Last couple of months have been very busy for us. We had a lot going on the product front. I am sure you have experienced some of that first hand (best deals, personalization, product pricing information, some plug-ins etc). We have lot more coming your way within next couple of months. And we were talking to potential investors in order for us to ramp up product development and marketing. We finally signed off with Norwest Venture Partners right before holidays.  read more »

The last couple of months have been very exciting for retrevo. After we started the public beta, towards the end of September, response to our first service has been phenomenal. Since the holiday season was approaching fast, we decided to put this amazing response to work by picking the top five tiny tech gifts from all the products that people searched for using Retrevo service. Don't forget to check out the daily deals if you like any of these products. Here we go:  read more »

Is search going to become the primary interface of choice for a consumer's online experience? What do consumers expect when they "search"? Do consumers need something beyond search for serious online purchases and services? These are some of the questions that we raised (and still grapple with) when we started Retrevo. Yes, we targeted a market that was big. We targeted a market that was undergoing a major transformation with analog to digital conversion, convergence of media and content portability. We targeted a market  read more »

Yesterday early monring in the wee-hours, we released our second major software feature set. Exciting part of this release is Daily Deals and Shopping. Now Retrevo becomes the first company to provide comprehensive product information that includes research, product docs, social media aggregation, shopping and bargains/deals on the web. So far we have received terrific feedback from early users. I hope you all enjoy the black Friday and every day through the new year because believe  read more »

Yesterday Scoble stopped by and hung out with us. He brought two brand new Zune portable music players with him - a gadget lover's dream. In case you missed it, Microsoft started shipping Zune on Nov 14th. You can read one of the press releases here. So there we were with Scoble and two Zunes; one black and one translucent brown (chocolat).  read more »

I attended the The Art of the Start event organized by SVASE last week. BTW, the book written by Guy Kawasaki is an interesting read if you are thinking about starting an enterprise. O  read more »

Michael Calore of Wired wrote an article Retrevo: a Google for Gadgets on his blog. It was a balanced article focusing purely on product research. I have covered the topic of product research vs. lifecycle information needs on this blog in the past. Some of Michael's readers asked when we would develop a search plugin for th  read more »

Response to our Search Widget has been phenomenal. Thanks to everyone who is giving it a try. We are still in the first inning, there are lot of improvements needed and yes, this can evolve into something bigger. But this is a start! I particularly liked this post from Nitin Karandikar outlining pluses and minuses of our Search Widget. One question that has come up repeatedly is mone  read more »

A number of bloggers and independent audiophiles / videophiles asked about our plan for asearch widget ever since we launched our public beta. In the true spirit of a startup, we rushed andreleased one last week. We have tested this widget with TypePad, WordPress and Blogger. We also released the code that can be inserted in html pages to "retrevofy" your site and bringthe best consumer electronics information. We will be monitoring the adoption of this widget to determine the next steps in this direction. Will it lead to a true mashup?  read more »

I have been asked this question many times in the last few days. Is Retrevo a product review site? The answer goes a lot deeper than the question. When we started Retrevo last year, we did it because we were frustrated with the complexity of the hi-tech products we bought and used every day. We always were in need of the right answers but there were none (well there were but were extremely hard to get to). In spite of every one of us spending thousands of dollars every year on new products, there was no one to help us *after* we bought a product. And pre-purchase help was incomplete at best. S  read more »