Retrevo, a site that aggregates information about consumer electronics from sources found across the web, has raised $8M in Series B funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Alloy Ventures. Both of these investors were also involved in the company’s Series A round. The company has raised $11.9M to date.
The purpose of Retrevo is to provide consumers with information about electronics before and after they purchase them. During the shopping phase, the site serves as an advisor and maps products visually according to how expensive and feature-intensive they are. Shoppers can also view expert and user reviews found from across the web, as well as prices from various online vendors. Much of this information is scraped from sites like Amazon and CNET (Retrevo started off as a vertical search engine, hence the sophisticated scraping technology).
Once consumers actually buy these electronics, Retrevo helps consumers learn about them and solve technical issues by aggregating user manuals and making them searchable.
The company says that it will use the new money to accelerate its pace of innovation, simplify the user experience, partner with complimentary services, and market the site. Retrevo also claims it has experienced double digit growth over recent months.
Information aggregation and content syndication do have their markets.. nice.
Hmmm – 8M$ hua? I wonder on what basis… Omgili has as a sub-domain reviews aggregation from multiple review sites and other discussion based sites:
http://reviews.omgili.com
Not to mention Summize:
http://www.summize.com/
Well the more the merrier
I have used retrevo and it is totally a cool way to find electronics. I love the graphing technology to give a high level overview. Community based reviews also pretty cool.
This space seems to be promising. I have played in the past with another similar site:
http://www.SmartRatings.com
They seem to be copying the model of review aggregator alaTest.com. alaTest seem to have over 2 million reviews from a lotta countries. Must be an interesting market. alaTest is Swedish, so must be owned by Ikea
Jean: So Retrevo must be owned by Home Depot…?
Interesting space indeed. alaTest seems to be frontrunner internationally, http://www.alaTest.com. A lot of buzz (and cash) for these kind of services right now. Manageable info on quality of products, I wish I thought of it myself
you didn’t mention ViewScore.com and Wise?
I used to work at a patent law firm that filed the patent for ViewScore at 2004 – interesting to see how they will use their patent with this new competition….
Tom
I love retrevo! I met them when I was reporting with Robert Scoble and the gang at Show Stoppers while at CES. Retrevo was the best booth by far! If you want to know more about gadgets its the place to go for the right information.
I even interviewed them in this video:
http://www.podt...ers-at-ces-2008
Why does everyone feel they need to use comments to ‘plug’ their self interests? It’s also apparent most of you haven’t even checked out retrevo or if you did clearly don’t get what they do. I’ve checked all these “review” sites and retrevo is far and away a better experience.
But the big difference which everyone that has commented has *avoided* is their value map. None of the sites all of you referenced have anything like their map. Before I read reviews I first want to find a product that I like. retrevo lets my do that in a way no other site I’ve shopped or publisher I’ve read (cnet, pcmag, etc.) can touch.
I trust the techcrunch readers are more intelligent and when they check the site they’ll realize for themselves the uniqueness of the site.
Mike
In respone to Mike A:
Yes, and I really think that Retrevo rocks the scene in many ways. I personally think their value map is genious! And as you say, the previous posts surely come from people with interests from the other review sites.
But this doesn’t mean that Retrevo has everything right. Most people find them to be a bit too complicated. I am the CEO for another one of those review sites: http://www.testseek.com We relaunched a couple of weeks ago in US with many new features. Our main focus with our new web platform was to make the service REALLY simple to use, for instance, to find the best digital camera, just compare our listing with retrevos:
http://www.test...e808e2b26d55fe2
(set filters to 2007, 10 or more reviews and TS Score > 80)
http://www.retr...digital+cameras
I think both alternatives are good, testseek’s approach may be a little easier to grasp for the not so tech savvy consumers, but Retrevo’s do have more data.
What also needs to be considered is the detail of the data collected, check out the product pages of their highest rated camera, the Nikon D300:
http://www.retr...ikon+D300?rt=oa
http://www.test...e808e2b26d55fe2
What you can see is that retrevo have included links to “expert reviews” that are not really expert reviews, but product release news and announcements and even som “spammy sites”. Testseek.com do not include product news or announcements since it’s of little value to the consumer. All review sources are manually approved before included to our index. Even the reviews are manually checked before added.
Also my opinion is that testseek.com gives the consumer a better idea of what the experts actually thought about the camera, since we include conclusions (like good, bad, bottomline) from the reviews as well as awards.
I know that my opinions are somewhat subjective to my cause… but they are still my honest opinions. As I said before, I really do think that Retrevo is doing something very good. I will definetely keep track of them in the future:)
Another big difference with testseek.com and retrevo.com is that we do not have any VC capital backing us… “we” are actually just two guys from Sweden who started out doing this at our spare time… So I guess we will have our hands full with keeping up with retrevo in the future:)
Cheers
Fredrik Engdahl, CEO testseek.com