With Black Friday rapidly approaching, there are plenty of deals coming out that are making saving money during the holiday season easier and easier. This time last year, the recession was in its infancy and companies were still trying to figure out the way to attract new customers. During the holiday season of 2008, plenty of people were looking for deals. In fact, Savings.com saved people almost $4.4M* during the holidays in 2008. The most popular category was electronics and Savings.com's electronics deals saved users over $1.5M.

It's time to end the suspense and to let you all know who we've chosen to attend the first ever Save Up. These lucky ladies and gentlemen will be joining us in San Francisco on November 5th for a day of savings-oriented panels and fun. We received many, many amazing entries, and it was very difficult to pick just a few.

Without further ado, here are the names of the DealPros who will be attending the Save Up next month:

We here at Savings.com are devoted to working hard so that you always have easy access to all the best online coupons and deals. And as much as we know and understand the value of a dollar, we also see the value in taking time to enjoy some of the finer things in life.

This past Friday was one of those times. We invited our significant others, some business partners, and a few friends to celebrate a successful and exciting third quarter.

Our Community Manager, Sara Dunham (aka "WiscoVixen"), has gone Hollywood on us. She's appearing on Best Deals TV Show to tout the benefits of Savings.com.

Best Deals TV Show is southern California's #1 most-watched consumer program on KTLA 5 and KCAL 9. Consumer reporters Lynda Halligan and Andrew Amador travel all over southern California searching for the best buys and value for services.

The spot will air on L.A. channels KTLA 5 and KCAL 9 starting this Saturday. Early birds can catch it at 8:30 AM PST on October 11th and 25th on KCAL 9. Night owls can get their Wisco-fix at 1:30 AM PST on the 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st on KLTA 5.

Or you can take a peek right now:

One of the coolest parts of working here at Savings.com is watching our elite community of deal experts find, post and share the best deals on the Web. From the mom who knows where to get diapers on the cheap to the tech-guru who shows us where to find the best deals on laptops and gadgets, many Savings.com users are the Web's true coupon connoisseurs. We like to call these savvy savers DealPros™.

Since our community is such a vital part of Savings.com, I wanted to do a little recap of how much money our members have saved each other. Since April when we opened the doors for members to submit deals, people have submitted tons of deals to our site. So how much money have they saved each other?

Drum-roll please!

At Savings.com, we celebrate coupons on a daily basis. But we were still stoked to hear that September is National Coupon Month. We're not surprised that an entire month had been dedicated to coupons--given the steady rise of usage we've witnessed over the last months.

At Savings.com, we work HARD. But we also like to play hard as well. After months of meetings and research and coding and testing, we launched the new and improved website. And last Friday we celebrated our accomplishment with a red and white themed party.

Our goal has always been straightforward: we want to help you shop smart. There are lots of coupon sites out there but our focus is providing quality deals, making the site easy to use and building a passionate community of "DealPros" who are always on top of the best deals.

I am proud to announce that with your feedback and a lot of hard work we made Savings.com faster, easier and even more fun to use.

Here are some highlights of our new site:

Despite the sweltering summer heat in the San Fernando Valley yesterday afternoon, almost 300 people showed up to attend BargainBabe's Frugal Fe$tival. The Fe$tival took place in Woodley Park in Van Nuys, and the park's little picnic area was filled to the brim with expert and amateur coupon hunters alike who were looking for tips, tricks and ways to save a buck or two.

Well everyone, it's nearly time. BargainBabe's Frugal Fe$tival is upon us. This Sunday, July 26th, the frugal folks of Los Angeles will flock to Woodley Park in Van Nuys to meet up and converse about saving money and about, well, being frugal.

I'm gonna let you in on a secret: Our team has been working like crazy for the past several months re-designing Savings.com from the ground up. In addition to a whole new look you will find the new Savings.com faster, easier and even more fun to use. Here are some things that you can look forward to:

For the past two weeks, we've been running a Twitter Roomba contest. Everyone that followed our new Twitter account @savings and everyone that RTed (retweeted, for those of you who are not Twitter lingo savvy) one of our posts has been entered into the drawing to win a brand new iRobot Roomba 530 robot vacuum cleaner.

