Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Decide.com Adds Recommendations, Categories

Seattle-based Decide.com, the product pricing prediction service headed by Mike Fridgen and co-founded by Oren Etzioni, is expanding its service beyond pricing to recommendations, and has also added a number of new categories to the service. Decide.com--which uses algorithms to help users figure out when the best time is to buy electronics, appliances, and other products--said it has added "love it" or "don't buy it" recommendations to the products covered on the site, using a database of expert and user reviews. The company uses pricing predictions and those reviews to provide a simple rating and recommendation to users on if they should buy a product, via a "Decide score".

Decide is venture backed by Madrona Venture Group, Maveron, and angels. Both Fridgen and Etzioni were previously at another, pricing prediction firm, Farecast, which was sold to Microsoft in 2008; Etzioni is also considered one of the pioneers of the Internet industry in Seattle, having been involved in Go2Net (acquired by InfoSpace) and Netbot (acquired by Excite), and having links to countless other startups via his computer science students from the University of Washington, where he is a professor.

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