Last year a Halloween costume for my son did not cost much, and as a matter of fact it earned us $200 – my son was the winner of his school competition. We took a cardboard box, glued to it some black paper ~$2 and cut out holes on top / bottom and sides. Next step was to find and print iPhone icons – thanks to omnipotent Google and HP printer that was not too expensive. On the back of the costume we glued a pumpkin post card with apple-style cut out (the card was about $2 as well). The most expensive element of the costume was the glue – we used 3M spray on glue. That was actually well worth the $16 as we had no mess in the house and were able to put the costume together in less than 3 hrs – not bad for a 7 year old and all-thumbs dad.
October 20, 2009
July 14, 2009
To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Posted by Nick Krym under how to use WWHOW | Tags: Twitter |Leave a Comment
It’s no surprise that WWHOW! and Twitter have a lot in common – WWHOW! to a degree was inspired by Twitter and aims to have the same level of success 
Of course in many aspects WWHOW! is quite different from Twitter – it is a focused service with some structure of data and a very different UI. There are a few aspects of WWHOW! functionality that bring it closer to Twitter that you may see on a surface.
One of the most important links with Twitter is an ability to post on WWHOW! using Twitter – either through a cell phone, application or web interface. Here is one of the ways you can do it –
1) Make sure that your Twitter ID is the same as WWHOW! (no need to have the same password though). To do so you might want to register on Twitter first with their huge user base getting a specific user ID could be a bit trickier.
2) Follow WWHOW. To do it follow the link Twitter and click “Follow” button.
3) At this point you can start using WWHOW! via Twitter – just tweet the deals you find using the following template:
@WWHOW # #
For example your tweet may look like that –
@WWHOW Pampers # BabyWorld @ Monroeville, PA # BOGOF
or
@WWHOW Cappuccino # Amici @ Montgomery and Bush, San Francisco, CA # Only $2
Of course your posts will need to stay within 140 character limitation imposed by Twitter. Using Twitter is in particular convenient due to its mobile interface, so you can send an SMS message right from the garage sale you discovered while driving from work or when you stumble upon a great sale in a neighborhood grocery store.
July 10, 2009
A while ago I talked about Categorization Blues – our concerns about making UI more complex than it absolutely has to be to meet the objectives of WWHOW! Well, after many complaints from end-users we caved in and added categorization. The list of categories (or you can call them “predefined tags”) now includes:
Antiques and Hobbies
Clothing and Fashion
Arts and Crafts
Automotive
Baby Gear
Purses, Bags and Luggage
Bridal
Computers and PDAs
Electronics
Eyewear
Food
Freebies
Toys and Games
Flowers and Gifts
Health and Beauty
Home and Garden
Jewelry and watches
Maternity
Movies, Books and Music
Musical Instruments
Office
Cell phones
Photography
Shoes
Sport and Fitness
Wines and Spirits
You still can tag items using terms outside of the list, to do so just click on pencil icon by the WHAT portion of your posting and add tags of your liking to the list. Do not forget to click save after you done.
How can you use Categories? The main point of tags and categories is to assist you in search. You can put category in WHAT portion of the search filed and click “Search” button, you can click on it if you see the Category in a popular Tags list, or you can use URL. To do specify Category in the address box of your browser using the following template:
http://wwhow.com/what/<category>
For example, http://wwhow.com/what/Maternity, read more about using URL in the Fun with URLs.
June 29, 2009
Do you know that you can put your search criteria right in the WWHOW! URL? Using a URL technique could be a very convenient way to send a link to your friend that covers multiple postings, for example you want to tell your friend that you found a lot of great deals on shoes in San Francisco…
Hi Linda, take a look at http://wwhow.com/what/shoes/where/9411 – I found a lot of great deals on shoes at that site. Some savings are over 75%! Bye for now…
You also can shorten the URL using http://tinyurl.com or other service. That makes it easier to do short twitter style postings.
WWHOW has a smart URL structure that allows you to specify What and Where in the following form –
http://wwhow.com/what/<Category>/where/<Address>
http://wwhow.com/what/<Category>
http://wwhow.com/where/<Address>
Note –
You do not need to put triangle brackets, just specify what you are looking for and replace the <Category> in the URL. You can use any keyword as <Category>.