We amassed 382 followers at our new Twitter account, and many of those followers RTed us during the course of the contest. When all was said and done, we had 529 entries. We used random.org to choose a winner from our list of entries. And the winner is...

It's about time for our annual trek cross country to NYC for LinkShare Symposium East. This has always been a must attend industry event for us primarily because of the massive amount of networking opportunities it presents. For 2009, the event is once again sold out and we are going full bore as one of the proud sponsors.

As an addendum to our 30 Deal Hunters to Follow on Twitter blog post we recently released, I want to let you know about the team of Savings.com DealPros that's out there in the Twitterverse spreading coupons and deals to the masses.

Each of our deal hunters has a specific area of expertise, so when you follow one (or all) of them, you'll be getting the very best deals for that specific category. They're also there for you to request deals from. Looking for a deal on something in particular? Let them know and they'll do their darnedest to find you the best deal on what you want.

Without further ado, our Savings.com DealPros are:

Some of us here at the Savings.com office celebrated National Bike to Work Day by--what else?--biking to work! From left, Jacob H., Sheryl and Jacob S. all did their part cutting down on carbon emissions (for what it's worth, I WALKED to work!) by cycling to the office instead of driving.

For Jacob H. and Sheryl, it was a breezy 1-3 mile ride, but Jacob S. put us all to shame by navigating his way to Santa Monica from the Mid-Wilshire section of Los Angeles with a NINE mile ride.

Way to go, Jacob S.!

Photos, videos, blogs...these things are typically what comes to mind when you think of online communities. There are groups of people out there sharing everything from ridiculous photos of their cats to opinions on and reviews of restaurants in their area. I'd like to introduce a new type of community to you...a community of people dedicated to saving each other money by sharing, commenting on, and voting on coupons and deals.

We know our smart, savvy community knows how to find great deals online, and it looks like others are joining the revolution. Last week (Thursday, February 19th) the Chairman of ComScore (Gian Fulgoni) gave his review of online retail from the 2008 holiday season. He was very clear that he believes online coupon sites have reached the "tipping point" and have achieved mass acceptance. He highlighted "coupons" as one of the largest growing search terms with 157% growth from December 2007 to December 2008. In this same time period, Savings.com grew over 300%. It's great to see the entire industry growing and to know our community is helping people find the best deal on whatever they're looking for. It's even better to see us growing faster than any other major coupons site....

We are growing like crazy, and we're looking for a couple of rockstars to join our team. Well, maybe rockstars isn’t the perfect analogy since they’re usually irresponsible, strung out, and unreliable, but you get the idea. We've got several open positions at the moment, but the two we're most aggressively searching for right now are listed below:

We launched a Savings.com account on Twitter a few weeks ago, and we've received an overwhelming response from the Twitter community. To date, we have over 850 followers who receive a couple tweets each day from us about new and exclusive codes, new blog posts (like this one!), and anything else we think they might like to know about Savings.com, coupons, and online shopping (follow us at: @savingsdotcom ).

Hello and welcome to our new blog. My goal with this is to openly communicate with you and to get feedback on how we can improve. This has been a tremendous ride for all of us and we've seen savings.com grow from 4 full time employees to over 30 in less than two years. In that same period of time we've seen traffic go from a few thousand visitors in a month to a million visitors per month. We are thrilled that our "little" idea has taken off. I still remember the first time one of our employees told a stranger he met at a bar what we did and the guy said, "really, I love your site!" That was about a year ago and we still didn't think anyone knew who we were. Since then I've had countless experiences where friends and strangers have reached out to me and told me what savings.com is doing well (and also what we can do better). People seem to love the simplicity and honesty of our site, "all the best deals as voted by you."