Buzzillions Blogs

The other day I was in Target looking for air beds for a visitor coming in town.  While it’s easy these days to find product reviews on things like digital cameras and televisions, it’s a little trickier when you’re looking for other products.  As I stood there blinking at the choices, (varying price ranges, familiar and unfamiliar manufacturers etc.) I thought…if only there was a way I could get some advice here.  Did I need the $100 air bed with the foot pump, or would the $39 one do just fine?  While it was tempting to go home, get on the computer and see what Buzzillions had to say about it, I ended up choosing blindly.  Now I (and YOU) don’t have to.  With our new Buzzillions iPhone app, you can (if you have one of these handy phones OR the ipod touch) download the app and be on your way to having millions of product reviews at your fingertips.

So the next time you’re at a retailer, scratching your head as you mull over the options, you can whip out your iPhone, type in the product name and get a little guidance from reviewers like you.  Best of all…it’s FREE. We’d love to hear what you have to say about it, things you like, things you don’t, so we can work to improve the application to make it even more useful.

Recently we have been reaching out to bloggers, people who are passionate about saving money, getting quality products and finding the right product for them.  Some are moms who (time crunched and budget conscious) know that in order to make wise product decisions they must read reviews.  Others are simply people who write about savvy ways to save money, find bargains and get the best deal…something even more important in today’s economy.  We asked for feedback about our site from these wonderful bloggers and got some great insights about how to make our site even better.  When reading comments about our site on these blogs, what we noticed several times was that people wanted an improved search; a way to search within categories as opposed to one general search.  We took note of these suggestions since we’re always trying to improve your experience on the site and  we launched a feature on our site that will make searching much easier.  Take it for a test drive, and tell us what you think…

As working parents with two young kids – a 7-month-old and a 3-year-old – my wife and I are all about streamlining.  We want what is best for our family, but frankly don’t have time to read through the multitude of books, websites, and blogs, not to mention the advice from friends and family (both solicited and unsolicited) to make an informed decision about what is best for us.  It is not only time-consuming, it’s overwhelming.  That’s why we love Buzzillions.com and PowerReviews’ new feature, AnswerBox.  Both help cut through the barrage of information to find the right advice and products for us

I know we’re biased, but Buzzillions.com is the best place for top rated products with ratings from other parents like us!  Buzzillions.com allows us to read reviews from real parents on everything from the best baby bottles and the most reliable baby diapers to trendy gift ideas for our 3-year-old’s upcoming Birthday.

However, sometimes we need specific answers to questions and don’t have time for in-depth research.  That’s where AnswerBox comes in.  What do other parents think about using BPA-free baby bottles and which ones do they recommend?   What are the best sources for “official” car seat and booster seat safety information?  How well do gDiapers work?  We love the fact that the inserts are flushable and compostable, but do the reusable diaper shells really keep it all in (yes, they do)?

As you can see, we’ve got a lot of questions.  The local baby boutique is good for some answers, but who has the time these days and how do we know that they aren’t just trying to get us to buy their products?  Baby books are great for one-way information, but not specific answers.  There must be a lot of other parents out there with answers!

With this in mind, PowerReviews created AnswerBox.  Our newest feature enables your customers to ask questions about specific products and tap into a large online community of active shoppers for answers.

One of my first projects as an intern was to implement a feature we call Customer Images. The project took a while, partly because it was a new and unfamiliar codebase to myself, partly because the technology didn’t want to play nicely, and partly because some other unforeseeable issues came up. Nonetheless, when the first image came in, I remember everyone in the office being pretty excited. Here it is:

Actually, that image came from Jim in the office, taken on a sub-par camera phone for a mousepad
on Allsop. No shame in bootstrapping the feature, right? That was August of 2006. By now, thousands of customer images have come in, and I’ve graduated from intern status. Fortunately, I will admit that all of the images look better than Jim’s hand in the first customer image. Here’s a recent example from a review on the Nikon D200:

We’d love for you to try out the feature yourself. Perhaps you already own a product from one of the following popular retailers that use Customer Images. If so, share your experience with the product by writing a review and be sure to attach an image while you’re at it!

• Adorama
• Netshops
• Evogear
• Ritz Interactive

So how DOES the sausage get made here at Buzzillions?

(First of all, we AVOID as many Web 1.0 lame-isms as possible but you never know when an 800 pound Gorilla reference is going to delight the noobie who’s still sending his friends joke emails.)

Okay back to tech talk…so we go for the “best of breed” approach and generally operate on the bleeding edge. Why not choose the tried and true tech of yesteryear? Well, using the right combo of stable open source and innovative enterprise software gives us a legion of low-cost outsourced programmers. Why reinvent the wheel? (…when you can just use other people’s cliches…)

Whoever said “Work smarter not harder” clearly did NOT work at a startup.

When you’ve got to work harder AND smarter, you want the best tools at your disposal and you want to dispose of the tools that don’t cut the mustard. We buy some tools (e.g., Jira, Intellij, Endeca) and use open source for others (e.g., Hibernate, EHCache, Apache, Tomcat, Spring).

We even tested three wikis for a month until we chose the one we wanted to use (Twiki). There were several Wikis that didn’t even support attachments…weird. As for why wikis have two search boxes…well, that’s a mystery for the ages.

If you add in the individual productivity tools such as Excel, Powerpoint – does it really boost productivity , SnagIt, Google Docs, Mind Manager and others, the list of tech becomes staggering.

Stay tuned and we here at Buzzillions will open the hood so you can learn from our mistakes and in turn share your insights with us.

Can you add to this list of Web 1.0 lame-isms?

“800 pound gorilla” – I later found out that a VERY LARGE gorilla is generally 550 pounds so if you’re the 800 pound gorilla you can really kick butt (unless you’re slow or dumb I guess)

“how the sausage gets made”- I researched this and wish I hadn’t

“dog and pony show” – many dotcom road shows were just a substantive

who’s got more of these?