Google Releases TipJar to Save You Money

This past week Google released the TipJar (http://www.google.com/tipjar), a community-driven web service designed to consolidate and share ideas on how to save money.  The site is broken down into categories, such  as home, work, finance, and food.  Users are able to submit their own unique ideas, and those ideas are voted on by the community.  This allows the most useful and beneficial ideas to rise to the top.

Sample ideas include:

• "Utilize online bill pay with your bank. It keeps you in much closer contact with your money, as you can keep a very close eye on your balance and be in much less danger of overdrafting. It saves you money on stamps and paper checks."
• "Buy a water filter and take your own water to the gym/sports etc. bottled water is expensive, unnecessary and bad for the environment"
• "Keep your car engine tuned and its tires inflated to their proper pressure. Doing both can save you up to $100 a year in gas."
• "Call your cable tv company to cancel your service. Most companies will offer a monthly discount to keep you as a customer. I tried to cancel and was offered $40 off each month. I'm saving over $480 each year now."

Most of the ideas are common sense, but it is quite possible that you may learn something that you didn't know.

The interesting thing about this service, from our perspective, is that it is powered by Google Moderator, which is a free service available under the Google App Engine.  Google Moderator is a very simple tool that uses "crowdsourcing" to determine questions to be asked at conferences, group meetings, Q&A sessions, and the like.  It is a good example of an actual service running "in the cloud".  The Google App Engine is Google's cloud application deployment platform, which allows developers like us to create applications and let the hosting piece be handled under the same scalable platform that Google uses for all of its stuff.  Like all good things Google, the App Engine has a freely available option that is completely usable.