The “Break it Down” Blog

Vizio VP505XVT 50″ Plasma TV – King of Value, PC Mag Editor’s Choice

Some quick background, Vizio broke out onto the scene with the most value-minded (read: cheapest) televisions at Costco and eventually other major retailers, servicing the middle to low end crowd with affordible HDTVs that performed OK. Since then Vizio’s business and ability to execute at delivering increasingly better panels, still targeted to the mid-range, have made [...]

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IGN Game Reviewers Love Everything

Reading through the Kotaku “Frankenreview” series over the last year or so I’ve unscientifically noticed a trend… IGN seems to love most everything. I noticed with high profile titles more time than not IGN tends to love them and in polarizing titles they also tend to lean towards the upper-end of the scale. There are [...]

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Reevoo: Independent Product Review Site for Shoppers

When I am in the market to buy something, reviews are a critical thing for me… the more the merrier. This is true to the extent that I won’t even shop at an e-tailer that doesn’t provide reviews or represents them poorly; and I find myself more inclinded to shop at stores that do make [...]

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Recommendation Systems – Let ME Decide What I Like

I’ve been a NetFlix user for years, and always pretty happy with the service (except for a few throttling issues), but one aspect of the service that has really been bugging me recently is how the stars that NetFlix shows you for the movie ratings is not based off the community’s collective reviews, but rather [...]

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Checking Product Pricing and Reviews Instantly

How cool is this… The Consumerist pointed me over to Frucall which is a mobile and online comparison service. You essentially text message the number “fru” with the bar code from the item in question, and the response you get back is a summary of the average rating of the product and it’s price online. So [...]

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