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Priceonomics Raises $1.5 MM, Users Unfazed
- ajju 14y agoThis is probably the best funding announcement I have ever seen: self deprecating, funny and actually useful to the reader. Congrats guys, rock on!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sherm8n 14y agoCongrats! I just gave about 30 electronic items to someone on TaskRabbit to sell for me. Used ebay to correctly price them, but priceonomics was spot on when verifying them!
- fscof 14y agoBig congrats guys! I feel assured knowing we won't be eating top ramen all summer.
- midas 14y agoThanks Forrest! We'll now be upgrading to pasta and red sauce.
- jabiko 14y agoRaising venture capital seems not to require building a secure product: http://tinyurl.com/7pad22b http://tinyurl.com/7pad22b (Click the search bar to execute the code)
- joshu 14y agoMisspelled my last name. :(
- mixonic 14y agohttps://skitch.com/matthewbeale/82y5t/car-used-price-850 https://skitch.com/matthewbeale/82y5t/car-used-price-850 Admittedly, searching for "car" is vague, but this is just too funny of a result to not share :-) Exciting!
- nknight 14y ago... What is that "car" in the picture?
- joshz 14y agoIt's a bodykit. http://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/07/ebay-find-of-the-day-fastlane-future-car/ http://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/07/ebay-find-of-the-day-fast...
- midas 14y agoHa! How did you get that result? The javascript should autocomplete to our cars guide if you type in "car": http://cl.ly/0x0z2F393U20383s3b2G http://cl.ly/0x0z2F393U20383s3b2G You can manually override if you want to, but if it's not doing it by default that's a bug.
- nknight 14y agoJust hit enter fast enough: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14571816/pricenomics%20car.mov http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14571816/pricenomics%20car.mov
- midas 14y agoThanks! I had an intentional 100ms delay between keystrokes, but I just lowered it to 25ms on my local and it's looking much better.
- nknight 14y agoI'm still able to reliably bypass the autocompletion just hitting enter, any reasonably fast typist would. It's not even just the 25ms, it's the actual time to execute the autocompletion code. Hitting the search button with the mouse also bypasses it entirely, no matter how long you wait, as does hitting tab then space or enter to activate the search button.
- evanm 14y agoOmar, Priceonomics should have a price page for itself
- ajju 14y agohttp://priceonomics.com/priceless/ http://priceonomics.com/priceless/
- jansen 14y agoCongrats on the round and really great post, guys!
- bguthrie 14y agoCongrats, guys! Well done.
- michaelmwu 14y agoBlog is down?
- DTrejo 14y agoPrice comparison makes you unhappy! http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WILSON%20(2011).pdf http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WIL...
- jasonshen 14y agoDid you read the article? Here's the important point: From this perspective, comparison shopping may focus consumers' attention on differences between available options, leading them to overestimate the hedonic impact of selecting a more versus less desirable option. To the extent that the process of comparison shopping focuses attention on hedonically irrelevant attributes, comparison shopping may even lead people to choose a less desirable option over a more desirable option. Pricenomics helps you get the best/fair price for an existing thing you were already going to buy. It is purely about making a more informed decision about one item, not comparing between somewhat different products and making the wrong decision.
- natep 14y agoExactly. After looking at the results of some generic terms (netbook, ultrabook), they're really not equipped for general-purpose feature comparison. But when you narrow it down to a specific model, it seems like it would help you avoid ripoff craigslist/ebay deals.
- bengl3rt 14y agoHiring??? :D
- Anirak 14y agohttp://priceonomics.com/search/?q=feces http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=feces I think I've discovered a new niche.
- Destroyer661 14y agoIt would be nice if they tailored the searches a bit more to geo-location. I search for things and end up getting craigslist results for SF even though I'm in Canada.
- neilwillgettoit 14y agohttp://search.priceonomics.com http://search.priceonomics.com I lol'ed
- adamclayman 14y agoWith the new financing, could/would you build medical pricing into your practice areas? It's about-time for more transparency in the medical world. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1100041 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1100041
- joshu 14y agoThis seems like a fun project. Has any of the data actually been released?
