Gdgt, a new site co-founded by Peter Rojas (founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget) and Ryan Block (former editor in chief of Engadget) is opening up today.
It is--surprise--yet another gadget site, but it's quite good, and more useful to real people than the gadget porn sites these two editors came from. It's a community-driven site, wiki-like in features and general atmosphere, so it's the site's users that will make it succeed or fail.
Meanwhile, the new version of Retrevo (previous coverage), another tech product site, launched on Monday of this week. It's a more sober site, useful but not as exciting as Gdgt. It's more of a buyer's and owner's resource.
Gdgt: By geeks and of geeks
"It's the gadget site we always wanted," Rojas and Block say about their new site. Conceptually, it's quite simple, and potentially powerful. Users on the site pick the products they have, want, or once had, and write up quick reviews of them if they like. It's social, it's fast, and if the product you want to write about isn't in the database, it's pretty easy to add it.
If you're looking for solid advice on a product--how to fix it, if you should buy it--the community could provide value. You'll be able to see what users are saying about products and dive into discussions about particular features. If you like researching what the people who are really passionate about their gear say, this will be helpful.
But the people who get the most out of Gdgt will be product geeks and fanboys who like chatting about toys. The service has a very high social component. You can follow people, friend them, get alerts when your friends write reviews or respond to yours, and so on. There are also free-floating discussions about product companies, and "feature" stories (blog posts) by the editors that will serve as jumping-off points for community chatter.
It sounds like an straightforward concept, but Gdgt wins points for execution. It's fun to use. It's fast (at least the unloaded beta I tried was) and most of the pieces are where you expect them to be. Those that aren't (like the site's preference for using product model numbers instead of more popular brand names) will likely be fixed based on user feedback.
I admit I do have issues with sites that encourage people to define themselves by what they own, and Gdgt definitely does that. There's a tacit game of one-upsmanship in the "I have" list. But if you do have the gadget bug and see no issue with feeding it, I think Gdgt will end up being a great place to hang out.
Gdgt is as much about products as it is about their fans and owners.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Retrevo: Get in, get info, get out
In contrast, the new, recently launched version of Retrevo is designed to "make the shopping journey simple and enjoyable," an anodyne pitch if ever there was, but attractive, no doubt, to people freaked out by the idea of buying a digicam or a flatscreen.
Retrevo has an AI core that gathers up product review and pricing data from numerous sources (including CNET), to present overall recommendations on products. What's new is its Farecast-like feature of telling you if the product you're looking at is at its peak of popularity, or heading toward or away from it, plus indicators telling whether users like it, and if it's a good value or not at the moment. If you trust the Retrevo machine, it provides good info to reduce buying anxiety.
A new automated "product catalog" also gathers up information on entire categories of products and puts into a catalog-like format that's supposed to be comfortable to users. I found the information on the catalog pages poorly organized, however.
The site will now also telegraph the essentials it knows about products to you via Twitter if you send it a query, which is potentially useful if you're in a store and curious about a product you're looking at on a shelf, and if you don't care if all your Twitter followers see when you query the Retrevobot. Another handy feature (which I don't think is new) is an electronic "shelf" for keeping product manuals. Retrevo has a nice library to stock it from.
This should make it easier for you to part with your money.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)If you're a gearhead, try Gdgt for fun and community, but don't skip Retrevo when you're looking to make a purchase.
And to keep me employed, be sure to check out CNET reviews as well. Thank you.
Disclosure: In past jobs at Red Herring and Ziff-Davis, I have worked with people now at both Gdgt and Retrevo.
Story updated with commentary from NPD. See end.
We all know that it's going to be a "soft" holiday shopping season. There are stories to back it up from Amazon.com and elsewhere. And now Retrevo, a consumer electronics research site (arguably a CNET competitor), is launching the charts and graphs we all need to drive the point home. They call the service Retrevo Pulse.
Using data from its own site--the reviews content it aggregates, traffic analysis from user behavior, search keyword tracking, and so on--Retrevo is making available daily updates of two charts: pricing trends and demand trends. It's the demand trends that are the most ominous. Where you would usually see a nice ramp-up to the holiday gift-buying season starting in September, what you have now is the beginning of the usual ramp, followed by the clear collapse in demand in the first week of September that's sustained to the present day.
That blue line should be going up, not down.
(Credit: Retrevo)Some categories are spared, Retrevo CEO Vipin Jain says. Laptops will still be moving out the door, and according to Retrevo, at higher prices than earlier in the year. And although demand is soft, the prices on televisions and GPS units are going down, keeping their demand curves a little more horizontal than in some other categories.
What's also interesting about these charts is that Retrevo is putting them on its public-facing site, and for no charge. Usually you'd see a consumer-facing company like this take these interesting data sets and sell them out the back door to manufacturing and retail companies. But those firms probably already know what they're in store for, and aren't about to spend additional money to be told again. So instead, Retrevo is showing the users themselves what they are not buying, in hopes that more people will use the site, and keep traffic (and thus monetization) up during what is sure to be a gloomy holiday for tech.
At least Retrevo, which raised some money six months ago, is not joining the pool of companies that are laying people off. Although, Jain says, he has put his hires on hold.
Update: I got this comment via e-mail from Stephen Baker, VP of Industry Analytics at The NPD Group, which provides market research and analysis to the retail industry: "I am not sure the conclusions reached are right. Our sales data also saw a serious spike down after Labor Day so that is directionally correct but you never (even though retailers wish it was not so) see any type of real upward movement until about 2 weeks before Thanksgiving when sales start to tick up. October is almost always a miserable month with sales flat to down every single week, sequentially after Labor Day. So it isn't surprising that a 30 day tick would show a downturn in interest right now, people just don't buy a lot of electronics between Labor Day and mid-November."
Product search Retrevo is getting a facelift this morning. The search tool, which we've briefly covered a few times since its launch at DemoFall 2006, uses a metacritical approach to serve up a hodge-podge of prices, reviews, and resources for buying just about anything that uses electricity.
This morning they're unveiling a new look for sorting through their search results, which has changed from just throwing out a series of lists, to an all-inclusive page that combines pricing, features, and competing products. That last bit is what the service's creators are the most proud of though. They believe they've put together a matchmaking system the likes of eHarmony (their words, not mine) that will connect people to their quintessential digital item by offering up suggestions for related products as they search. It manages to do this mostly by price and features but will also serve up suggestions based on brand similarities and items that have been linked in other reviews as well.
In addition to basic product pricing and review links, one of the cooler features (although not new) is that you can often find PDF copies of user manuals, which can be pretty darn useful for things like universal remote controls and digital cameras. In most cases this is actually faster than trying to traverse the vendor's Web site, especially if it's an older item. There's also a scatter plot for any given product, the likes of CrispyShop (review) that will let you attempt to find the best deal based on aggregate prices.
Still missing, and what Retrevo's creators tell me is coming early next year, is a way to see when products were first released, or if it's been replaced with a newer model--the latter of which savvy CNET readers can find in our gadget reviews.
Related: Pricegrabber, CrispyShop, Mpire
Retrevo now lets you tweak all sorts of options and get recommendations while you search for digital gadgetry.
(Credit: Retrevo Inc.)- prev
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