Relevant Mind: Crowdsourcing for Consumers

If you’ve ever tried to research a specialty product online, odds are you’ve gotten a headache sooner than any useful information. User reviews are written by the begrudged and the brand zealot—if you can find them. This is exactly what Aaron Mann encountered when he was in the markets for a new mountain bike. His experience led him to create Relevant Mind, a collaborative product research tool just launched at Demo (see the presentation).

The product mines blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, podcasts, and social networks to gather data. Organized into niche verticals, it compiles these online conversations about products alongside information on where to buy them. From their release:

“RelevantMind is like Cliff notes for product research – an invaluable service for saving time and frustration, from the buying process and beyond,” stated Chris Shipley, executive producer of the Demo conference.

“Much like asking a knowledgeable friend for advice, we fundamentally change the product research process by connecting people to information tailored to their specific needs,” says Aaron Mann, CEO for RelevantMind. “Going much deeper than product reviews and aggregators, we bring you the actual conversations people are having about the things you are interested in.”

This “crowdsourding” model harnesses the wisdom of many to augment traditional editorial coverage. Already popular amongst news sites, we’ve seen it taking off as a consumer tool. Social shopping sites such as CrowdStorm, ThisNext, Yahoo! Shoposphere and most recently eBay Neighborhoods have all entered the playing field. But in contrast, Relevant Mind aggregates data from existing communities on the Internet, more like a search engine. It launched with two categories—road bikes and golf—and plans to add new verticals in the coming months including climbing, cooking, skiing and snowboarding.

Relevant Mind