Comparison shopping site NexTag has acquired product recommendation research engine Wize. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Launched in 2006, Wize lets consumers search for reviews on electronics, home goods, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews, such as Amazon and BestBuy, as well as expert reviews from traditional product review sites. → Read More
Product reviews, both from users and experts, are an integral part of the shopping process. Generally, I scour the web for both negative and positive reviews, across multiple sites before purchasing ant type of gadget. Product recommendation research engine Wize has launched a redesigned version of its platform that aggregates reviews from across the web. Launched in 2006, Wize lets consumers search for reviews on electronics, home goods, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews, such as Amazon and BestBuy, as well as expert reviews from traditional product review sites.
Wize’s technology has been tweaked to read reviews across the web and then analyze what people have said is good, bad or important using real everyday language (i.e. Very Portable, Great for sports!). So shoppers can indicate in their product review search that they are looking for a camera that is “very portable” or “good for vacations” and they will receive recommendations with that language. → Read More
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies: adap.tv AdaptiveBlue AggregateKnowledge CastTV Critical Metrics Jangl Pando Networks SodaHead Spock Wize ZapMeals ZenZui Zing Adap.tv – They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about. AdaptiveBlue – Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here. Aggregate Knowledge – One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation. CastTV – A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ. Critical Metrics – A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody. Jangl – They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission → Read More
Kevin Werbach and I are pleased to announce this year’s finalists to present at the Supernova 2007 Conference, on Thursday, June 21, 3:30pm – 5:30pm, at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. We had a record number of submissions this year, which made it extremely difficult to select the finalists. Many of the selected companies will be showcasing new products for the first time at the conference. Here are the companies that made the final cut: adap.tv Adaptive Blue Aggregate Knowledge CastTV CriticalMetrics Jangl Pando Networks SodaHead Spock Wize ZapMeals ZenZui Zing Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit their company for consideration. I look forward to moderating the panel with Kevin and to seeing more great technology in action. TechCrunch readers can take advantage of a $200 discount for Supernova registration using “crunch2″ for the 2-day registration and “crunch3″ for the full conference package. → Read More
Silicon Valley based Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.” We first profiled Wize and some of its competititors late last year and said Wize had the best chance for commercial success of the bunch. Tonight, they are announcing a first round of financing – $4 million from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners. → Read More
Product review search engine Retrevo was selected to launch at DEMO yesterday and it’s pretty cool. We’ve written about competitor ViewScore here before and also launched this month is yet another similar service that just launched called Wize. All of these sites will help you find reviews of electronics and other products and each of them has a unique feature set that adds value to the basic search and aggregation. What could be better than services that aggregate reviews? Perhaps an aggregate review of these type of services. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’ve come to the right place. If neither gadgets nor reviews are your thing, I think the following are still interesting case studies in how to add value on top of product search and affiliate revenue generation. Affiliate and contextual advertising have created a seductive opportunity for monetization that many site designers are seeking to cash in on. There are so many sites that try to monetize affiliate links that I’ve grown bored with most of them, but the following ones are more fresh and interesting than most. Between these three sites I think that Wize has the best chance for commercial success, but I really like some of the features of the other two sites, Retrevo and Viewscore. Retrevo Retrevo just launched yesterday. It discovers product manuals and previews them if in PDF format, displays information from manufacturer websites, searches blogs and forums, professional reviews and articles and offers a preview pane to easily switch between sources. It does not offer numerical ratings, saved searches or much else. The variety of sources searched are very good, but not much value added on top of that. For a simple, powerful, thorough search – Retrevo is a good option. The company is backed by just under one million dollars from Alloy Ventures and is seeking further funding. They plan to roll out many new features in the future to support the full life-cycle of product ownership all the way to recycling things. Matt Marshall wrote about Retrevo earlier this week. ViewScore Israel based ViewScore uses numeric score averaging and a semantic algorithm to give products an average score out of 100 over thousands of professional reviews online. The review sources are ranked by another algorithm and user feedback. The site grabs product specs, compares similar products and offers comparative pricing from multiple online shopping sites. Users can also → Read More
