GDGT Doubles Down On Product Reviews; Hires Former Consumer Reports Guy As Director Of Content

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, February 16th, 2012
gdgt

Social product review site gdgt is announcing a key hire today as the startup continues to try to innovate on technology product reviews. Gdgt has brought on Marc Perton, the former Executive Editor of Online Media for Consumer Reports (basically the guy who oversaw the Consumer Report’s online strategy), as its new Director of Content. Perton also previously worked with GDGT co-founders Ryan Block and Peter Rojas at Engadget.

Along with this new talent, gdgt is debuting freshly revamped product pages, which Block says are built to make it super easy and fast to get criteria-based review data, comparison shopping information (via Amazon right now, with additional retailers coming soon), specs, and other product intel.

You can see an example here.

The site has also turned on Amazon shopping links (and are collecting affiliate fees) and will be adding more retailers soon. As Block explains to us, this year gdgt will be focusing even more deeply on solving a big problem in the personal technology space, which is product reviews. And he says there’s much more innovation to come in the future.

Last Fall, gdgt started syndicating its crowdsourced product data, user review data, Q&A and discussions across related Engadget content.

GDGT, which is definitely NOT being bought by CNET, has $3.72 million in funding from True Ventures, betaworks, Spark Capital, AOL Ventures, and others.

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