10. Pronto.com- Comparing over 70 million products from 125,000 merchants, this website does all the heavy lifting. It even breaks items down by category, store, and brand. A selection of filters helps you see only what you want, and you can sign up for email sales alerts.

9. Discount Calculator- this app allows you to figure out the new price of a discounted item(s) taking tax into consideration.

8. Dealio.com- like Pronto, Dealio lists prices by item and category. However, deals and coupons are featured in a newsfeed style homepage. Users can like or dislike deals, giving you more information at a glance.

7. Groupon.com- you don’t even have to browse; Groupon will email you every day, dishing out another amazing deal catered to your interests and location. Drawbacks: deals come and go quickly and are dependent on whether or not enough people go for it.

6. Google Product Search- if you know what you want, Google makes comparing stores, prices, and products a breeze. After finding a deal, you can buy online or be directed to a store near you. Consumer reviews also help determine the deals from the downright cheap.

5. Dealnews.com- this site is constantly updating, giving you new and fresh deals. The deals are handpicked by the site’s staff, and users and merchants tip them off to bargains. An added bonus, this site omits establishments with poor customer service.

4. RedLaser App- for your iPhone or Droid, this app allows you to actually scan an items barcode and then compare prices from online and local retailers. Pretty neat, huh?

3. Twitter- most companies and retailers are on Twitter, and many of them are tweeting sweet deals before (or even instead of) posting them on their websites. For example, follow JetBlueCheeps to get last minute deals on airfare.

2. FatWallet.com- this allows you to compare prices, like every other site, but also offers a community forum of frugal shoppers and a change to earn cash back when you buy from specific merchants.

1. SlickDeals.net- very popular with its users, this site offers an almost overload of deals, coupons, and price comparisons. It updates frequently, giving you a front page of deals on anything you could want or need, but also gives you the option of filtering down and searching for something specific.

Now get to it! You never have to overspend again!

Part I: Picking your Destination Country

We live on a beautiful planet full of exciting countries, vibrant cultures and unique experiences. However, if you haven’t extensively traveled, picking a destination for your first international work experience can be an intimidating exercise. There is a plethora of information out there, often far too much to digest easily, and the hours upon hours of potential research may seem so daunting that you don’t know where to start.

I have studied in Spain, backpacked through South America, and worked in Argentina, South Africa, and briefly in Southeast Asia. From my experiences I have become significantly more comfortable dealing with the uncertainty that comes from working in emerging markets, and I’d like to share with you some of my trusted resources and “tricks of the trade”:

• Do some serious introspection to figure out what you want from your trip: International travel is a passion for many people, often developed during the undergraduate years through a semester studying abroad, a summer backpacking trip through Europe with friends, or an “Around the world trip” during gap year (common amongst Europeans and Aussies). Having traveled and lived internationally both during and after college, I’ve found that what I enjoy and seek to get out of my foreign excursions has slowly changed over time. I still love meeting people from around the world and seeing exciting new places, but at twenty six I find myself spending less time looking for riveting nightlife and more time learning about the culture, local economy, and enjoying the cuisine of whatever locale I am exploring. Before even considering working internationally, I would recommend setting some time aside to think about what exactly you want to gain from your international experience so you make the most of your time and pick an appropriate destination.

• Create your “Location Criteria” list: While there are many countries out there wonderful for visiting, my criteria for picking a place to live and work are quite different than what I look for in a vacation destination. To understand these differences and begin thinking about which amenities or characteristics are most important to you, think about what you consider essential in your current daily life and what you do could do without. Next, think about what you are unsatisfied with about your current situation, add those attributes to your running and finally force rank the entire list. My criteria list looks something like this (but is ever-changing):

o   Work opportunities in target industry/sector
o   Fluency in local language
o   Cost of living (especially rent, food, transportation, internet/mobile access
o   Culture and beauty of city/town
o   Attractiveness of nearby getaways (e.g. day trips or weekends away)
o   Transportation cost to/from/within
o   Size of local professional community
o   Distance from home

