OneReceipt Tracks Your ...

Online retail always surges around the holidays, and with the frantic purchasing of gifts come the inevitable deluge of email receipts. It’s all too easy for them to slip unnoticed into the recesses of your inbox, but a new service called OneReceipt aims to aggregate and track those receipts so users will be able to see exactly what their money is being spent on. At first, OneReceipt sounds a bit like Mint since they both track purchases. OneReceipt co-founder Sam Fine isn’t thrilled with the comparison — he says Mint is more of a “balance sheet” and isn’t very indicative of what exactly a users money gets spent on. OneReceipt takes a bit of a different approach: it pulls receipt data from email accounts linked with the service, so it serves not only as a tracker for where user money is spent, but on the types of products that are being purchased. In fairness, OneReceipt is entering a market where a few impressive companies have already staked their claim. Rival Lemon also tracks email receipts, and has a nifty smartphone app that allows users to snap photos of their paper receipts before tossing them in the trash. Eric Schmidt-backed Slice also tracks receipts by connecting to email accounts, but focuses less on financial transparency and more on product logistics. Unlike Lemon, OneReceipt focuses on pulling receipt data from different sources rather than making the user set things up manually. During my brief time with OneReceipt, I linked up three separate Gmail accounts to the service, all associated with different types of purchases. OneReceipt was able to pull all the receipts from each account and display them in a timeline view. There were a few hiccups — a pair of tickets to see the final Harry Potter movie showed up at the top of my timeline despite buying them in July — but the rest of the data seemed spot-on. Fine sees OneReceipt in its current form as a starting point for users looking to get control over their spending. He figures that all of the receipt data that OneReceipt pulls in is only half of the equation — users will have to get in the habit of adding their paper receipt info by sending a picture of the receipt to their @onereceipt email address. OneReceipt hopes to streamline that paper handling process with the addition of smartphone and mobile web apps to their arsenal, which I’m told will see the light of day in coming weeks. Aggregating receipts is only the beginning for OneReceipt — co-founder Sam Fine told me that the company is looking at providing special purchasing offers based on user spending patterns. It seems like a bit of an odd mix: I’ve been using OneReceipt as a way to track how much useless junk I’ve been buying and don’t need the temptation to buy even more, but the functionality could certainly come in handy for some. OneReceipt has just finished up their private beta, and is now open to the public. Using OneReceipt costs nothing, but Fine and his team are looking at offering premium solutions for small and mid-sized business down the road.

AnyClip Partners With W...

On the heels of inking a deal with DailyMotion , AnyClip is today announcing a content licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution . Full movies from the movie studio, including the Harry Potter and Batman franchise, will be fully searchable for any object, character, location, scene or emotion. Other titles covered by the agreement include Ocean’s Eleven, 300, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, Lethal Weapon, Dirty Harry, Casablanca, Se7en and The Shining. AnyClip’s online library now includes access to over 12,000 films and over 50,000 live clips, including titles from the likes of Universal Pictures, Vivendi Entertainment, and Indie distribution firms such as First Look and Virgil Films. In addition, AnyClip is today launching a completely revamped consumer site, featuring the option to purchase full length films via Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes (see screenshot below). The new site will also include special features, such as targeted advertising and a call-to-action to purchase the songs featured in each clip (think Shazam for online video).

Lego Tries Augmented Re...

