Veedow is a shopping discovery site that recommends products to users based on their expressed interests. The moment I heard the word "discovery", I was all over it. Frequent readers of this blog may remember that until October, I worked at matchmine, a media discovery company that recommended music, video, podcasts and blogs to users based on their interests and tastes. Because of that, I’m extremely interested in any recommendation and discovery services, so hearing about a site that took the discovery angle to a shopping site immeidately piqued my interest.

How It Works

From the veedow site:

Veedow collects a wide range of products from multiple sources and distributes it to users according to their chosen interests. The system generates a personalised page where users can rate any product, add it to their wish list, suggest it to friends or comment on it. We collate all these actions to learn people’s tastes and generate better recommendations for them and the whole community. For instance, when people leave high ratings for a specific product, this will likely be displayed to other users with the same interest.

When you sign up for veedow, you’re asked to select your interests:

Once your interests are added, a personalized set of recommendations can be found on your veedow page:

You can highlight each product and see:

Clicking the more button will show you user reviews and clicking the "shop this" button will redirect you to a page where you can buy the product.

Summary

Veedow, like any discovery engine, serves a niche interest: people looking for something that they don’t know exists. So if you’re looking to find something new, it’s really a great service. For instance, one of my interests in the Animal section was dogs. Going through my recommendations, I found this:

This is exactly what I need, though I had no idea it existed. My dog keeps trying to jump up in the front seat while I’m driving, and I keep having to elbow him to keep him back. Not so much fun while driving from Boston to NY.

So, if you’re looking for inspiration, I’d suggest checking out veedow. One note: it would be really cool if you could go into "gift mode", where you can change your interest settings for, say, a relative, allowing you to add their interests and see what veedow recommends for them. It would be a very cool holiday shopping tool. But I guess you can just change your own interest settings and accomplish the same thing.