• Create a short-list: Going straight from creating your “Location Criteria” list to internet research will be tempting, but can end up taking you down rat holes for endless hours of semi-useless browsing. Most of us are busy, so unless you have a plethora of time to burn it’s important to find ways to quickly hone in on a short-list of countries that meet your criteria. For me, this usually means two actions: a) reaching out to my well-traveled colleagues, explaining to them what I am looking for, and asking if they have suggestions, and b) selectively googling things like “top emerging market cities to work in” to read what cities are most highly recommended by major international publications. From my personal experience and  extensive word-of-mouth, here are several cities that continually get highly rated:

o   Buenos Aires, Argentina (yes, I’m a little biased)

o   Cape Town, South Africa (ditto)

o   Sao Paolo, Brazil

o   Mexico City, Mexico

o   Santiago, Chile

o   New Delhi, India

o   Bangelore, India

o   Manila, Philippines

o   Singapore
o   Shanghai, China

o   Hong Kong, China

• Find expats living in your target cities: A one hour conversation with an expat who has spent significant time living your target country is much more helpful than hours of Google research. Also, this step should be pretty easy since you’ve already reached out to your network to create your short-list and know where your friends and colleagues have international networks. Offer to take them to lunch if they live nearby, or beg for a Skype phone call if they’re still abroad. I’ve found most people very approachable and often excited to talk about their experience since expat communities tend to be pretty tight, even in some of the biggest international cities.

• Check the latest economic data: Nothing is worse than expecting to pay significantly less in your new location, only to find out that since your friend moved back home the local economy has been booming and cost of living has gone up 30%. After looking up flights, figuring out the average cost for things like accommodation, transportation around town, food (grocery store and eating out), and nightlife. These will be critical data points when choosing your destination and will be valuable inputs into your budget down the line.

Hopefully you find these suggestions helpful and please feel free to chime in with additional recommendations in the comments.

In the next post of this series I will share some thoughts on how to find a company or organization to partner with during your international venture.

The event will bring together new media and entertainment industry professionals for three hours of interactive fun (open bar + food + people = interactive fun).  You can RSVP here: http://www.tubefilter.com/sxsw.  Hurry- there aren’t many spots left on the guest list! Check out the eventbrite to see all of the companies represented.

Here are the important details:

Who: Tubefilter and ValleyGirl.TV at the Cedar Door

What: Three hours of eatin’, drinkin’, and mixin’ it up.

When: 7PM to 10PM on Friday, March 11

Where: The Cedar Door, 201 Brazos St., just one block away from the Convention Center.

How: Get your tickets above and friend up Tubefilter and ValleyGirl.TV on Facebook for more announcements and specials.

Please DM @lalawag or @valleygirlshow on twitter if you’re interested in getting on the VIP list!

Also: don’t miss Tubefilter’s panel at the SXSW Interactive Conference on Sunday, March 13, 2011 – Decision Trees: YouTube’s New Breed of Interactive Storytellers.

See you in Austin!

Information on the hosts:

Tubefilter is the leading authority in the web television space, Tubefilter News exhaustively covers the industry, the creators, and the stars of this fast-paced, emerging entertainment market.

The Valley Girl Show is a fun-spirited, web-based talk show starring Jesse Draper. The show concept is an ‘Ellen Degeneres’ of business with a splash of pink and guests you would only see on Charlie Rose or MSNBC. Featuring interviews with some of the top CEOs and entrepreneurs in the world; past episodes have included guests such as Scott McNealy, founder of S.U.N. Microsystems, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, to name a few.

1. Facebook Connect- have an opinion, quip, or remark that’s simply too witty to share with just your friends in the room? Plug in to Facebook Connect and share it with the world.

2. Oscar.com- it seems obvious (and maybe it is), but the Oscars website is your one stop shop for all things Oscars. For $4.99, enthusiasts can get an “all access” experience offering additional live streams. (Of course, if you want a brief overview of the Oscar nominated movies but with more cute kids, you can go to http://tv.gawker.com/#!5744041/adorable-kids-reenact-five-best-picture-nominated-films)

3. Twitter- Get your phones ready and prepare to hashtag. If you’re following the Oscars or ABC, double hashtag #ask #oscars to direct questions. MTVnews will be going with #oscars, and Washington Post’s Jen Chaney will be using #oscarspotting. Newly Twittering James Franco is also the man to follow.

4. Apps- There are several apps specifically designed to give you a more interactive experience this year. For example, AppEzzy’s Awards Hero: Oscars Edition gives you the opportunity to read up on Oscar noms, watch trailers, and bet on winners. Also, ABC Digital’s Oscar Backstage Pass offers live video feed before, during, and after the show.

5. People.com- Other than its usual live blogging and red carpet coverage, this site will give you the chance to compete to win a $10,000 prize in “Red Carpet Trivia Live.” The contest will feature rounds of trivia and factoids throughout the Oscars. Why should the celebrities be the only ones who win something that night?

6. Oscar Noms- Food, that is! What is a major TV event without some yummy snacks? Try making dishes themed to fit with Oscar nominated movies, fish n’ chips and tea for The King’s Speech, trail mix and ice tea for 127 Hours, pretzels and beer for The Fighter, and apple martinis, sushi, and Doritos for The Social Network. Mmmmm.

Happy Oscar-ing!

