ProductWiki Launches New Feature; Q&A

Waterloo, Ont.-based ProductWiki, which has developed a consumer-driven product review site on a Wiki platform, rolled out a cool feature today: Collaborative Reviews. It features a voting system that lets users vote on the pros and cons of a particular product. (Mashable did a mini-review.) To get a better handle on ProductWiki, I did an interview with co-founder Erik Kalviainen.

What’s the history of ProductWiki – the founders, etc.?
ProductWiki was launched publicly in Nov. 2005. There are three founders: myself, Omar Ismail, and Amanie Ismail. Amanie and I are married (both 28), and Omar (23) is her brother (my brother in-law). In 2005, we were all working in Silicon Valley when we had the idea of a “product wiki” to do for consumer products what Wikipedia was doing for general knowledge – create the ultimate open-content product website.

What’s the company’s strategic focus and what’s the competitive landscape like?
Using the collaboration of our growing community, we strive to create high quality product pages that become the best resource of information for each product. After visiting one of our product pages, we hope the user has a good overall sense of the product, and has enough information to make a decision whether or not to buy. It’s a lot, even overwhelming amount, of work to create a comprehensive catalog, so we focus our efforts on one product at a time. As we grow, the rate of user contributions increases as we accelerate towards our end goal.

Most of the useful information on sites like ours comes from a dedicated core of community members, whose contributions benefit a much larger readership of users. It is extremely important to support the core contributors, so they can continue to do what they do best.

ProductWiki positions itself somewhere between product information/price aggregators (Shopping.com, ShopWiki, Wize) and the newer Web 2.0 phenomena of social shopping sites (ThisNext, Kaboodle, Stylehive). However, we introduce the concept of open-content collaboration to the mix. While it’s a very competitive space, our unique take on the problem of online shopping, combined with our growing community, gives us an advantage.

How many users/visitors do you have?
Currently, we have about 150,000 unique visitors / month, which grows at a pretty steady rate. This time last year, the number was 30,000.

You just introduced Collaborative Reviews. What’s the thinking behind this service and how will they work?
The basic idea behind the Collaborative Review is to create a single review of a consumer product that takes many people’s opinions and experiences into consideration. The typical Web surfer has to read through many individual reviews before they come up with a consensus. Our system mimics this process in an elegant way, and the end result is a single review that captures most of the information typically spread out across multiple reviews.

A collaborative review works by individual members submitting pro/con statements about a given product. Other users can then vote on each statement as to whether or not they believe it be true, important, or relevant to the review. The process of receiving votes is made as simple as possible; accomplished by either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If a statement is omitted, other users can add it. From our testing, we’ve found that the collaborative review very quickly becomes useful even after only a handful of reviewers have made a pass at it.

While we emphasize the collaborative nature of the technology, users have the option of seeing how individuals voted by looking at the review’s history. To further help the user out, they can filter on individual users and see how they reviewed the product themselves. This means the collaborative review has the best of both worlds: consensus, and individual opinion.

The Collaborative Review system fits in perfectly with our vision that I outlined to create a high quality resource of product information.

What’s the business model?
We currently have a partnership with Shopping.com to deliver price comparison services on each of our product pages. It is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) arrangement and has proven very successful. Our ads are a valuable resource to our users rather than a nuisance like other ad models.

Have you received any venture capital? If not, are you interested in venture capital?
We are completely self-funded by the three founders. We are open to the concept of venture capital, but are growing the business organically with success. We are currently sustainable, allowing the three founders to work full-time on the ProductWiki project.

What’s your take on the Web 2.0 landscape in Canada?
Coming from Silicon Valley, we’ve definitely seen significant differences between the Web culture in the Bay Area vs. Canada. People there do EVERYTHING online, whereas in Canada you’ll be lucky to find a company that has a significant web presence. Canadians are some of the most savvy Internet users, but the landscape prevents them from fully integrating it into their everyday lives. I think it has a lot do with the geographic size of Canada, and the logistics of shipping goods across the country. However, Canada has a ton of bright people, sophisticated infrastructure and broadband adoption, so we have hope for a bright future for Canada on the Web. We’ve attended some smaller events in Canada like BarCamp/DemoCamp and it’s amazing to see how many Web 2.0 companies are Canadian that you didn’t know about.