At the same time, with the rise of Twitter, people can do a quick search and find out what everyone is saying in regards to a product in real-time. Unfortunately, with so many places to go and read this endless amount of content, it’s hard and tedious to know where to start.
This is where Burlingame, Ca.-based Wize comes into the picture. The startup, which has been around for several years now, on Wednesday announced new features for consumers to help improve the process of researching products.
With today’s revised launch, Wize has integrated semantic search technologies to try and create better product review results, by understanding exactly what people are saying about those iPhones are toaster ovens, etc. Tom Patterson, CEO of Wize.com told us, “We literally took all this review content across the Web, and analyzed it with our proprietary semantic technology to understand what people are ecstatic or upset about. We want to give people the ability to shop by use or need.”
Wize isn’t trying to focus on the tech savvy person who knows exactly what kind of specs they are looking for in a digital camera, but instead, focused on the person who says, “I need a camera to take great pictures at my daughter’s soccer game,” of course based on user reviews as opposed to a salesperson’s pitch. Wize announced with today’s launch it’s also tapping into Twitter to find reviews of products based on people’s Tweets.
At the same time as wanting to be a destination for users to conduct their retail research, Wize has also focused on building killer technology for SEO, especially on Google. For example, if I do a Google search of “best camera for action shots,” the top Google result is actually a page which takes users to a nice set of aggregated reviews from Wize.
The startup received $4 million back in 2007 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund, and last year received $988K from Mayfield Fund. It’s currently running a lean business of 8 people and also announced it has added on Jeffrey Glueck to its board of directors. Glueck was previously CMO of Travelocity. Patterson shared that Wize’s current focus right now is, “getting to profitability.”
And it could happen soon – Wize has seen signficant growth in the past year. Patterson shared it’s up a couple hundred percent from last year and looking like it will hit a million by the end of this year.