This morning we launched a brand new Retrevo (project name "Retrevolution"). This was a project we undertook in second half of last year, went through extensive consumer behavior analysis in the real-world, brainstorming, arguing, thinking about the information architecture, designing...throwing designs out the window...redoing them, prioritizing, sweating (don't think it was easy work :)) and focusing on the core pieces that would make electronics shopping simple and fun for the masses - that's you and me. We had made good p  read more »

Today's customers, myself included, are more passionate about our gadgets, be it that shiny new petite digital camera with 12 Megapixels, face recognition and optical image stabilization, or that Blu-ray Disc Player exhilirating us with all 2 million pixels delivered in our newly installed home theater system. We want better technology, and more innovation and we're not afraid to pay good money for it.

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Retrevo released its monthly CE Pulse Report today. This report summarizes noteworthy trends in consumer electronics using Retrevo's CE Price Index and CE Demand Index. So what's the highlight for the month of April? Of course HDTVs. While the month of April brought some relief to manufacturers of consumer electronics categories such as Digital Cameras, Camcorders and DVD Players where demand stabilized and showed signs of a rebound, HDTVs continued their downward slide in demand. So what gives? How about a 30% increase in ASPs (Average Selling Prices) from January to mid-April?  read more »

Retrevo recently completed a study of consumers buying behavior when it comes to green products. Of course most consumers (75%) claim that buying green products is important to them. But majority of them aren't willing to pay a premium to buy them -- a staggering 35% consumers said they would be unwilling to pay any premium whatsoever, more than 50% won't pay more th  read more »

One of the challenges with shopping for a consumer electronics product is finding the right product at the right price (leave alone understanding what all the technical mumbo-jumbo is). Now I won't call myself a bargain hunter but I do care about good values if I can find those easily in the limited time I have to research and buy.

Here is a product I have been wanting to buy, a digital photo frame. So tod  read more »

We are pretty much done with the Black Friday. As I mentioned in my last report on Thanksgiving night, HDTVs were all the rage according to the Retrevo Pulse. Did this excitement continue through the Black Friday? Well, overwhelmingly yes. Two to one from unit volume perspective c  read more »

As consumers divert their attention from thanksgiving festivities and get ready for Black Friday marathon, where are they likely to be heading a few hours from now? Here are preliminary findings from Retrevo's real-time pulse:  read more »

1. Did we think people won't buy HDTVs? Well, we would be wrong if we assumed that. Heavy interest in HDTVs. heavy interest in Sharp HDTVs at Sears, Samsung & Sharp HDTVs at Circuit City,
   

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) just released the numbers. Internet advertising revenue reached $5.9 billion in the 3rd quarter of 2008, an 11% increase from the third quarter of 2007. Is it good or bad? First for some perspective. When we started 2008, the Internet advertising revenue numbers looked like this:  read more »

So as we enter the holiday season, the natural question to ask is "what are people going to be buying"? Black Friday promotions didn't start with the same fanfare as last year with only Wal-Mart coming out with BF deals.BestBuy and other retailers decided to wait it out until the real BF. So what indicators do you use? Well, we usedRetrevo Pulse to check out and here is the verdict:  read more »

Today we launched The Retrevo Pulse, a real-time view into consumer electronics products, prices and demand trends based on the behavior of millions of users who rely on Retrevo to make their buying decisions. The Retrevo Pulse includes two indexes, a CE Price Index and a CE Demand Index that track the Average Selling Prices (ASP) and Demand (in terms of net dollar value of interest) respectively for more than 4,000 electronics products across 40 categories such as HDTVs, Digital Cameras, Laptops and GPS.  read more »