GoodGuide, a startup that launched at TC 50, could have actually named themselves GreenGuide as well. The service wants to provide information to users on the social, environmental, and health related aspects of consumer products and by implication the companies that are behind them.
With so much focus and attention given to climatic issues these days, services like this could only help increase consumer awareness. After all its our planet and we have to keep it clean, green and healthy.
The company founders claim that around 60 million Americans wish that they have had more information regarding the Green aspects of the products that they are buying. GoodGuide is a response to this wish, the company assembled a team of technologists and experts and compiled product information for literally thousands of products (60,000 to be exact) from hundreds of sources. The sources ranged from the assembly or manufacturing procedures to the components of the products.
So now if a consumer wants to have more information about a product, all he needs to do is to search for it using the GoodGuide one box search. Once the product is listed in the search results, you could just click on its name and go to its profile page. The profile pages detail information ranging from Health, Environment and Social performance aspects of the product on a scale of 1-10. These scores are further categorized into areas – Cancer Effects, Toxic/Hazard, Climate, Philanthropy, and Employment Standards. All these scores are fed in to generate an over all score that determines how socially responsible the manufacturing had been.
If that was not all, GoodGuide also displays news and blog articles besides the profile – Google Finance style – to let the users see what others have talked and written about the product. In addition to this GoodGuide also provides a list of top products that could be used as a replacement for the current one.
Overall GoodGuide would serve as a definite resource in our efforts to go green, and clean.
GoodGuide is based in Berkeley, California and has raised $1.8 million in funding to date.
You can watch their TC 50 launch video below:
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[...] Mashable has written about a widget based service called TurnTo, which works on the concept of social shopping. Deviating from the path of the above two, this one lets you add people from your existing circle of friends. During TC 50, which I’d written about earlier, a couple of startups working in the social shopping/reccomendation space were showcased. One was GoodRec, which shows users reccomendations of restaurants, books, movies nightlife, and displays the location on a map. It allows you to make reccomendations, which can also be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc. According to StartupMeme, GoodRec scores over the existing player – Yelp, in terms of usability. Another player, who is into ’social’ based decision making is CityVoter, which ‘allows insiders who know a city best to share their insight with information, ratings, and reviews on everyday decisions’.The other startup is GoodGuide, which aims to provide users with information on social, environmental, and health related aspects of consumer products. With people becoming increasingly aware and conscious of the environment and the impact of their lifestyle on it, this is a good space to be, especially because of the clutter of ‘green’ goods that have been hitting the market. You can read more details on them here. [...]