<Address> field is very similar – just put the address of the place and WWHO! will display everything in the vicinity of the address. WWHOW! is using Google maps API to display deals on the map, so everything that is good for Google maps is good for WWHOW! For example the address could be
SFO
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
94111
100 Pine Street, San Francisco, CA
Pine and Bush, San Francisco, CA
Another thing you can do it to see a deals posted by a specific user just enter
http://wwhow.com/who/<User ID>
<User ID> should be exact user ID of the person who’s deals you’d like to see, BTW, some of them quite prolific, e.g.
http://www.wwhow.com/who/bianca13
OK, that’s it for now, wave fun with URLs!
June 11, 2009
From the day one we saw WWHOW! as a place where businesses can advertise their sales events, discounts, specials, etc. So if you are a merchant, a retailer, or a business owner you came to the right place. Do you have anything on sale today? Are you planning to hold a sale anytime soon? If so, it costs nothing to advertise your items on www.WWHOW.com.
WWHOW! provides businesses like yours a free advertising opportunity – there are no fees of any kind for merchants or consumers. The service is exceptionally simple and aims to provide an advertising channel for everyone, including small businesses with limited budgets.
All you need to register and in less than a minute you can start posting the items you have on special.
WWHOW! (pronounced “Wow!” as in “Wow, look at the price on these shoes!”) gets its name from the three bits of information necessary for any sale:
What?
Where?
HOW much?
It only takes these three facts and a click to post a deal on WWHOW! – and it takes even less effort for local customers to find your great deals!
Let’s say that your store has luggage sale, the Rick Steves 21’ bag are selling for 50% off regular price. You will need to enter 3 facts –
What? Rick Steves 21’ luggage
Where? Going in Style @ 865 market St. San Francisco, CA
HOW much? $99.95 / 50% off
You also may want to pick a category – in this case “Purses, Bags and Luggage” to make it easier for your customers to find your posting. You also can add additional tags after you post the line, e.g. “Travel Gear”.
You click “Post” and your ad is immediately posted on the site where everyone can see it. The majority of WWHOW! users search products in proximity to their location so your ad is naturally targeting local customers.
As you can see from the neighborhood book store that’s trying to compete with Amazon to the mom who shops for diapers, milk and other staples for her family… everyone benefits from the power of WWHOW!
June 1, 2009
A couple days ago a new job posting hit a few freelance websites such as Get a Freelancer –
need someone to clone that site completely with administrator’s panel and everything so its easily doable to set it up and run it in another domain. CAUTION! will pay up to 30 euros! so dont bother bidding higher (see http://bit.ly/47acWc)
I wonder whether to take this as an offensive move or as a compliment. I incline to go with later, at least chrispen (the author of the post) feels that WWHOW is worth replicating. Of course price tag makes it a very dubious compliment – even in countries such as Philippines and China 30 euros are not going to stretch enough to cover the effort to replicate the technology behind www.WWHOW.com, even if the developer make all the shortcuts we have not.
Well, I am ready to take a bet that it takes a lot of effort to get the system we built so far going; to make sure it runs, that it works with all APIs such as Google maps, to handle filters, tags, queries, sorting, to be able to run on a cloud and scale to millions of users, to be able to deploy changes with a push of a button… So I will pay 30 euros on a top of chrispen’s fee to a freelancer who finds a way to clone WWHOW for 30 euros or even 10 times as much… Couple caveats– using existing source code is not OK, Alfonso – you can not participate, and compensation should not be less than, let’s say $1 an hour…
April 17, 2009
So far lack of categorization on WWHOW! appears to be the biggest complain from our users. That was a conscious decision on our part not to introduce categories as we wanted to simplify post structure as much as we possibly could. Instead we decided on automatic tag generation and allowing users to add / change tags on the post. We are not yet ready to step back and change the approach, we are rethinking it though.
There are a few interesting challenges about categorization, first is the list. How would you categorize deals that could appear on this site – the site has not built its community yet and has not found its niche. Will it work better of masters of conspicuous consumption, wine clubs, penny pinchers, small businesses, or anyone else? There is a world of categories to cover. Take for example a look at Yelp category list. It’s huge and still doesn’t cover all the possibilities.
Another challenge is of course data entry; picking category from a list is easy, but how about adding it to SMS post? Of course it remains to be seen whether posting through SMS (via Twitter) turns out to be a popular venue.
Tagging appears to be a better approach, and using Tag clouds naturally surfaces popular terms, etc. Well, there is a lot of problems with tags as well – using auto generation could be a very simple task with frankly rather disappointing results, or it could be a very complex task which would require serious machine learning / AI algorithms, and that is not something we are prepared to deal with at the moment.
