VentureBeat

Retrevo, the Silicon Valley company that helps you shop electronic products, and then helps you after the purchase (with troubleshooting tips), has raised $8 million more in a second round of financing.

We reported on the company’s first fundings, which totaled $3.9 million (see our coverage here and here), and then later on its release of a set of useful comparison features. Retrevo now offers a great overview of a category of products. For example, if you choose mobile phones, it gives you a way to select them based on value, taking into account their price and features. It provides an overall sentiment rating for each product, which also takes into account user reviews.

We wrote before that it has joined a very crowded field, and today it remains as crowded as ever. Retrevo thinks its offer to help you find a way to troubleshoot a product after you buy will make it stand out. But is that enough to get it noticed, and to make money? It’s too early to say. Chief executive Vipin Jain says he aims to break even next year, from ads, but also from referral fees. He won’t say how much traffic the site has, but says traffic has quadrupled in the last year.

The round was led by Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Today, Retrevo, the search engine for gadgets, is launching a well-executed attempt to solve the information overload problem ordinary people face when they shop for consumer electronics online.

We’ve written about Retrevo before and have been skeptical because the market is packed. Incumbents like CNET offer “expert” opinions and link to a range of stores, newer companies like Buzzillions aggregate consumer reviews. There are comparison shopping engines like Pronto and Shopping.com. And last time we checked, not too many people were complaining about the experiences on Ebay and Amazon.

Ordinarily, I’d dismiss the company as a yet-another hopeless drifter, but Retrevo has managed to filter through the heap of information about consumer electronics, boil it down to its most essential elements and make it accessible to anyone who’s looking for help deciding what to buy. This is a very hard problem to solve.

To accomplish this, there are a number of sophisticated back-end mechanisms Retrevo spent a long time getting right, but it’s the interface that truly shines. Take a look at the landing page below.

It’s clear from here that this is not just another product search engine, and there are a few ways you can make your way into the site. If you want, you can type a specific product into the search box and go right to it, but the site is designed to let you search by product category alone. You have the option to type in “digital camera,” or you could just click the device in the circle on the left side.

When you do so, Retrevo reaches into the mess of chatter in forums and blogs, the ratings on review sites and the number of stars on Amazon.com and retrieves a set of results. Each device is ranked by a combination of “value” (the number of desirable features at the price point) and community sentiment (the combined wisdom of experts and consumers) See the results page below.

Representing a summary of everything an average person might need to know to make a purchase decision, this page offers the product’s model number, a well-sized image of the product, its price range and two cartoon thumbs. One thumb represents value, the other represents community sentiment. They can point up, sideways, or down. The top ten results contain a reasonable mix of high value, low cost products with good buzz around them and medium and high-cost products that deliver what you would hope to get at those price points.

The site lets you choose between the expert and consumer opinions.

The company says its product index doesn’t contain out-of-date products or those that aren’t widely available in stores. This compares favorably with CNET, where I often find myself reading positive reviews for last year’s technology. It’s also more simple and elegant than Buzzillions, which requires more input to find devices you might like.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, has raised more than $4 million in two rounds.

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.

Updated

Retrevo, the search engine for consumer electronics products, has raised $3.2 million more in venture capital — timing the news to generate buzz ahead the CES consumer electronics conference in Las Vegas next week.

The Sunnyvale company, which we first wrote about here, lets you research products before buying them, and and then gives you tips about use afterward. It launched last fall, and chief exec Vipin Jain tells VentureBeat the search engine has had “hundreds of thousands” of users, with searches doubling every several weeks — though he wouldn’t be more specific. The round was led by Silicon Valley’s Norwest Venture Partners, and follows a seed round of less than $1 million last year from Alloy Ventures.

It is just the latest in a bunch of comparison shopping sites, including newbies like Thefind.com and Become.com, and incumbents Shopping.com, Nextag and Pricegrabber — but trying to offer its own twist.

