{"id":854,"date":"2008-12-19T23:19:53","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T21:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/?p=854"},"modified":"2009-12-28T23:22:04","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T21:22:04","slug":"better-holiday-shopping-with-viewscore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/2008\/12\/better-holiday-shopping-with-viewscore\/","title":{"rendered":"Better Holiday Shopping with ViewScore"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s been a particularly tumultuous holiday shopping season. With pocketbooks worldwide squeezed especially tight this year, price conscious consumers have been weighing every decision particularly carefully, pouring over reviews posted online by both professionals and other users.<\/p>\n

With sometimes hundreds of reviews appearing for a new camera or cell phone, that process can be daunting to say the least. A new Israeli startup hopes to ease the pain.<\/p>\n

Two-year-old ViewScore<\/a> does the hard work of reading the reviews for you and assigns a numerical score from 1-100 to each product so you can quickly decide if the item is for you. To work its magic, ViewScore scans over 1,500 sites, from the big boppers such as CNET, to mom and pop\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like Steve\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Digi-Cams.<\/p>\n

ViewScore founder and CEO Ami Zivov says that the technology running behind the scenes is anything but simple. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very sophisticated system that took us a full year to develop to make it accurate. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve published several patents around our algorithms.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

ViewScore starts by crawling the Internet for anything that looks like a review (that part\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not so hard to do \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the crawler looks for the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153review\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in an article). From there, artificial intelligence and natural language processing parses each review to assign it a score. The technology is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153self-learning\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as new reviews are indexed, a product\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s score is updated.<\/p>\n

Reviews are given different weights depending on who wrote it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c professional reviews are ranked higher than the user comments, say, on Amazon.com. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intended to generate less biased reviews – a number of less reputable manufacturers and their PR agencies have used blogs to artificially inflate a product\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s status, ViewScore spokesperson Uriah Av-Ron explained.<\/p>\n

ViewScore isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t alone in the field. Competitors include ConsumerSeach and Wize. But ViewScore does something the other two can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it assigns a numerical score to a product even if the individual reviews don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t display such a number.<\/p>\n

Zivov came up with the idea for ViewScore after being injured in a motorcycle accident. While recuperating he wanted to buy a new computer monitor that would be easier for him to use. But a Google search for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monitor\u00e2\u20ac\u009d resulted in an unmanageable 10 million results. He plowed through the data for two weeks until he realized that software could streamline the process.<\/p>\n

The six person Tel Aviv-based company has landed seed funding so far from private investors. ViewScore is now looking to raise a Series A venture capital backed round. But with money for startups drying up, a key question will be how ViewScore intends to make money.<\/p>\n

The first way comes when a customer makes a purchase. Visitors to the ViewScore site can click to order their desired product online from a participating store. ViewScore has cut an agreement with PriceGrabber which provides the store links; the two split revenues.<\/p>\n

A potentially more lucrative direction is to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153white label\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the service where a third party integrates ViewScore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s product rankings into its own site. The Israeli comparison shopping site Zap.co.il is ViewScore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first retail partner. To see an example, choose the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Electric and Electronics\u00e2\u20ac\u009d category, then the link for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Cameras\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and scroll down. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see the ViewScore rating for most of the items listed.<\/p>\n

ViewScore also has a deal with Korean electronics conglomerate LG\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mobile phone division. Search for the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153VX5500\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on the LG site, then click the Reviews tab \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see the ViewScore rank there.<\/p>\n

ViewScore currently only covers consumer electronics \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a criticism leveled at the company by a number of Internet pundits – but with additional financing, Zivov aims to add more categories. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Travel, cars, restaurants, books, we can do it all and it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take a lot of resources,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Zivov says.<\/p>\n

We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d give that a 100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a particularly tumultuous holiday shopping season. With pocketbooks worldwide squeezed especially tight this year, price conscious consumers have been weighing every decision particularly carefully, pouring over reviews posted online by both professionals and other users. With sometimes hundreds of reviews appearing for a new camera or cell phone, that process can be daunting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}