http://www.mpire.com

Cross platform consumer deal-finder Mpire is every coupon clipper's dream. The span of the site's functions is mind-boggling: it crawls through the most popular retailers and sorts the product results based on popularity, price and relevance. It also shows complicated, yet strangely concise, charts on price trends, and even provides over seventy different widgets for Amazon associates and Ebay affiliates. (Send an email to widgets@mpire.com and they'll write the code for a custom widget to put on your website or blog for free.)

 Furthering their attempts at online shopping information domination, this holiday season Mpire launched a browser plug-in for Firefox, which was quickly followed by an Internet Explorer version. And while the results may be a bit off, at best, for niche market items, Mpire is definitely on the brink of revolutionizing the way we shop on the internet. We sat down with CEO Matt Hulett to discuss why Mpire is cool enough to have a fellow named J.Rock on their board of investors.

1. What is your company about? What's your business model?
Mpire is a shopping Web site that aggregates the largest online commerce sites, such as eBay, Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, Gap and thousands more into one location.  We act as the Kelley Blue Book for online shopping by offering data analysis that helps people find the right item at the right price. 

Mpire gets paid on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis when we deliver a shopper to merchant's virtual door step whether through our consumer site mpire.com or thru our private-label shopping services off of Mpire through our API.  

2.  Why did you start this company?
Despite advances in many areas of technology, we feel ecommerce innovation has remained relatively flat over the last 10 years.  So we created Mpire to offer a more universal, well-rounded shopping experience for consumers.  Shoppers shouldn't have to visit 15 sites to find the best deals or the right item, and Mpire solves that problem.  Ultimately, Mpire is the only shopping service to bring together new and auction items, reviews, coupons and proprietary pricing analysis.

3. What's your background?
Prior to becoming Chairman and CEO of Mpire in spring 2006, I was President of the corporate travel division of Expedia, Inc., the world’s largest online travel company. Prior to Expedia, I was a founding partner of the interactive entertainment provider AtomFilms and was President of Atom Entertainment, a firm backed by both Sequoia Capital and Macromedia (MACR) purchased by Viacom for $200M. Under my direction, Atom captured over 20 million unique monthly users and became a leading consumer destination for online interactive entertainment. I also had leadership roles at RealNetworks and at AttachmateWRQ, a privately held provider of enterprise software.

4. How do you plan to build a community of users and what are the benefits of using Mpire for shopping research?
With our flagship service firmly established at Mpire.com, we are now aggressively pushing our distributed shopping service through widgets, our Mpire Plug-in and custom services.  We are firm believers in not being  dependant on paid search to yield traffic and feel delivering compelling, relevant content in snippets across the Web, along with a universal shopping experience on our site, can help us build our user base.

5.  Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies? How did you go about finding opportunities and negotiating deals?
We have entered into a number of partnerships, the largest of which has been our extensive involvement with eBay.  In just the last year, we have developed more than 10 applications and sites for eBay, including a trend and culture site called eBay Pop, widgets that are served on the eBay home page, one of the most trafficked pages on the Internet today, and high-profile auction sites. We launched our B2B business recently and are working with many companies on creating custom shopping experiences for them. 

6.    Are you funded? What was the process for you to raise capital? How did you decide what investors to work with?
Mpire was founded in 2005 and is backed by Ignition Partners and former eBay executive and Pay Pal angel investor Richard Rock.

7. What does the future look like for Mpire and internet shopping in general?
We are very excited about where things are headed for Mpire as we aggressively push our universal shopping experience along with our distributed shopping strategy.  We feel our proprietary technology and innovative approach to shopping will only help shoppers have a more enjoyable finding and buying experience online.

8. What are some of the technologies that make Mpire a reality?
Two key pieces of proprietary technology – our relevance engine and our data analysis engine – have enabled much of our innovation to date.  When it comes to finding relevant items through an item search, results across the Web, including those on eBay, are marginal at best.  Our relevance engine algorhythm has a much higher success rate based on our unique approach (which we can't share, of course).  Data analysis, and the displaying of historical results, has also triggered our distributed shopping strategy and partnerships with companies such as eBay.