Red Orbit made zlert a site of the day today. It's a site with news, video and images mainly of technology, science, health and space. Thanks to the Red Orbit team!

Ziipa.com, a directory of Web 2.0 applications, kindly asked us to submit an entry. It's available in all its glory at http://www.ziipa.com/view/Zlert_-_Amazon_Alerts.

Ziipa is interesting in that it reminds me of killerstartups.com. However, they provide a screenshot of the site and the synopsis is provided by the site themselves. Like Killerstartups, you can vote on the site and leave comments.

Both Ziipa and Killerstartups have one other thing in common. They boggle my mind with how many startups or new websites come online every day. All providing a wide range of functionality.

Netcraft identified 172 million sites in their June survey. That's an increase of 3.9 million a month or 130,000 a day. Of course, many of those are personal sites, blogs, non-profits, educational etc. Not sure how many are startups, but I'm sure it's a pretty high number.

Makeuseof.com added zlert to their directory a few days ago. It's a site for "Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips". Has some interesting content.

One minor point about their logo, is that they shouldn't really be using a JPEG for an image that is all text. As you can see on the site, the logo suffers from some nasty compression artifacts. For example, you see some fuzzy ghosting around the letters, for example the "f" in "of".

When an image is mainly text, PNG or GIF files do a nice job of reducing size, but preserving the crispness of the letters. JPEG is really better for photographs. See the Wikipedia article on the JPEG format for details.

First blog about zlert in French

I see Sylvain Drapau posted an item on his blog about zlert on Saturday. Unfortunately, his site was unavailable most of the weekend, so only got to see it today. He gives an overview of zlert with links to our YouTube video and slidecasts. For those of you who (like me) have seen what little high-school French they had reduced to pidgin-French, a Google translation is also available. Merci beaucoup Sylvain!

We try to cater to an international audience on zlert. We currently support alerts for 5 Amazon stores, - US, Canada, UK, Germany and France. If you are visiting the site from France, for example, the default store on the home page will be amazon.fr, from Germany, amazon.de etc.

Right now, the site is only in English, although the search results are in French and German for amazon.fr and amazon.de respectively. We hope eventually to have complete French and German translations available.

KillerStartups reviewed zlert today. It's a great summary of what we are about. Well worth reading. Thanks to the folks at KillerStartups.

They did ask one question at the end under the "Some questions" section:

"Can’t you create most of these kinds of alerts on Amazon itself?"

The answer is no. Amazon are a great store, with an enormous range of products. You probably could spend your entire life only using products that you have ordered from Amazon (via zlert of course :)). They are not, though, a site for shopping alerts. The alerts they do offer are very limited, and you will have a hard time finding them.

There's a huge range of things that Amazon needs to do in order to run the kind of business that they do. They are not sitting around all day thinking about how they can make alerts more useful, what new kinds of alerts they could create etc. The kind of things we spend all day thinking about.

Besides, it's not really in their interest to encourage you to wait for an item's price to fall (e.g. with a price alert). Or to let you know when the price falls after you have bought it (with a price guarantee alert).

Other alerts we offer, I think would be good for Amazon to offer. For example, search alerts, accessory alerts etc. They don't, because I think they have other priorities, other things they want to grab your attention with.

It's one of the reasons they have made their data available to third-parties like us. We can add value doing things that they are not thinking about. It's mutualistic relationship. We both benefit.

I see SimpleSpark has added zlert to its list of applications. To be honest, I hadn't heard of the site, which started last year. It describes itself as "the place to find and share a new world of web applications". It's basically a directory of web applications. It's done pretty well.

The description they wrote for us is a little sparse and a bit inaccurate:

"Shopping alerts so that you know when prices drop."

Obviously, price alerts is one thing we do, but we do a lot of other kinds of shopping alerts too. For example, search, wishlist, reminders, accessory alerts etc. We like to think of ourselves as a comprehensive site with all kinds of shopping alerts.

Still, that's a minor quibble. We appreciate the coverage. They were also pretty fast to include us. Thanks guys!

Charles Knight of ReadWriteWeb, has posted an article about zlert, and a link to our video, on AltSearchEngines.

YouTube Video

Just uploaded our first video to YouTube. It's a quick introduction to the site:



Like all screencasts on YouTube, it's pretty fuzzy. Not as clear as the slidecasts we did on slideshare.net.

The Mankini

Came across this on zlert the other day. It's the Official Borat Mankini Thong. It's the top selling item under "Swimming" in Sports & Leisure on Amazon UK. Unfortunately, not available in the US. Is that a cultural difference?

Now live

Well, we're finally live. Have taken the wraps off the site and opened it to the public. Thanks to all who participated in the private beta. Appreciate you taking the time.

Those of you that are new to zlert, welcome. Please look around and let us know what you think.