VentureBeat

TestFreaks, a product review site that says it’s growing steadily, has raised $3 million in a second round of funding.

There’s a lot of competition out there — for example, we’ve covered Retrevo, which sifts through all the information online about consumer electronics, and Buzzillions, which aggregates consumer reviews. But Kristofer Arvin, the Stockholm, Sweden-based company’s founder, says TestFreaks stands out because of the sheer number of reviews it aggregates. The site pulls data from more than 4,000 sources in more than 60 companies. Then it crunches all those reviews together into what it calls a “Freak Score,” which is basically the average rating for a product.

“Our ambition is to make this page the best page on the web about this product,” Arvin says.

He also points to the fact that TestFreaks lets you drill down to “local” reviews, which are the most relevant to users — after all, someone in the United States may not care how a gadget was reviewed in Japan.

TestFreaks’ business model is interesting — instead of competing directly with comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com, it aggregates prices from comparison shopping sites and takes a cut when users make purchases at those sites. That model ties into TestFreaks’ ambition to be the central hub of reviews and shopping, but it may also add too many layers and complications to the process.

For now, though, TestFreaks is growing at a healthily clip — traffic has been doubling every three months, with about 2 million visits per month currently, Arvin says.

The new funding comes from Northzone Ventures, which also provided the company’s $3 million first round.

Vast amounts of power are locked away in the movements of the ocean, but because of technical challenges, the number of startups that have attempted to harness wave power thus far is relatively small when compared to wind or solar.

OreCon is the latest, with plans for a sort of giant, self-contained buoy that floats atop the water, each unit generating a megawatt and a half of energy. The company has raised $24 million, which it plans to use in building a full-scale example.

One of the problems with putting mechanical equipment in the ocean is that the salt and other chemicals in sea water tend to destroy moving parts. OreCon uses a design called the Oscillating Water Column to keep most of the parts well above water level.

In an OWC, which is a well-known setup, the pressure from waves outside the device causes water to rise and fall within it, which in turn pushes air in and out through a turbine, creating energy. They tend to be fairly inefficient, though. (See this brief animation to get a better idea of what happens in an OWC.)

OreCon’s innovation is using what it calls “multi-resonant chambers”. In its proprietary design, the company deploys multiple OWCs around a 40 meter platform that’s tethered to the sea floor a few miles off shore.

The first unit should be deployed somewhere off the coast of England in Cornwall, near Plymouth, where OreCon was founded six years ago. Closer to home, rival designs by Finavera Renewables and Pelamis Wave Power are planned for deployment off the coast near San Francisco.

The funding OreCon raised was for £12 million (about $24 million US dollars). The round was led by Advent Venture Partners, and Venrock, Wellington Partners and Northzone Ventures also participated.