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: How do to people access the “Young Africa Live” portal you developed?

Simon: It’s running on Vodafone Live, which is the portal for everyone who’s got a Vodacom branded phone here. Whenever they launch their browser, that’s the first site.

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: And how does it work? What kind of content do you have on “Young Africa Live”?

Simon: It’s for free to access for anyone with a Vodacom SIM. So everyday there’s four articles on there, all around categories like love, sex, and relationships. It’s just short articles with a punch line at the bottom that will trigger a conversation or comments. We’re seeing an incredible uptake, like over 2,000 comments being placed per day on our articles. It was launched last year the first of December on World AIDS Day and by now we’re the biggest youth portal in South Africa with this focus. It’s been exciting. I think there are over and close to 700 articles now that have been written.

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: What are some of the challenges you face with the solutions you build?

Simon: There’s a challenge obviously, moderation-wise, like how do you deal with the volume of all these comments coming in? How do you encourage a good and healthy community discussion? White-listing all bad words is impossible. Since the portal is all around sex, domestic violence, AIDS awareness, censorship just doesn’t work.

It’s also really hard to find solid partners to work with on location in these countries because a lot of it is very ad hoc and not as robust as we like it to be. We are trying to build a really strong platform to reach millions of people in Africa. Yet, for the bottom of the pyramid in Africa a lot of what we are building on is not so robust all the time. As long as you’re aware of that and expect that things are going to go wrong, then it’s okay.

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: How are you able to reach the bottom of the pyramid with a technology solution like this?

Simon: It has to be free to the end user. Someone obviously has to pay but not the end user.

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: What are some of the upcoming innovative ideas you have in store?

Simon: For the first of December, we’re starting with some new stuff like the ability to run a quiz on HIV awareness to test your knowledge about HIV. The other day I was preparing that and reading through some of the HIV facts that will be posted on that portal.

Josiah, Rising Pyramid: And how do you incent the users to go to your portal?

Simon: It’s pretty interesting; we run these competitions with airtime as an incentive. As people participate in the competition they are educated about the topics of the portal, love, sex and relationships in the time of Aids.

To be continued…check back next Tuesday for post 3 of 3 in which Josiah and Simon discuss innovative features that Praekelt has developed with mobile operators to deliver an impact in South Africa.

What will this mean for California’s neurotechnology companies?

The report described advances in areas such as brain-machine interfaces, mind control, and neuropharmaceuticals. The report went on to mention: “it will be imperative that the intelligence community be able to identify scientific advances relevant to national security when they occur.”

The unclassified report, entitled “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies” is available through sources such as Amazon.com or read it online for free. If you don’t have time to read a full report, check out this debrief in Wired Magazine.

10.Genetech. A large company (almost 10,000 employees), Genetech offers job sharing opportunities as well as paid sabbaticals. It is also looking at a strong yearly job growth.

9. Cisco Systems. Supportive of telecommuting, this company saw a healthy 60% rise on the stock market. Nothing to sneeze at, especially when almost all of Cisco System’s 28,000 employees are shareholders.

8. Boston Consulting Group. This small company offers steady job growth, full health benefits, and has an interest in women in the workforce. A career mentor advises any employee working more than 60 hours a week. See- they care about your physical AND mental health!

7. Walt Disney. Its creative atmosphere and emphasis on communication make Walt Disney a great place for recent college grads. Entry level employees have access to a 401(k) savings plan, and Disney foots some of the bill for future schooling. It’s no wonder why this company is such an active undergrad campus recruiter.

6. Capitol One. Not only do Capitol One employees make their own schedules, but they are armed with company gadgets to make it easier for them to work from home- or wherever! Locations are all over the country, too, meaning you don’t necessarily have to uproot to work here.

5. Zappos.com encourages a quirky and fun working environment. The company has grown rapidly, currently exceeding $1 billion in yearly sales.

4. DreamWorks Animation SKG. Another great place for recent grads, DreamWorks fosters a fun and creative workplace. Not only are there free meals and movie screenings abound (a must for anyone still paying student loans), but any employee can pitch an idea to executives.

3. SAS. Taking the number one spot on Fortune 500’s Best Companies to Work For the second year in a row, SAS has some of the happiest employees around. Child care, on-site healthcare, and a beauty salon are just a few of the perk of working at SAS.

2. Google offers its employees a great opportunity for job growth and encourages creativity, and engineers are able to spend a portion of their time on independent projects. Not to mention a casual dress code, free healthy meals, and a swimming spa. Plus, it’s planning on hiring over 6,000 new employees this year.

1. Facebook has been outshining Google lately in salary and employee satisfaction. It’s not only Google, however; Facebook pays more than virtually any other software competitor in salary and bonuses. Always scoping out the freshest talent, Facebook also offers a challenging and satisfactory workplace.

Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn?  I’m sure many of us have something we’d like to know more about, a skill we’d like to master, or maybe even just a curiosity we’d like to explore.

Enter Udemy.

Udemy’s primary goal is to make it easy for anyone to learn (and teach!) online. Their site makes it possible for you to upload presentations and videos, host live classroom sessions, and write articles in your areas of expertise.

I’ve browsed their offerings and was impressed with the both quality and scope of the content available. If you want to learn about something, chances are you can do it on Udemy.  On the flip side, if you have a burning desire to share your knowledge, it’s easy to start your own class as well. Courses range from “Stocks for Beginners” to ”Pole Dancing Instructional” to “Healthy Cooking Classes.” If those don’t intrigue you, check out the full list of classes at http://www.udemy.com.

For more on how Udemy  plans to disrupt the education industry, continue reading our exclusive interview with co-founder Gagan Biyan.

1. What inspired you to create Udemy?  Beyond simply solving the problem of educators’ physical, location-based constraints (that you discuss on your website), was there a particular course or educator that motivated the development of your site?

Udemy was the creation of my two cofounders, Oktay and Eren. When Oktay and Eren were in Turkey (where they were born and raised) 3 years ago, they were sponsored by the government to build a live learning platform so Web 2.0 entrepreneurs in Europe could teach aspiring entrepreneurs in Turkey. After they completed development, they realized that this tool could be a lot more impactful if it was provided – for free – to anyone in the world. So, they set out to build a site that could let anyone teach anyone and the end result was Udemy.

2. What do you mean when you say you want to “disrupt the education industry”?
We want to democratize online learning by making it possible for anyone to teach and learn over the internet. It currently costs a lot of money to publish an online course or a book that is educational. Furthermore, you have to be a part of an educational institution to publish a course. As such, many of the millions of experts out there cannot or do not provide their knowledge to the world. We seek to disrupt the institutional nature of education by enabling individuals to teach without any tie to a formal institution.

3. Which videos currently on Udemy do you wish had been around when you were in college?
Great question. The courses I wish I had during college are Eric Ries’s Lean Startup course (http://www.udemy.com/the-lean-startup-debunking-myths-of-entrepreneurship/), the Limit Hold ‘Em course (http://www.udemy.com/getting-started-limit-holdem/), and How to Run a Website with WordPress course (http://www.udemy.com/how-to-run-a-website-with-wordpress/).

4. What is the most interesting or unique online course you’ve seen?
The Hot Thai Kitchen course is pretty cool (http://www.udemy.com/hot-thai-kitchen/). So is Larry Hewett’s Multimedia For the Classroom (http://www.udemy.com/multimedia-for-the-classroom/).

5. Are there any subjects you haven’t seen taught on Udemy that you would like to see?
Tons! We’re just at the beginning. I’d love to see some development courses (PHP, Rails) and some more courses on cooking!

6. What makes a successful Udemy video/lesson?
The most successful ones so far have had a good mix of videos, PowerPoints and articles. I’ve found that the courses that resonate the most with students are ones in which the instructor took great care to ensure that it was comprehensive and useful. You can really tell when instructors worked on their courses.

7. You also write for MobileCrunch.  How do you balance contributing to a popular tech blog with running a startup?  Do you ever find a conflict of interest?
To be honest, I don’t write as much for MobileCrunch much anymore (I wish I had more time) – only about 1 article per month. I mainly do it for fun, but I do often have to excuse myself from writing great stories due to conflicts of interest. Furthermore, all of my articles get screened by my editor, Greg Kumparak, who’s awesome. Ultimately, I simply have to make sure there are no conflicts in any of the articles I write.

8. Having grown up in Silicon Valley, did you always plan on a career in the tech world?
Haha – it’s funny how separate the Silicon Valley that the tech community sees and the “real” Silicon Valley are. The reality is I had family and friends in the tech community my entire life, but I wasn’t really in the startup world – in fact, I didn’t know it existed. So, while I did always expect to have a career in the tech world, I didn’t know it would be starting my own venture!

9. What is your vision for the future of Udemy, and/or what is your hope for the future of online education?
For online education, I hope that the future is as Bill Gates recently said, “In 5 years, the best education in the world will be available online.” For Udemy, I can only do my best to ensure Udemy helps accelerate that vision.

10.Do you have any advice for young innovators and entrepreneurs?
As cheesy as it sounds, remove the word “can’t” from your vocabulary. It’s so easy to throw your hands up in the air in frustration when things seem difficult. Instead, use your creativity to try to solve the problem and think about what you would do if someone had a gun to your head.