Clipix.com: Save Money While Organizing Your Life

The average Canadian spends 43.5 hours online -- double the worldwide average of 23.1 hours -- and in that time we're surfing back and forth from Facebook to Twitter and all over the place. However, how many of us can really remember where we've been online from one moment to the next? Besides, if we see something we like, unless we remember to bookmark the page, how can we ever remember how to get back to it?

Plus, for many of us, bookmark lists are long and unwieldy and half the time we don't even remember what's there. If only there were a better way to organize your browsing on the web and what if, while you were doing some online shopping, the same mechanism could notify you when the items you want drop below a certain price?

Well, Clipix does both. Created by Oded Berkowitz, the founder and former senior partner at Trade.com -- the first online stock trading platform -- and the founder and CEO of MyRegistry.com -- the world's largest public online registry -- Clipix.com allows users to save documents and websites in the cloud on custom themed clipboards. They can even share these book marks and documents between computers, so collaborators or family can see them, while planning an office move or family vacation, for example.
"When we moved to our new MyRegistry.com office everything was custom designed, I had a lot of workers and it was one huge mess," says Berkowitz.

"I looked for painters and I had to re-look for them. I looked for furniture and I couldn't find it again. I said to my wife, 'Why can't I have everything in a very organized fashion, so that when I need to go back to something, it takes me a second, rather than hours and hours, and sometimes you can never find it again -- that's when Clipix was born."

Using Clipix couldn't be easier: simply surf over to Clipix.com and login using your existing Facebook or Twitter account and if you don't have either, don't worry, email works too. Once you've signed up, just drag the 'clip' button to your bookmark bar and browse as normal. Once you see something you'd like to go back to in the future, just click the 'clip' button and the clipix pop-up box will appear allowing you to pick the image you want to associate with at site. Once an image is selected (either taken from the web page or custom made) you can choose a category to put the clip in, such as gifts for the family, books you want to read, articles you've read or a category of your own making. You can then go back to Clipix.com and go back to the source website for any clip any time you want.

"From a bird's eye view, Clipix may look a little like Pinterest, but it is significantly different," says Berkowitz. "If you go down a tiny bit of a layer, you see that although you add things with a clip button, or with a pin button, nothing else is similar. Pinterest is a very successful social network, but Clipix is not. Clipix is a utility that one can use to manage their own life and as such, everything on Clipix is defaulted to private. It's not about sharing everything that you clip with the world, it's about sharing with people who care."

To that end, you can share any of your clipix boards with friends, both on and off Clipix, with its syncboard feature. Simply enter the names of the people who are on Clipix and the e-mail addresses for the people who are not, and they will be able to see your clipboard. You can even specify whether they can edit the board by removing or adding new clips. If you want to share specific clips with the world via Facebook or Twitter, that's possible as well. Plus, just so your clipboards don't get as long as your old bookmark lists, you can combine clipboards and drag them into one.

"If someone wants to build a new house and they clip wallpaper designs, landscape ideas and stone ideas, all those are separate clipboards that can be dragged into one, 'New House' clipboard," says Berkowitz. Besides, unlike a bookmark bar, you can take your clips with you through your iPad or smartphone, which is perfect if you're traveling and need to be reminded of the restaurants and attractions you may have clipped.

"Also with Clipix, you can clip documents like PDF files, word documents and excel so it makes things very easy and efficient because I just bought a new TV and after I bought it, I also clipped the receipt into the clipboard, so not only do I have the store that I bought it from, but the receipt right next to it, in case there are any problems with the TV."

Depending on how much he paid for the TV, fixing it might not matter to Berkowitz because if you clip anything from a shopping website, like Amazon, you can set a price alert, so when the price of what you clip drops to the amount or percentage you specify, Clipix will alert you of the sale. The price alert feature could help Berkowitz find a new TV for cheap if the time comes.

"It doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have, everybody loves a good deal," he says. "I noticed that my wife kept going back to websites for her favourite shoes and favourite dresses and I said, 'What are you doing?' and she says, 'I keep going back to see when these things are going on sale,' and that's when the light bulb went off."

When a clip has a price alert attached to it, a visual cue, in the form of an orange dot, lets you know which clips have price alerts and which do not. Once the desired price is reached, the orange dot switches to a green flag and you also get a notification in your e-mail inbox.

"I was looking at shoes on Zappos and about a week and a half later I get the notification that my price alert arrived and I tell you, I couldn't believe my eyes," says Berkowitz. The price alert is even more effective on the mobile version, which allows you to scan bar codes to clip things you see in a store, comparison shop, and add price alerts to the scanned items. It also works on real estate. "Realtors now are putting price drop alerts on each other's property. We're making Black Friday every day," he adds. The bar code scanner can also help with QR codes, which can be scanned and the information they reveal can be stored in a customized Clipix clipboard.

It goes without saying that Clipix is great for shopping, but clipping articles may leave something to be desired, since you can only clip images related to that article and not the article itself. If you want to read the article, you have to go back to the source website. It may be inconvenient, but there's a good reason for this.

"The reason for this is trademark issues and copyright issues," says Berkowitz. "The article doesn't belong to me and copyright is a huge issue, which is why everything you clip on Clipix has a watermark that says copyright protected."

The reaction has been largely positive. In fact, most people prefer to read articles from the original website because they like to see it with the proper links and images. However, sometimes, articles you once clipped have been taken down by the original website as time passes. Thankfully, Berkowitz has a solution.

"In the next 30 days, we're adding the ability to archive articles, but it will be presented to you in a different fashion because it's not live anymore. Still you'll be able to read it right on your Clipix portal, as if you uploaded a document," says Berkowitz. "Me personally, I like to read articles that are live on the original site because I want to read them with the links and everything else." For the record, videos can be seen from the Clipix portal and you don't need to go back to the original site to view them.

Clipix is about trying to stay very simple, functional and about solving problems," says Berkowitz. "I don't want to try and teach you how to do something that you do forever in a crazy different way. I'm just trying to show you something you do forever in an easier way."