plums

Google Offers continues to expand.

The daily-deals arm of the search giant announced 14 new deal partners and new personalization features making the process of finding and receiving relevant deals in one location more seamless for consumers. Google Offers also branched out to four new cities this week: San Jose, San Diego, Minneapolis and Baltimore.

"If deals aren't relevant or don't match your interests, they're spam," Nitin Mangtani, product manager for Google Offers, told CNET. So to broaden its consumer appeal and make deals more targeted, Google is adding new inventory categories such as luxury … Read more

You know how you can never find the spoon at the bottom of the diaper bag when the baby is screaming for food? Sure, maybe I could be a more organized mom, but I've seen my friends with the same frenzied look nearly every time I'm out and about.

I'd never heard of pouched baby food before this product turned up in my in-box, but apparently it's a popular alternative to jars. And Plum Organics has teamed up with Boon Inc. to create a spoon and pouch system. The custom-designed spoon easily attaches to the spout … Read more

Outright, an online service that allows self-employed individuals to manage their bookkeeping, has inked a deal with FreshBooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service, that will allow Outright users to import invoices and payments from FreshBooks. Once users signs up, they can set up automatic syncing between the applications and all income and expense information will be downloaded immediately to Outright. The feature is available now and requires registration for both services.

PropertyShark, a provider of real estate data and listings, announced recently that it has formed a partnership with Maponics to provide the underlying boundary data for its … Read more

Introducing the latest spin on microblogging: Plum Groups, which lets you create your own private stream of bite-size content to share and collaborate with a select group. You can add status messages much like Twitter posts or Facebook status updates, or you can share links, videos, files, or photos. Basically, it puts the ever-popular "stream" slant on the private group niche (you know, like Google Groups).

"Services like Facebook and Twitter are powerful ways to broadcast to large groups of people, but they stop short of keeping real-world groups like families, close friends, schools and co-workers connected … Read more

Plum, a social media platform company that provides tools to Web site developers to help them make their site social, launched Share Space Pro on Monday to provide users with a custom social-networking application that can be modified to look and feel like the host site it's running on.

Share Spaces are micro-social networks that let a Web site's users interact with others that have the same interests. Companies can sign up for Plum's service and create a mini-social network for a page on their site with the help of Share Space Pro. The tool lets them … Read more

It swallowed a pit from a plum.

And over the course of three test drives through our house, the Roomba 560, the new top-of-the-line Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner cleaner from Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot, also gobbled up three rubber bands, two stray edamame, seven coins, a couple of beads and a grapefruit-size wad of pet hair.

And that was just what I found in the dust bin. An additional chamber that captures fine particles and sits next to the air filter captured a disc of dust that would cover a butter dish. The house was dirtied on purpose for this … Read more