Update: Neglected to mention Fixya, another consumer electronics search engine which is more similar to Retrevo than any of the others listed above, focused on technical support, user guides, and repair leads. It is an Israeli company, seed funded by Yossi Vardi, and founded by Yaniv Bensadon. It is about to get funded by a Silicon Valley firm, we’ve heard.

There is a rolling thunder of new Silicon Valley Internet start-ups launching on funding of around $1 million or less.

The latest is Retrevo, a Sunnyvale search engine focused on research and other advice on consumer electronics. It has raised less than $1 million from Alloy Ventures.

You may try to call this a Web 2.0 bubble, but frankly, we don’t see any end to this. There is so much money around, these start-ups will keep coming.

Like other focused search engines, Retrevo has plausible survival odds if it manages to lodge itself in your brain as the place to go for a particular need. In Retrevo’s case, it wants to be the place you think of before your buy consumer electronics (TV, printer, DVD, iPod, etc), but also after you buy — to get help with troubleshooting, for example.

Retrevo is in a closed testing mode, but you can get to a trial page here until it goes live Wednesday at DEMO.

If you have say, a problem connecting your Sony camcorder to your TV, you can do this search, and Retrevo will give you search results that include a page directly from Sony’s guide book, in a preview section (see below for screen shot of another example)

It culls relevant information from manufacturer guide books, product reviews and forums/blogs. It filters out everything else.

It is a comparison shopping site, a lot like Shopping.com, Nextag, Become.com and Pricegrabber — but it aims to serve the full life-cycle of your needs, including eventually even recycling information.

The consumer shopping search engine industry is competitive, so this will be a tough road for Retrevo. But its backer Alloy Ventures says Retrevo has a good chance, given the huge consumer electronics market of some “$130 billion” in the U.S. alone, according to the firm.

Chief executive Vipin Jain has been working at this start-up with ten employees at his offices at the Plug & Play complex in Sunnyvale, with a “little less than a million” in backing from Alloy.

He’s now about to start looking for $5 million in venture backing, he says.

He wants to make money from advertising and from lead generation revenue from the device retailers.

(Update: Corrected name of company acquired by News Corp. It was Newroo)

Roundup of latest Silicon Valley action:

One of Digg’s top diggers, p9, has quit, and Netscape is grinning — When Kevin Rose, founder of the news-ranking site, Digg, said he wanted to make the voting process for stories more democratic, he apparently alienated some of the site’s top users. One top digger has left, and slammed the door loudly in protest. Here’s a good description of how Digg works, by the way, and a discussion about the changes underway. Of course, all this is giving Jason Calacanis (pictured above, with dog) fodder for saying he was right all along to offer to pay the top users at Digg and other news sites to leave join him at Netscape. Calacanis’ site competes with Digg. This has also sparked a debate about how long users can volunteer their time and energy digging sories for Digg without getting some reward or other form of recognition.

Now Calacanis is suggesting his parent company, AOL, consider stealing away top users from competitiors to AOL’s other sites, for example at Uncut Video, AOL’s clone of YouTube. He’s suggesting Uncut steal from YouTube’s best 1 percent of video posters: (Wow, this copying behavior is becoming quite a trend over at AOL):

So, I’m wondering if the folks on AIM pages or Uncut are seeing something similar and if similar strategies might work. Maybe Uncut should hire the top 20 video producers on YouTube to work for us? Maybe AIM Pages should hire the top 20 folks on MySpace to be part of our “leadership program” (or something like that). Have them train the user base and give feedback to the developers.

Video ads really that popular? — Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has produced rosy set of calculations for the revenue video-sharing site YouTube can bring in from advertising. He estimates 80 percent of YouTube’s 100 million vidoes being watched daily can be monetized, with advertisers paying an average of $12 per 1,000 times these video are shown. He assumes YouTube will give users a cut for sharing their content, and arrives at a total $153 million net revenue per year. He says this is just back-of-the-envelope, and not meant to be exact, but even then we find it hard to agree with the analysis. Let’s face it, ads become a turn off at a certain point. The joy of YouTube is sitting there gawking at vidoes run over and over again. Forcing forcing people to sit through ten-second ad will radically change the experience. Here’s a Business Week article about the topic which shows much more skepticism.

