With online shopping spending hovering around $125 billion annually, many startups are building innovative services to improve and solve current online shopping deficiencies and, in the process, grab of piece of the online shopping revenue pie.  This group of companies focuses on helping consumers identify produces they are seeking or may be predisposed to buying.

Moderator:
Rafe Needleman
Webware, CNET

Judges:
David Hornick, General Partner, August Capital
Sam Klepper,GM, MSN Media Network Group
Alexander Marquez, Intel Capital

Criteo
Consumer recommendation engine; plans to work with ecommerce sites to boost sales, works with content portals to increase page views and lets bloggers in on the action by sharing their ratings with the entire recommendation system. Criteo offers a plug and play widget distribution and for more advanced installs they have an open API. In a benchmark test run by Netflix, Criteo scored >5% better score than the rest; they rated in the top 30 out of 16K competitors.

Powerreviews/Buzzillions
Buzzillions aims to be the starting place for online shopping, by focusing on market research via product reviews;  PowerReviews collects and distributes those reviews to retail sites. Tag-based reviews to enable tag-driven shopping. Powerreviews converts 2 to 1 over other product review sites.  The business model is to monetize each product they review and look to maximize this fee to closer to $1 per review, also will incorporate a CPA revenue model and expect that sponsorships will also materialize.

ThisNext
Helps people discover cool products similar to LastFM but with a twist. Users at their partner sites and at ThisNext enter cool products that they think are neat and these recommendations also gets cross-fed to other sites.  ThisNext is not a transaction site but more of a shopping and browsing site. Judges felt ThisNext needed to better clarify its business model and target market and that it was unclear to a visitor whether the site was a social recommendation site or an ecommerce site. 

Wize
Wize aims to simplify and minimize the time it takes to research products.  Their business model is driven by lead generation and syndication. They offer a range of reviews gathered from consumers and from experts, evaluates any biases of these sites and adjusts for a weighted average. The company focuses on mining the sentiment about what core features are most useful to buyers. Provides a single numerical score so buyers can make a better buying decision based on the scores provided. Judges liked Wize's score differentiation ranking differentiation but see challenges in building a brand. Wize has a number of syndications in place and plans to get the Wize rank integrated into these sites. Company also seeking out select manufacturers to have them adopt/endorse the Wize ranking.