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.

Along with a technology overhaul, Wize has added a host of new features including “Wize Choice Recommendations,” which is an authoritative opinion of the best and worst products available on the Web, based on Wize’s proprietary analysis engine; and gives users the ability to see reviews by product or by a category or consumer need (i.e. MP3 accessories).

Wize will also let you save and organize your searches relating to a given product, making it easier to the user to save research. And Wize is becoming a little more social by pulling in real-time feeds from Twitter that have mentions of products.

I’m a fan of Wize’s tweaked site, which gives consumers a in-depth look at what people are saying about a particular product. The startup, which has raised $4 million in funding, faces competition from Retrevo, ReviewGist and ViewScore.

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adap.tv	AdaptiveBlue	Aggregate Knowledge
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 to connect to you directly. You can ban a number at any time as well. They just recently launched a service that lets you generate a Jangl number for any email address and leave a voicemail for that user and number for a callback. Calls are served over a VOIP bridge, so it also makes long distance calls cheaper.

Pando Networks – Desktop peer to peer file sharing service Pando speeds up file transfers by torrenting files and buffering them over their higher speed network of servers. At Supernova they’ve announced their Pando Publishing Platform that lets users easily publish to the web with the cost savings of peer to peer. The platform gives publishers the benefits of P2P video streaming amongst their users and CDN peering service. P2P streaming lets users view video incrementally instead of after a lengthy download. Their CDN peering service will let turn a regular CDN server into a supernode that will save on bandwidth by balancing load between users and the main servers. They’ve already lined up content partners NextNewNetworks, Blip.tv, and Rever.

SodaHead – A polling destination site that lets users poll their friends, SodaHead experts, or strangers. Polls are embeddable widgets that can be voted on at the destination site or any page featuring the code. Polls also feature comments so users can express opinions that don’t fit into any of the options.

Spock – A people search engine that automatically aggregates information linked to a person along with support for updating contacts.

Wize – 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.” Earlier this year they got a $4 million round. We have a review of other review services here.

ZapMeals – Adding a little levity to the event, Zapmeals is a startup spoof (e.g. the fake) that aims to be a marketplace for meals, hooking up hungry stomachs with nearby home cooked meals or caterers. You choose your cook based on a member rating system and their fleet of couriers would deliver the meals to your home.

ZenZui – A new way of surfing the web on your mobile phone browser, Zenzui economizes on your phone’s screen space by displaying sites and services as icons on a grid display. You can scan the 36 slot grid using your numbered keypad and zoom in for more detail on a specific service. We covered their launch here.

Zing – Zing enables mobile music players to connect to music libraries over WiFi. They’re currently powering the SanDisk devices for Yahoo Music and Pandora.
You can see a Wink powered group for the event here.

The 12 real start-ups were hand-chosen from more than 130 applications. StumbleUpon, one of the 2006 Connected Innovators, has already enjoyed great success as a newly acquired eBay business. We have high hopes for more great success stories from this year’s crop of Connected Innovators.

Disclosure: While these companies were selected from 130+ applications, they were required to pay a fee to participate once selected. As a partner to the conference, TechCrunch received a percentage of that fee.

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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.

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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.

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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 sign up to get an alert when a new review for a particular product is available.

Viewscore currently offers 60,000 reviews from 1,000 sources. Blogs and other social media are not included. The company says it hopes to expand it’s basic formula beyond gadgets and into many other fields. See our initial review of Viewscore here.

Wize

Wize aggregates reviews on far more than just electronics, it’s got home and garden, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews like Shopping.com and Amazon and expert reviews from traditional product review sites. The company says it has 757,136 product reviews from 4,735 different websites for 19,806 different products. That’s a lot of websites, 4,735.

Wize quantifies what percentage of reviews were positive or negative (”users like it”) and it tracks buzz – by simply counting what percentage of reviews for a product were posted in the last 60 days and how the reviews rated that product relative to others in its class. The site combines user ratings with expert review ratings and the buzz formula above to give products an overall Wize rating. User research can be saved via a cookie, without creating an account.

The site is very aesthetically pleasing and probably has the best chance of commercial success. I think people like the combination of trusted professional sources along with simple up or down community voting. It’s not the most subtle, interesting approach here but I think it’s likely to work the best with large numbers of users.

Others

Also worth looking at again if review aggregation is what you’re in the mood for are ShopWiki (our review – it’s got loads of cool features) and Külist, which is strange but kind of cool. Metacritic is probably the overall review ag leader, but doesn’t do gadgets.

These are the types of sites that only so many people probably want to think about them too often – but when you need one they are quite handy. More are sure to pop up any day now, but I think the sites above provide a good look at the state of the art.

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