InterActive Corp (IAC) the latest to media giant to move into deal-making mode –The big media companies are upgrading their buyout strategies. Sumner Redstone, chairman of media giant Viacom Sumner M. Redstone last week fired Viacom’s chief executive, Tom E. Freston, and replaced him a Philippe P. Dauman,a deal-maker. As the NYT reported, investment bankers scrambled to make lists of possible acquisition targets to pitch, including folks like YouTube, FaceBook and Bebe. In fact, even Viacom itself showed up on the list — as a candidate to be taken private by all the hungry private equity companies out there. This is the era of the acquisition, baby, and it Silicon Valley is getting its fair share. The latest comes from IAC, which has hired Kara Norman, the young associate with Battery Ventures, as its “vice president, mergers and acquisitions.” We teased Kara for chasing entrepreneurs through the NY’s Central Park, and now she will be based in New York where she can chase full-time, though she promises to visit the valley often — where there are plenty of acquisition possibilities.

Kara’s hire comes on the heels of IAC’s hiring of Jason Rapp, who will be her boss at IAC. Rapp was VP of online development and associate GM at New York Times Digital. He has joined Barry Diller’s IAC as senior VP, mergers and acquisitions. IAC, which owns properties like Evite, Ask, Ticketmaster, is giving the new hires a pretty broad mandate Kara said. IAC, of course, is smaller than NewsCorp, where Ross Levinson head of NewsCorp’s Fox Interactive division is making all the waves buying up Web 2.0 companies, such as MySpace and Webaroo Newroo.

Mendel Biotechnology has new ethanol technology — The NYT has a good summary of the various approaches to cellulosic ethanol production, which is where the great expectations are right now. Instead of corn stalks, perennial plants like grasses that require far less energy-consuming irrigation and fertilization than corn are looking promising. On this blog, we’ve mentioned most Silicon Valley companies active in the clean-tech already, but not Mendel, a Hayward company. According to the NYT, it is:

…looking more at miscanthus, a perennial grass native to China, where Mendel has set up an operation.

The company said miscanthus could produce well over 20 tons an acre each year. “No planting, no fertilizing, no irrigation,” said its chief executive, Chris Somerville, who is also the director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and a Stanford University professor. “You can just cut it every year for 10 years.”

Silicon Valley green-tech Young Innovator, Christina Galitsky. Technology Review pays tribute to Christina Galitsky — The publication has made Galitsky, 33, “2006 Young Innovator.” She left a chemical engineering program UC Berkeley with her master’s in 1999, and found work testing California’s water quality. She recognized contamination was coming from the power industry and, eager to fight pollution, joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. There, she began diagnosing energy waste in nearly a dozen industries, from concrete to beer, and is helping companies like wineries to spot their energy waste more easily.

New life for the Segway? — The high-tech scooter company’s chief executive James Norrod is taking “a much more expansive view of what Segway is about.” Instead of limiting the Segway to the two-wheeled personal transporter we’ve all gotten comfortable with — and, frankly, tired of — Segway can put its technology “into anything that moves.” According to a BW story:

That means unmanned vehicles with potential military or industrial uses, or multiperson vehicles that use Segway’s computers and electric engines to glide smoothly over obstacles. And Norrod thinks Segway’s efficient electric motors could be central to a new generation of hybrid cars (yes, cars). Segway has already built a four-wheeled, multiperson prototype. “If people want four wheels,” says Norrod, “I should give ‘em four wheels.”

Second Life database gets hacked – There have been several major Internet privacy snafus lately, and this one at Second Life is just the latest. A hacker apparently accessed account names, real life names and contact info. Sadly, it seems there’s nowhere really safe to play online anymore, even in the ultimate escapist world of Second Life.