Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Social Software

All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you’ve to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental automobiles into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you’ve made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental vehicles, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you’re going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt grants you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

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Filed under: Design, Utilities, Productivity

If you’re moving to a new place or just want to reorganize furniture in your current living space, PlanningWiz may be helpful by letting you plan and lay out objects in your rooms. Set your room dimensions (you can select Imperial or Metric system, but for some reason you can’t choose Imperial on the first step) and start selecting furniture pieces to start experimenting.

You can select furniture from categories like “child’s bedroom,” “bathroom,” and “kitchen,” and you can drag-to-resize the furniture objects to match the dimensions of your existing (or future) objects. PlanningWiz also lets you customize the design with color, text, and dimension guides.

The plan can have a custom scale from 1″:1′ down to 3/32″:1′. Plans can be saved to your free account space, printed, or shared via e-mail.

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Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) continues to make transparency about all people and businesses its top priority. In releasing Trends for Websites this week, the world’s largest search information company made it impossible for websites to hide their numbers from all eyes, including consumers and advertisers. Are you a media buyer who wants to know the reach of a prospective website before you even contact them to negotiate? Visit Google’s Trend for Websites site and find out instantly.

Google then one-upped itself by announcing the Ad Planner product for advertisers. This new product will grant media buyers and advertisers to get an immense amount of help on the ideal web properties in which to spend ad money. In other words, Google is making life easier for its advertisers to find the largest-impact website in which to advertise — without trial and error. Of course, the new Ad Planner service is free.

Google’s unabated quest to become the world’s largest advertising company continues to move forward. Even though these two products may not get much attention from the media after this week, these are big impacts in terms of the business model that keeps Google’s entire money chest afloat: advertising revenue. When Google stated that “we want to help you figure out where your target audience is” in announcing Ad Manager, it wasn’t kidding. The more it makes its ad customers successful, the more business it will bring in. Everyone’s happy, and Google remains solidly on top of the new media advertising world.

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Citigroup Inc. (C)

The current challenging market conditions created much not only on traders and companies, but also cause some huge names to break promises they’d made to consumers. Eric Dash of The New York Times tells of one such promise that may now be repealed. Last year, Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) promoted the “deal is a deal” slogan, promising to millions of people that the company would no longer lift reserve interest rates on cards at any time, for any reason.

However, as Dash explains, times have changed and in the current weak environment the bank is reconsidering its decision because of financial troubles. A year ago, the company said it would no longer use the “universal default” practice where a card issuers can raise the holder’s rate when that person is late paying any bill. What the bank still held was the right to raise rates every two years, when people renew their cards.

At the time, it looked like Citigroup’s decision was efficient as rivals such as Chase Card Services followed the company by announcing it would abandon the “universal default.”

What made Citigroup change its mind were the $40 billion in write-offs the company has taken during the last year on mortgages investments. In addition, the slumping economy has added pressure on its credit card business.

A major impact on credit card lenders has been federal banking regulators and Congress, which have set up rules designed to protect consumers amid the weak economy, limiting the banks’ flexibility to increase rates of riskier customers.

Now, after a year, Dash writes that the company is disappointed over its “Deal Is a Deal” policy as results were not as expected. “We have been disappointed with the results we have seen so far,” Citigroup stated. Probably consumers will have the same thoughts after the bank will be forced to break its promises.

Eliza Popescu is a financial writer for the on the web investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

If you’re not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don’t despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the shut beta, with the caveat that you’re now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you’re a power-user, or someone who’s really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those photos of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote’s text-recognition features.

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Filed under: Products and services, General Motors (GM), Marketing and advertising

With sales of new cars continuing to wane in the U.S., what can a automobile dealer do to entice customers onto those bright and shiny car lots? How about install a “scent-pumping” box that spews that new automobile smell into the service area in hope of recruiting the olfactory senses of browsing customers?

Take that and the fact that some Chevy dealers are installing flat-screen Televisions, providing free wireless world wide web service and having a full coffee bar available, and the service department at your local General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) sounds care about it is becoming Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) or something. But, like most goofy marketing moves, the public loves it. A Chevy dealer in Pittsburgh, Pa. has seen service business increase 10% since adding all the amenities along with using new, bright colors and having repainted and sealed the floors. In other words, don’t let the service department area look like one, but more like a high-end hotel lobby bar.

And this isn’t just a fad; it’s estimated that many auto dealers make increased profits from service (as in, half the profit), with the other half coming from used and new car sales. When sales are lacking (such as truck and SUV sales), you’ve to make it up somewhere, right? Service just may be the key to getting many dealers out of a hole. Remember, new trucks and SUVs are among the most profitable; smaller, gas efficient cars are among the least profitable. That future profit needs to be made elsewhere — and that area is service and routine maintenance.

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