- mitchellh 14y agoCongrats. I'm sure they're aware, but for others here: decide.com does a fantastic job at price predicting products, and is founded by the same person behind the price prediction algorithm purchased by Bing ("Farecast") and he is also a tenured professor at the University of Washington specializing in machine learning. Pretty steep competition both from an engineering and business standpoint.
- joshu 14y agoI actually met Oren at TED. Super sharp guy.
- redorb 14y agoThe difference I see is priceonmics give me a real answer $200 for a iphone 3gs see here: http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/iphone-3gs/ http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/iphone-3gs/ While decide.com give me a .99 cent option and no other real value ideas of that phone https://www.decide.com/search/iphone%25203gs/1/22818276/RELEVANCE/ https://www.decide.com/search/iphone%25203gs/1/22818276/RELE...
- kruipen 14y agoFor anything from long tail priceonomics seems to show pretty much random data, e.g. this is the most most popular amplifier: http://priceonomics.com/amplifiers/eagle/ http://priceonomics.com/amplifiers/eagle/ (I tried amplifiers because I was curious to compare data with a toy site (500 lines of haskell for crawler+site) I built for audio equipment price trends: http://kruipen.com http://kruipen.com)
- rjb 14y agoDecide seems fine for new items, specifically electronics and appliances which is probably why the service highlights their price drop alerts. Priceonomics really impressed me when it was able to price a Leica M4P and a set of P90 pickups. Decide had neither in their system.
- zissou 14y agoThe economic (consumer choice) problem that Priceonomics is aimed at solving is the "when to buy a product" problem. Plenty of products already exist to aid consumers with the "where to buy" and "what/which to buy" problems. This paper at Microsoft Research goes through the theory: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=148337 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1483...
- budu3 14y agoApparently a wive is really affordable http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=wife&fs=1 http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=wife&fs=1
- theunixbeard 14y agoAt prices like that, I might just pick up 2 or 3! But seriously, it'll be interesting to see how in the future their algorithms improve to deal low-information queries like that.
- joseakle 14y agoLuck is cheap too. http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=luck&fs=1 http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=luck&fs=1
- blantonl 14y agoI suppose this a positive, but I'm skeptical when companies use marketing events and cheeky blog posts to trumpet funding events. Especially when they don't disclose the reason why they needed to source funding the first place. Or they never mention how the capital will help the idea move forward. The other reason why I am skeptical is that feels like startups these days are more focused on raising money than shipping product. Is the referenced blog post an example? This is what I hear from this post: "hey, everyone! (waving hands) - we raised a round!" I'd rather see: "hey, everyone! check out what we rolled out today!" And If what you rolled out today is successful, innovative, generates net income, and is backed by 500 trillion in venture capital. Fantastic! Otherwise, why should I be concerned that you got some people to invest in your idea?
- nedwin 14y agoI actually thought the blog post was the opposite of how you read it. They're basically saying "it doesn't matter that we got funding - our users don't care" (which they don't) but they also know this will raise their profile in terms of finding talented engineers. The message being "we're hiring and investors believe in us - you should too". I thought it was refreshing.
- pbreit 14y agoYour skepticism is mis-placed. Your concerns are lame in general and especially so for Priceonomics and this particular post. Priceonomics has a history of writing quality blog posts of interest to this audience. This post acknowledges the folly of talking about a funding and proceeds to spend most of the time supplying very useful information about the process. Asking for more detail about intended fund usage is unnecessary. Everyone already knows basically what the funds will be used for. And you know what? Raising money is worth celebrating. Funding is critical to helping entrepreneurs be successful.
- wensing 14y agoI'm pretty sure my reaction to this is due to being outside YC & SV, but ... We raised $1.5 million in 10 days and pretty much the whole time we didn’t feel very good. Ten days? Didn't feel very good? That's fundraising? Wow. What can I even say to that? Congrats guys.
- galfarragem 14y agoI hope it will work someday cause it doesn't for now.. http://priceonomics.com/cars/ford/mondeo/ http://priceonomics.com/cars/ford/mondeo/
- zacharyvoase 14y agoI'd love to see this for salaries.
- jdc 14y agohttp://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries
- sova 14y agohttp://priceonomics.com/search/?q=human+being http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=human+being tldr: $37