So for now we’ll keep an eye on how the site shapes up and will make small steps improving end-user experience.
Of course if you have any ideas I would love to hear them, please put your comments or email me.
April 6, 2009
A couple days ago I sent email to very few freinds introducing them to WWHOW! Almost right away I got a few notes back. The one I received earlier today was very interesting:
Hi Kolya –
I’ve looked at your WWHOW site – the idea is simple but beautiful. This niche for small local businesses has been clearly overlooked – not covered by EBAY, CRAIGS LIST, AMAZON, etc. I think you’ll be helping both consumers and local small businesses. It also really timely in the current economic condiyions.
Congratulations! I hope the idea will prove itself both useful and successful.
I have already registered and posted my recent (modest) finding. It showed up instantly. That was easy, the site is friendly enough. Regarding the search for posted items – it is not entirely clear for me how one does it. By clicking to ITEMS in the menu on the left? The menu is cumbersome/long but incomplete/hard to read. Alternatively, by entering item / location? – Nothing showed up. -but I understand there are very few users so far. Still – you may think how to improve or redesign the search.
I do promise to spread the word locally. I do not shop much locally except for wine.
Local wine taxes are highest in the whole US, moreover, Maryland prohibits sending wine in here by mail. Thus I rely mostly on small local wine shops, and since there are too many of them, it is often difficult to track good deals/new arrivals, etc. Together with my local friends we may use WWHOA platform to communicate our findings.
Thanks again for setting this up – and best of luck for the future.
One can not ask for better feedback, encouragement, and motivation! Here is what I wrote back -
Lesha thank you so much, that is great feedback! Something we can use right away – I will chat with my guys and see how we can improve the user experience.
In meanwhile here are few ideas to simplify your communications with friends using WWHOW!:
1) You can make each other favorite; then on the left check “favorites only” checkbox; that will limit entries in the list to only your friends.
2) Search and “tagging” items is tricky (you referred to tags as “the menu on the left”). It will probably always be a work in progress. Here is one of the ways you can do today – let’s say that you found a great deal on 91 point Merlot. Your post could be “05 Tin Roof Merlot” “Mills @ 21401” “13.99”. BTW, I just put a zip code, you can specify address in many ways; basically, if it’s good for Google maps it’s good for us. Our tag generation tool is not going to recognize your post as wine, Merlot as tag should appear. To help others find it you can click on the edit (little pencil right by your post) and edit / add other tags for example “Wine”
3) Another cool way to place a post on WWHOW! is through text messaging on your cell phone. You have to set it up by registering on Twitter and then electing to “follow” wwhow (if you are not familiar with Twitter that could be a bit awkward, yet will take you just a couple minutes). After you set it up, in order to post the same note about Merlot you can send a text message. You can do it right from the store. The text message would be “@wwhow 05 Tin Roof Merlot # Mills @ 21401 # 13.99”
I am quite excited about WWHOW! will see where it would take me…
Any plans on visiting Bay Area? Would love to have you over!
Thanks,
Nick
December 9, 2008
Of course the more idea is yours the more it seems brilliant, original and appealing. As far as I am concerned that baby is just absolutely adorable. Who knows, maybe I need to grow out of it, especially having seen many of my ideas turn out to be rather ugly as they grow out of all adorable infant stage. Yet it’s been a few months and I still see WWHOW as something unique and worth investing time and effort in.
So what is WWHOW?
- WWHOW is an internet service dedicated to local bargains on products and services
- WWHOW is designed as a microblogging application
- The site includes a “live” list of posts (small messages with predefined structure)
- The site includes a set of tools that simplify viewing and searching the data
- All users can view and search posts published on the site
- Registered users can publish posts that are immediately available for viewing
- Registered users can modify their home page to optimize viewing and search experience
- WWHOW content power comes from quantity of postings rather than from depth and sophistication of individual post
- WWHOW aims for high usability
- Narrow scope of functionality
- Simplicity of individual operations
- Uncluttered easy on eyes WEB 2.0 design
- Self-explanatory controls following established UI principals
- User-centric approach to layout and flow
- WWHOW is built for success
- Conceived as revenue generating services with potential for high earning
- Architected with low cost of operations in mind
- Developed from the ground up as service that can scale to millions of users
And what WWHOW is not?
