VentureBeat

Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?

We have. Sometimes we can’t find reviews for a niche product. At Amazon for books, or at Yelp for restaurants, we often get that sneaky feeling a reviewer is biased (written by a friend of the author, or owner). And for cameras or computers at CNET or Yahoo, we’re not sure whether the revenue is targeted to an expert, or beginner. We’re dependent on the reviewer, and don’t know what the masses think.

Enter Buzzillions.com, a new site that claims to rectify these shortcomings. Judging from its stated traction, it is on to something.

Buzzillions gets its reviews from retail clients of its parent company, Power Reviews, a two-year-old Millbrae, Ca. company. Power Reviews gets the reviews in return for offering retailers technology that helps generate reviews. Each retailer sends out a survey after a purchase is made, asking the buyer to rate their product, and to provide other information. If they bought a camera, for example, they’re asked whether they are a beginner or expert photographer. These products are then put on Buzzillions. This way, a person surfing reviews at Buzzillion can search for reviews written people that match their own interests.

See below for partial screenshot. Note the users get to “tag” a product with certain words, and list pros and cons.

Buzzillions makes money charging retailers for the traffic it sends back to them when people click through to products after reading reviews. It charges either by CPC or CPA.

Over four months of testing, Buzzillions.com has generated more than 140,000 reviews on 45,000 products, covering primarily digital cameras, sporting goods, footwear and concerts and theater events. Its customers include Ritz Camera, Abt Electronics, Smart Bargains, Mountain Gear, Journeys. By year end, it expects to double the number sites it pulls reviews from, chief executive Andrew Chen said in an interview with VentureBeat. The company released a launch statement Sunday evening.

By targeting actual buyers with surveys shortly after purchase, Buzzillions’ retailers reach buyers when they are still in a cooperative state in mind. This contrasts with Amazon or other review sites, such as Epinions, where there is little incentive for users to fill out review.

Most retailers have an incentive to maximize the number of reviews they get–even if some are negative–because the assortment builds trust. Studies show that customers are more likely to buy at a site when they see both positive and negative reviews (they’re assured they’re not getting snowed). While Epinions collected two million reviews in eight years, Buzzillions will get a million reviews in a year, Chen said. By also catering to specialty retailers, Buzzillions has a wider a selection of reviews.

Other competitors include comparison shopping engines, such Shopping.com and Pricegrabber.com, which are introducing widgets for their retail partners to collect reviews, though still elementary. Become.com scrapes the Web for reviews, but it collects from everywhere: Some reviews are three stars, others have five, others none, so it has difficulty creating a unified feel. Google could enter the market. Amazon has added product wikis, and expanded reviews.

The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005, and will be raising another round in July.

Tomorrow, Buzzillions will introduce a feature that lets people add a review to their own blog.

Two co-founders of Rapt have sued the company’s chief executive and venture capital backers, Accel Partners and Levensohn Venture Partners for breach of fiduciary duty and fraud.

Rapt is a San Francisco company that provides software to help companies find the right price for their goods to maximize profits.

It is another one of those stories we are getting familiar with in the valley — where start-up founders get washed out of their ownership holdings, while venture firms bolster their stake at more favorable terms. The case is similar to those of Epinions, Nishan Systems and Wine.com before it (you can search for stories about these cases here at VentureBeat). Rapt raised money during the boom times, but then struggled through hardships — and when the company was forced to raise more money, it did so in a way that pissed off guys who put in early sweat labor.

We’d heard about the suit a few days ago, but hadn’t gotten very far in confirming it. Now the team over at PE Week have gotten a copy of the complaint and spilled all the details. We’ve emailed Accel’s Jim Breyer again, and called Rapt, but nothing back so far.

Dan Primack of PE Wire has done a good job in summarizing it, so we won’t repeat it all here. We agree with his assessment that it is unlikely to go to trial. This is something that venture firms don’t like doing, because it can hurt their reputation as an entrepreneur friendly firm. At least in the Nishan and Epinions cases, settlements were reached. The Wine.com case rages on, however, that one concerns an East Coast firm, Baker capital, which presumably is less concerned about its reputation among entrepreneurs out here (it has also tended to invest in later stage companies). Regardless of the merits of all these suits, the cases are significant because entrepreneurs have until recently avoided suing VCs — once perceived a powerful clique that could gang together and blacklist a noisy entrepreneur.

There is also one other anecdote worth mentioning, since the two co-founders are blaming a third, Tom Chavez, who is now chief executive for effectively changing the rules of the game on them. Chavez not long ago became known for his Rapt presentation called: “It’s a whole new ballgame, and the winners are changing the rules,” adorned with pictures and references from Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, MoneyBall. Don’t mean for this to be a cheap shot; it’s just that he was giving this presentation around the same time the firm was negotiating its 2005 round of capital — the one where the two co-founders say shareholders weren’t solicited for their input on what would become a massive dilution of their shares.