Cheap Uncle »
Cheap Uncle is a shopping website that merges online couponing and comparison shopping into one, easy-to-use site. By taking coupons from its sister site, CouponCabin, and combining them with product price comparisons, CheapUncle uses unique patent-pending technology to provide its customers with a money-saving experience.
All shoppers need to do is log on to Cheap Uncle and search for the item they want. Within seconds, the virtual "cheap uncle" will search coupons, deals and pricing information of more than 14,000 online retailers to find the best possible price. A link is then provided to the merchant's site for easy shopping.
Duo Consulting took advantage of Yahoo's application programming interface (API) to enables the mashup of Yahoo Store retailers and product coupons housed in Coupon Cabin's database. Additionally, Duo utilized Amazon's EC2/S3 virtual server and storage system permitting Cheap Uncle to dynamically scale their server power and storage capacity to meet the demands of online shoppers.
Cheap Uncle is the first business model of its type using the online tools from Yahoo and Amazon. Originally planned as a massive hardware implementation requiring the purchase of multiple servers and the provisioning of substantial bandwidth, Duo engineered a composite Web 2.0 application that permits Cheap Uncle to pay only for the capacity that it needs. Creatively engineering this implementation saved Cheap Uncle tens of thousands of dollars in hardware acquisition, hosting requirements and ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs.