The Internet is inundated with applications, services and sites that cater to objectives of bargain hunters. The main categories of the applications include:
- Comparison shopping engines such as www.nextag.com. Dedicated sites as well as shopping subsites of major search engines help consumers to find best deal on products available on the Net.
- Collaborative shopping social sites such as www.stylehive.com. These services help users to connect to be more effective in shopping process or just have more fun while shopping, with bargain shopping is not necessarily critical element of the process.
- Blog based bargain information sharing. A large number of blogs offer information on coupons, life hacks, freebees, etc.
- Narrow scope product moving sites, typically dedicated to moving highly discounted products in large numbers, somewhat similar to TV shopping networks.
- Deal-centric communities that unite people focused on bargain shopping, such as www.fatwallet.com
- Deal aggregators. Sites that offer bargain info by aggregating other site’s info.
- On-line deal centric communities, such as www.dealio.com
WWHOW aims to be different from all of these services:
- Unlike comparison shopping engines, deal aggregators and many other services WWHOW is not focused on the products available on the Net. While the products available on line can appear on WWHOW the focus is outside of the Net – on products that are available via local stores, garage sales, and other venues typically not covered by Net-centric sites.
- Unlike collaborative shopping social sites WWHOW is not linking friends or attempts to create social groups. WWHOW loosely connects friends or strangers using follower model (similar to Twitter).
- Unlike shopping engines, product moving sites and other application WWHOW is not involved or compensated by product sales and in that light is product agnostic.
- Unlike blogs WWHOW doesn’t represent a view or efforts of single individual or small group; WWHOW offers a community built content with much broader coverage and generally transient nature.
- Unlike deal-centric communities, blogs, and other services WWHOW is not concentrated on depth of the topic it focuses on the breadth instead, e.g. no discussions, collaboration, supporting data, etc. on the deal – just What Where and How Much…
.
Besides the obvious “I don’t want to be a www.me2.com” – why and how WWHOW aims to be different:
- We believe there are many more deals and bargains in the real world than on the Net; and we believe that market is virtually untapped;
- We believe in ease of sharing information; we believe it should be easy to share and easy to access;
- We believe that deals and bargains are transient in nature and thus do not deserve much collaboration;
- We believe that being locale aware brings additional power to bargain hunters
- We believe that both consumers and small businesses can find a win-win value through simple means of microblogging
November 9, 2008
…of course, plenty, yet i am still thinking that our propositions is unique, and that’s my view after a brief check of a few sites listed below. Leslie, that’s not a bad list to consider just before you click proceed to checkout 
http://www.ableshoppers.com
http://www.absurdlycool.com
http://www.alexscoupons.com/
http://www.all-free-samples.com/
http://www.amazing-bargains.com/
http://www.anandtech.com
http://www.antirebate.com/
http://www.apnoti.com
http://www.bargaineering.com
http://www.bargainist.com
http://www.bensbargains.net
http://www.bradsdeals.com
http://www.buxr.com
http://www.cheapstingybargains.com
http://www.couponalbum.com
http://www.couponcraze.com/
http://www.dailyedeals.com
http://www.dealcatcher.com
http://www.dealdump.com/
http://www.dealhack.com
http://www.dealigg.com
http://www.dealnews.com
http://www.dealofday.com
http://www.deals.com
http://www.deals2buy.com
http://www.dealsea.com
http://www.dealslist.com
http://www.dealsofamerica.com
http://www.dealspl.us
http://www.dealstop.com/
http://www.dealtaker.com
http://www.dealuniversity.com/
http://www.ecoupons.com/
http://www.edealinfo.com
http://www.fatwallet.com
http://www.freegrabber.com/
http://www.freesamplesite.com
http://www.freestufftimes.com
http://www.frugalvillage.net
http://www.gotapex.com
http://www.gottadeal.com
http://www.hot-deals.org
http://www.hotdealsclub.com
http://www.judysbook.com
http://www.morestuff4less.com
http://www.mysavings.com
http://www.passwird.com
http://www.probargainhunter.com
http://www.resellerratings.com
http://www.retailmenot.com/
http://www.savings.com
http://www.shopping-bargains.com
http://www.simplerebates.com/
http://www.slickdeals.net
http://www.spoofee.com
http://www.startsampling.com
http://www.techbargains.com
http://www.techdeals.net/
http://www.thefreesite.com
http://www.webbyplanet.com
http://www.xpbargains.com
Nick Krym
Alfonso Adriasola
lesliewwhow
bargainbeauties
nicjsan
Brandy
