apply. Please see fare rules.

Pack of useful software Keeca recommends. Totally FREE!

2006-10-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

Free and useful for personal use, our recommended collection of software include the famous Google Pack and beyond. We gathered what's hot on the Web and categorized them into 5 areas - Web, Music & Photo & Video, Communication, Office Suite, and Productivity. Some of them are purely Web-based web 2.0 applications facilitate you from surfing the Web to editing clips online. For example, YouSendIt let you send big files that are too large for emails; JumpCut, recently acquired by Yahoo, allow you make amazing movies online right in your browser and perform easy online video editing. Others are stand-along software application that you can download and install. For example, the iTune from Apple Computer works well on both PC and Mac. It is the best friend an iPod ever had, you use iTune to organize, share and listen to music on your computer.

Free. We insist only include completely free top-notch software in our Keeca Pack. Go try them out, but don't spend too much time. I warn you.

Deal Search Gets Faster

2006-10-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

We had successfully upgraded our Deal Search infrastructure to use a newer search engine libraries - KinoSearch. Though KinoSearch is still in its alpha stage, but we had experienced its performance of building indices improved over 40 times than Plucene API in our own benchmark test, pretty much in line with official KinoSearch benchmarks. The move is good for user experiences and also improved system reliability for Plucene used to give us file descriptors leakage under mod_perl framework. Shoppers should experience deal results returned in a more timely manner as we continue to grow our deal database.

Study Buddy

2006-10-14T22:05:00.000-07:00

Want you kids to find answers to more than 4000 frequently asked homework questions or use one of the many online reference tools? Use AOL's StudyBuddy.com, now covered by Keeca Web with a link to this useful, study-friendly sites.

Study Buddy categorizes references into top categories of math, health, language, science, social studies, and electives. Under each, you can further browse by grade, K to 12, which is an important to easily get to proper material of kids' age. Where Answers.com is a generic knowledge base for all ages, Study Buddy is especially suited for kids' learning. Also, for writing, use Essay Feedback to get your paper proofed before you turn it in for a grade. It's free, fast and easy.

Pluggd for Searching Podcasts

2006-09-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

Until now, for months, Keeca Web had been recommending Yahoo Podcasts for searching available podcasts channels on the web. I stumbled upon Pluggd and tried. I like it over Yahoo Podcasts for 2 reasons:

Pluggd seems more compatible (or reliable) to play audio on my Mac. Unlike Yahoo Podcasts, where I often ran into problems of not be able to play audio for unknown reasons. Pluggd's play just works, almost every time I clicked.
The search term I use return more relevant podcasts channels and episodes, but this is just my personal subjective observations.

You can use Pluggd to discover, listen, and share. In the near future, one exciting feature Pluggd had demonstrated and will roll out is it's capability to allow you to search inside a podcast to find the portions of an audio or video podcast that interest you.

Pluggd has now taken the place of our recommended Podcasts search site as listed on Keeca Web.

Deal Search Result Page Rearranged

2006-09-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

Keeca Deal Search result page had changed from 2-column presentation to a 3-columns format. The new format had gone live last night.

At the center of the page, matched deals are shown to catch shoppers eyes. On the left, price comparison sites - BizRate, PriceRunner, Shopping.com, Froogle - are listed to take shoppers directly to the pricing result pages and auto carry over the search term for shoppers. Also, the recommended store merchants are listed on the left where our engine suggest shoppers some highly relevant stores to shop from. In the parentheses, the numbers denote number of deals available offered by that store. On the right, sponsored links are clearly identified.

As a shopper, I'd browse the deals at the center and look for stores on the left to shop from. For searches upon product, the price-comparison links on the upper left really save my time to spot the best price from the most places on the Web. These changes are relatively new and untested, so please, leave comments about what you think. I'm listening.

What's Hot On Keeca Homepage?

2006-09-18T23:29:00.000-07:00

The day CrazyEgg opened to the public I jumped in and tried. Basically, if you have a web site and want to see where on a page people click on, you simply deploy CrazyEgg tracking code on your site and see the clicks come. The stats of my first test came in days after enough real visits were captured. To my surprise, the center premium placement of the page got almost no click of interests, which lead to a keeca.com homepage redesign. Whatever visitors were not interested in the central premium placement beneath the search box was pushed down. In stead, 3 125x125 banners were put in to guide visitors. The 2nd test ran then.

The above image shows the Heat Map of the 2nd CrazyEgg test. You see, the general online deal search remains the most interested feature of the site as before, followed by the travel deal banner. On the left, travel also stands out among all different type of deals.