Smartlife

eBay is one of the all-time online success stories. It arrived in 1995, the same year as a Newsweek feature on why Internet businesses would never make money, and it proved them extraordinarily wrong. It survived the dot-com disaster and now trades in over thirty countries with twenty-two billion dollars in assets.

Unfortunately, growth causes its own problems. The service simply can’t respond quickly to every complaint while its immense popularity makes it a prime target for scammers and counterfeit auctions. Other complaints leveled at eBay are less innocent less…

I don’t know about you, but I like saving money. Unlike a lot of other people, I actually look forward to getting my semi-weekly flyers in the mail, as well as the other ads that come with the community newspaper. The trouble, of course, is that I end up spending a lot of time clipping those coupons. Time is money, and unfortunately, the paper versions of these flyers don’t have a search function.

And that’s why sites like Coupon Sherpa are positively fantastic. Instead of spending hours sifting…

eBay is twenty billion dollars worth of dot-com success story, making up for the scarcity of such things its own sheer size. It’s so successful, it even overrides the “capitalize at the start of a sentence” rule, and most of us have known that rule since grade school. Started in 1995, the auction site has grown larger than many countries’ armies and is much, much more welcome around the world. Last year they made over six hundred dollars per second because “take a percentage of everyone buying and selling everything”…

The summer sun makes it hard to think, but that’s the point. You don’t stretch out in those glorious feelgood rays to work out solutions to all of life’s problems, because stretching out is the solution. At least for a while. We get all too few hours of doing nothing in this life, which is why you might as well use some thinking time to make the most of them.

We’ve searched the net to bring the best in brilliant beach gear, and a few toys which…

When the summer sun is shining, sometimes even the beach is too much effort. You want to relax right now, and if you’ve taken the precaution of installing a pool (or the cheaper precaution of knowing someone who did) you can do exactly that. The swimming pool is the icon of conspicuous luxury, and a triumph of human technology over Mother Nature. If she can’t be bothered to install the beach in your backyard, you’ll build it yourself! The ability to float away from it all without leaving the front…

QR codes (an abbreviation of “quick response codes”) were invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of Toyota Motors. They were originally designed to track car parts during the manufacturing process, but it quickly became clear that the technology could be re-purposed for a wide variety of uses.

Despite being around for over a decade, QR codes were a fairly obscure technology until the advent of smartphones made them a fairly common part of modern life. Marketers and technologists are experimenting with all sorts of different ideas to make the most…