SEATTLE -- A Seattle startup hopes complex math formulas, rumor mining and $8.5 million in funding can completely change the way you shop for electronics.
"We predict when the next model is coming so you don't get burned," said Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide.com, adding they also "predict what's happening with prices."
Fridgen said Decide is a website that not only compares prices of TVs and laptops and cameras, but can also forecast price drops and new model releases.
With six new laptops and two new TV models released every day in 2010, and new cameras coming out every other day, "buyer's remorse" has become a pretty common gripe among electronics enthusiasts.
"Trying to figure out when the next best thing's coming," said Mark Denmarsh, "it's impossible, it's a full-time job."
Ed Guinasso, who owns Magnolia Tech Outlet agreed.
"If I'm buying ten TV's and it turns out to be not as good a deal," he said, "then it hurts even more because I have to sell them really cheap to get them out of here."
Decide comprises about 20 PhDs and engineers at the base of Queen Anne Hill, and uses what the company calls "predictive technologies" against a database of billions of historical price points to calculate, with varying degrees of confidence, what lies in the future of each product.
"Prices do go down over time, but there's a lot of price price volatility that happens over the cycle of that product," Fridgen said. "Across all predictions, we're about 75 percent confident."
Which means, of course, they're sometimes wrong. But Fridgen said they openly admit it and display how much people have paid when that's happened.
It's a reunion of sorts for Fridgen and others, like University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni. They were co-founders of Farecast, a site that predicted rises and drops in airfares. Microsoft eventually bought Farecast and incorporated it into Bing Travel.
Decide said it's already raised $8.5 million dollars in capital from some big names, including Madrona Venture Group; Howard Schultz' venture firm Maveron; Zillow co-founder and former Expedia CEO Rich Barton; former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford; and Google founding board member Ram Shriram.
Fridgen said the site makes money through what he calls "agnostic" monetization, referring users to sellers on a cost per click basis, regardless of which vendor gets the eventual sale.
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