VentureBeat

Frucall, a Cupertino, Calif. company is offering a convenient way to check prices for all kinds of products from your cell phone while you’re shopping.

Today, in addition to letting you search prices with voice — by calling 1-888-Dofrucall — it also launches price search via your mobile WAP browser and texting (SMS).

We tried it out at Starbucks the other day, and it worked great. We found an Italian espresso machine on the shelf, typed in the product’s barcode at www.Frucall.com/m on our Treo browser, and hit search. While Starbucks priced it at $19, Frucall took us to a page showing it priced at $17 — saving us $2. Frucall gave us a way to purchase the product, and also lists local merchants carrying it.

For people who like hunting for bargains, this is a useful service. There’s a bunch of other features. It lets you record a voice message about a product when you’re shopping, in case you want to retrieve it later. It also converts your voice messages into text.

It also lets advertisers bid to place ads on result pages for specific product barcodes, product categories, zip code, phone area codes. It gives advertisers an easy way to convert voice ads into text.

Google, by contrast, lets you text a barcode, and provides information only on products contained in Google Base (merchants are forced to submit their products there). Frucall’s coverage is broader, including products found at Google, Yahoo and eBay. Pricegrabber, meanwhile, does something similar via the Web, but doesn’t offer a voice service, or such a robust mobile offering.

You can search without registering. But more benefits come with registering, such as finding previous searches.

Frucall raised a first round of funding “in the millions” of dollars earlier this year, from PacGen Ventures, according to chief executive Behzad Nadji. He plans to keep that Series A round open, and to raise more by the middle of this year, he said. Nadji was previously at AT&T, as senior vice president of research and architecture. The company has 20 people.

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.

Updated

If you’re searching to buy a product online, there’s no single “branded” engine that stands out — and for a reason. All of the major shopping engines sites have sold out to advertisers.

This may represent a grand opportunity: If a Google-like search engine emerges in shopping, perceived to be without bias, it could be hugely popular. It could “become the ubiquitous brand,” said Dan Ciporin, the former CEO of Shopping.com, calling this a “missed opportunity.” Ciporin left Shopping.com when it was acquired by eBay in 2005, and this week joined a venture firm Canaan Partners in its Westport, Connecticut office.

However, its unclear to us whether there ever will be a singularly popular shopping engine. There are too many ways to shop.

Here’s the background: Leaders like Shopping.com (owned by eBay), Shopzilla (owned by Scripps) and Pricegrabber (bought by Experian), and independents Become, Nextag and others all feature results that are paid for by vendors — so you’re never really sure why a particular product or vendor is ranked high or low. Many of them even buy search traffic by placing ads on Google and Yahoo. The sector is in malaise, experiencing a wave of management defections — even as a host of new companies are springing up to pick off niches. Retrevo and others are targeting consumer electronics. Ugenie focuses on books, and Like.com specializes in fashion, jewelry and textiles. Reflecting the fragmented state of shopping search, new sites like Roboshopper are aggregating results — just like the “meta” search engines that showed up several years ago to aggregate Google, Yahoo and Ask. But like those, Roboshopper’s site doesn’t really add much.

Even Google’s search engine, Froogle, has veered from purity. It forces vendors to submit “feeds” to its engine, effectively forcing out the small retailers who don’t want or know how to. Many brand names like Amazon.com and Williams-Sonoma aren’t represented.

Thefind, a Mountain View start-up, says its approach — of providing only unpaid results — is paying off. It crawls large portions of the Web, and returns results based on its relevance criteria. It has built its own equivalent of Google’s “Pagerank,” but for shopping, counting incoming links to a particular product as a sign of relevance, and accounting for things like how frequently it shows up at popular retail outlets. Thefind says it will hit a million visits next month, after only six months. It has some work to go in making consumers appreciate its benefits (relevance is difficult to showcase in shopping search, and semantics can be tricky; type in “dress shirt” at Thefind, and women’s clothing make up the top two results, with only the third result getting you to a men’s dress shirt from Jos A. Bank), but it looks to be on the right track. Thefind may be one to watch. It is raising its next round of capital.

[Update: See our update on Thefind, where we have revised our opinion on the company. Its results aren't as clean as we thought.]

Still, despite such efforts, peoples’ interests, motivations and tastes range so greatly, the concept of “relevance” may be more fleeting in shopping than it is in regular search. We’re more uncertain than ever there will be a single category killer in shopping search.

Wize.com, a San Mateo start-up, has launched yet another search engine for consumer electronics and other goods.

Wize’s promise hangs on a single, skinny thread: Its “Wize Rank” concept. Wize Rank is a numeric ranking of products (from zero to 100). Each product is rated according to how well users and reviewers judge it, along with the buzz it’s getting. It is a cute play on Google’s concept of “Page Rank.” The exact “Wize Rank” formula is proprietary, and so not being published. This lack of transparency may cause some people to dismiss it, but then Google’s algorithm has remained secret too.

It is very late in the game to be launching new engines like this. Wize focuses on research, and joins a full field of players such as Become and Retrevo. We played a bit with Wize, and it doesn’t let you buy products directly, but directs you which vendors are selling them for the lowest price. Here, it also has competition in Shopping.com, Nextag, Thefind.com and Pricegrabber. (Update: ViewScore, of Tel Aviv, Israel, is doing the exact same thing as Wize, a reader points out below, making even less original than we thought. Meanwhile, other sites are doing something similar for specific niches, i.e., movies, games etc.).

And yet Wize has gotten $4 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners, a sign that the search engine sector — dominated by Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo — is so profitable that its worth gunning for a success even if the odds of doing so are very poor.

Here’s the basic Wize Rank equation:

Wize relies on 1,042,806 consumer product reviews of 17,668 products.

Its weakness is that it remains subjective like most other rating sources (why does “buzz” matter, for example?). Each user has different needs. Wize.com says we should consider its method similar to Wine Spectator’s scoring. But Wine Spectator’s tasting scores are quite subjective. WS’s scores became popular because it was one of the early players to rate wine. Perhaps Wize can win some respect for its numbering system, in which case it could become quite a success (there is less chance of this happening, now that we’ve seen Viewscore). Here is an example of a camera that has received a score of 100:

Wize CEO Tom Patterson was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield last year, the company said.