Lego (or LEGO if you’re adamant about trademarks) has just dipped another toe into electronic gaming with their clever “Life Of George” iOS title. The game uses 144 pieces and a piece of cardboard covered in a dotted pattern. The game is simple: George shows you a picture from his travels and asks you to recreate it using Legos. You have to dig around in your box of pieces to recreate the image and then take a picture of it on the Playmat. Using a brick recognition system from Eye-Cue , the game awards you points for speed and accuracy. The game is oddly addicting and great for kids. The pieces are bit small so it’s aimed at ages 12 and up but it’s also a great way to build teamwork with one player – maybe a parent – calling out the pieces and the other player putting the object together. The game marks Lego’s further attempts at capitalizing on its strong lead in children’s toys into new markets. The impetus for Life Of George is based on the success of the Lego series of video games (Lego Harry Potter, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego My Dinner With Andre) as well as its quiet but apparently popular Lego Universe, a brick-based MMO. By adding a casual game like Life of George, with it’s candy-coated graphics and clever gameplay, you grab the kids who may not want to bring their entire Lego collection to Grandma’s but still want to play with their blocks. As a parent, I find that the game is also helpful in teaching counting and hand-eye coordination as you need to find blocks as quickly as possible and then smoosh them together. Naysayers will note that George does not offer much in the way of imaginative play and I’d agree. But, as we all know, making the thing on the Lego box is often far more exciting than making another “car” using the big green board and a bunch of bricks. There’s a reason behemoths like the 1200-piece Millennium Falcon exists: people love to build things with Lego, but they don’t always want to be structural engineers. To be clear, Life Of George is a casual game in the vein of Cut The Rope or Angry Birds. You play it for a while, maybe forget about it, maybe dump all of the pieces into the main Lego box down the line. However, at $29 plus a free iOS download (a price I suspect will go down over time) it’s a fun way to interact with your Lego using electronics. Click to view slideshow. Herr George has a Facebook page and his game is available on October 1st .

Toshiba Announces Updat...

If ever there was an audience for a silver and neon green laptop, kids would be it (and also maybe people who like lime green a lot). That said, Toshiba has just launched its updated kid-friendly laptop: the Satellite L735D. Toshiba and Best Buy worked on this one together, and did quite a bit of research to make sure that the little ones were getting what they wanted. Which was a lot of silver and neon green. The Satellite L735D is really just the L635 wrapped up in some kid-friendly design, packed full of kid-friendly software, with more aggressive pricing. It’s a full 13.3-inch laptop, with a 1.3GHz AMD E-series processor and a 320GB hard drive. The 13.3-inch screen has a 1300

Google’s Getting Harry ...

This morning Google made an announcement of magical significance: the Harry Potter eBooks, which are being released for the first time this October, will be available via its Google Books platform. That sounds like it should be a given, but in the case of Potter it isn’t — author J.K. Rowling is selling the books exclusively through Pottermore , a site that she launched with much fanfare last month. Some reports took this to mean that Potter wouldn’t be making his way to the Kindle (or that end-users would have to deal with clunky workarounds to get the book off of Google Books and onto Amazon’s popular device). Fortunately, that isn’t the case: we’ve received word from an Amazon spokesperson that the company is “working closely with Pottermore to make sure Kindle customers will be able to buy and read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.” That’s important, because even before today’s Google announcement people have questioned if Potter would come to the Kindle. Pottermore is reportedly distributing the books in a DRM-free format, and historically Amazon has only sold its books with DRM . Update : Amazon says that they actually sell lots of Kindle books without DRM, and that the decision is up to the publisher. It’s unclear exactly what Amazon is going to do here, but obviously they’re working something out (and they have a strong incentive to, given that the series has sold 450 million copies in print). One thing to note: Amazon’s statement makes it clear that Potter is coming to the Kindle, but it’s still feasible that there could be different release windows in play. As for the purchase process itself, it sounds like users will buy the books from Pottermore, then choose which eBook platform they’d like them delivered to. And while it doesn’t have exclusive rights to the books, Google does have a leg up on Amazon in at least one respect: they’ve been chosen as “the preferred third party payment platform for all purchases made on Pottermore.com” — you’ll be able to pay with either Google Checkout, or your credit card. Given how many people will flock to the site, this could well introduce Google Checkout to a lot of people for the first time. Finally, Google hints that there will be more coming from its partnership: “Stay tuned for more Pottermore and Google wizardry on the web this summer, leading up to when Pottermore opens.”