Transcript: Calling all Gadget Freaks: Retrevo is your search engine

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1601/calling-all-gadget-freaks-retrevo-is-your-search-engine

Guest: Vipin Jain - Retrevo

Vipin Jain - Retrevo
I'm Vipin Jain; founder and CEO of Retrevo. Retrevo is your information site for gadgets, any information you need around your gadgets whether you are researching, using, fixing, upgrading will you come to Retrevo. We started our company about a year ago and our product is in public beta for over a month and I'm going to show you, what to do on Retrevo.So, I'm a gadget freak; mostly audio, video but mobile products, I do love them. So, let's say BlackBerry Pearl, now I own an old BlackBerry here, but I have been curious about BlackBerry Pearl. Well I don't know much about the product so I'm going to type 'BlackBerry Pearl' into Retrevo, and see what it has to tell me about it.

So, I type 'BlackBerry Pearl' and out comes all the information that I as a consumer need to make an informed decision about BlackBerry Pearl. I have the product document at my disposal; I have reviews and article from various experts on the Web; you have a review from PC magazine, you have review from CNET, all aggregated for you in one place. I have interesting articles from manufacturer or RIM in this case; about the technology about this particular product that I need to read to come up to speed and then buzz in forums and blogs. So, Retrevo is incidentally and not accidentally, the first company that also aggregates social media information around gadgets.

So, in this case we will bring you any buzz on Engadget or Scoble's blog or anywhere else, that might be relevant and in this case. You might learn about any specific observation from the reviewers, you might read about any problems that reviewers have seen on this product, but all this information is aggregated and contextualized for you and you have -- information organized into channels.

So if you want to read more reviews then you can simply click on a channel on the left hand side and get more information. You have Inline Preview, so you don't need to click on a result and go back and forth; you can see all the information and the preview of the information on screen without any going back and forth. If you click on a new search result, you can see the preview for that search result right in line. So, just to make it easy for you to get all the information, synthesize it, make your decisions. Now let's say you want to learn about Slingbox, that is another hot product and you want to see what all information is available, well you type 'slingbox' in the same way you have the product documents, you have interesting article from manufacturers, buzz and forums and blogs and reviews aggregated from all over the Web.

So, this is all good when you're looking at buying a product and you want to research, you want to get comprehensive information about the product. Now say you buy the product, and in this case you bought a Slingbox, and you travel out of town but you have a local game back home that you don't want to miss and you run to your hotel room in the evening, power up the Slingbox, but there is no picture, there is no connection. So what do you do? Well, you come to Retrevo and you type 'slingbox connection problem' and it's prompting me to register which is optional and I say 'No Thanks' and in this case what I see here is a problem that Slingbox has with remote connection and the answer to this question in this case is inside a user manual and Retrevo immediately brought that page inside the manual that told you how to resolve the remote connection problem.

So, this is what Retrevo does; not only help you research and help you buy products but after you buy them, help you use them fix any issues that you might have. So, this is all in a nutshell. We are in the first inning, lot more that has to be done both in terms of the content that we can bring that we can mine, that we can contextualize; as well as in terms of all the user interface and things that we can do around information to make it easy for you to manage your gadgets, but we want to be the destination that brings you the best experience around gadgets by aggregating all the information by mining, by contextualizing, by making it natural and easy for you to consume information. So, that's pretty much Retrevo. So, go give it a try.