January 19th - Winnipeg Free Press
Payoff.com
Getting a handle on personal finances might have been one of your resolutions at the start of new year. Whether you are trying to save for a specific purpose, get your spending in check, put some money away for retirement or just trying to find out where all your money goes, Payoff.com may be just the type of online financial resource you are looking for. There are numerous financial management tools (if you don’t end up liking the novelty of Payoff.com, try Mint.com), but Payoff is unique in that it mixes serious money management tools with “fun and dynamic” elements that you would find in games to help you reach your goals. Gamification is a new buzzword and you are seeing elements of it pop up everything from personal fitness tools to weight-loss programs to websites looking to attract more users. Payoff.com’s CEO and founder Scott Saunders explains his two year old start-up as a tool that “enhances people’s intrinsic motivation to achieve financial goals through rewards and by illustrating the connection between short-term financial behaviours and long-term goals. We want to help more people sleep better with funded savings and lighter debt loads.” If you are looking for a unique way to keep more money in your pocket, Payoff.com might be right for you.
Shut Up and Play the Hits
Back in April, James Murphy and his art-project-turned-band, LCD Soundsystem, wrapped up their 10-year run with a sweaty, nearly four-hour-long dance party at Madison Square Garden. Considering the tickets sold out almost instantly (mainly due to the fact that scalpers and brokers wrangled most of the available tickets) and the whole confetti-filled concert was streaming live to the web, the fact that the whole project ends with a documentary film isn’t that surprising. For fans of the proto-dance-punk act, it’s a fitting final chapter and for Murphy, it is the perfect way to end the band. Although Shut Up and Play the Hits is supposed to be the end note for LCD, with the type of money being thrown around for reunions, they’ll probably be back together to play Coachella in 2021. The film is narrated by Grantland’s Chuck Klosterman.
Frugalo
As we all know, penny-pinching Winnipeggers love a good deal. If you are like most people who likes to save a buck, you probably signed up for every daily deal site you came across last year. At first, the deals are a novelty, but after a while the emails start to clog up your inbox and become more of a nuisance than something you actually want to look at. You either end up deleting them without looking at them, archiving them in some folder or unsubscribing. Here is where Frugalo comes in. It is a new web app that centralizes all your daily deal subscription in one location. It lets you manage your deal accounts, send bargains to your friends (through Facebook, of course) and ultimately free your inbox from the deluge of daily deal emails, but still be connected to the bargains in your city.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 19, 2012
