With our background in the price comparison business, having founded PriceRunner in 1999, we have a few insiders in different places. With the recent sale of Kelkoo it was rumored that the selling price was “something less than €100 million” but it was actually quite a bit less than €100 million. We have inside sources close to the deal that gave us the exact number, 40 million GBP.

Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million so they are taking quite a hit on this one, However Kelkoo hasn’t developed well since then and Yahoo has been trying to sell Kelkoo for over a year. Yahoo had spent considerable effort to first integrate Kelkoo into Yahoo and then over the last year trying to make Kelkoo as a separate business to prepare it for sale. Their efforts were fruitless so they integrated it back again and then finally separating it again and succeeded in selling for £40 million to the UK based private equity firm Jamplant Ltd.

The price might at first seem a bit low compared to other price comparison sites that has been sold during the last years. However Kelkoo has been underperforming and with the market values today there are many interesting profitable companies selling for less. It’s going to be interesting to see if Kelkoo are going to change their broker based business model and start focusing on user value and building loyal users instead of trying to over capitalize on every single page. We think users today demand more of a shopping site, users want more objective information and they need to be able to trust that the site giving the recommendations are doing so with the best intentions and not for a quick profit.

//Kristofer Arwin
CEO and Founder of TestFreaks

About TestFreaks
TestFreaks aims to be the worlds largest review database and is currently available on 18 markets/languages and are reaching 4 million happy review lovers from all over the world each month.

Pepcom: Wine, Dine & Demo!

Yesterday in New York City, Pepcom held its last trade show of the season: the Wine, Dine & Demo! 2008 Exhibitor – Preview. This show featured products from well known companies such as Dell, HP, Vizio, and NVIDIA and some newer faces including Clickfree, Dreambox Learning and Big Stage Entertainment. I was able to swing by most of the product booths and see the latest and greatest products coming out for the upcoming season. Read on and I will try and give you a taste of what I saw.

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So Fedex came this morning and dropped off a nice little package from the folks at Microsoft, a special edition Gears of War 2 120gb Zune! So I thought I’d do an unboxing, it’s done in 1080i Resolution so it should look decent at full screen.. so check it out, and in about a week I’ll have the full review for you.

See ya in the next review…

So thanks to Google’s index from 2001 i found myself not only taking a step back in time but also seeing the future at the same time. Today everyone knows what the iPhone is but there was another device named iPhone that was seven years ahead of it’s time, namely the iPhone 2050 it even won best of CES 2000 and had the same initial price $499

Okey, so it’s not a cell phone but nevertheless it has pretty much the same features as the iPhone of today has.. Wonder what Apple would have named the iPhone if the iPhone 2050 would have been a hit

A description of the iPhone 2050

“The revolutionary iPhone is a fully integrated telephone and Internet device with a built-in touch screen to bring the world of the Internet into your home or office with the touch of your finger. It includes exclusive services and all the most popular telephone features like caller ID and call blocking, along with an Internet dial-up using PPP and e-mail access with multi-user mailboxes.”

“Additional Features:

56K modem support for dual phone lines, adjustable touch-pad screen
Laptop-size keyboard
Full duplex speakerphone
Voicemail
200-name address book
Three-way calling
Call forwarding
Automatic e-mail check

What can you do with an iPhone?

Send and receive e-mail
Make phone calls
Shop online
Surf the Internet
Read the news
Check the weather
Review sports statistics
Access movie information
Trade stocks
Bank online

And all of this can be accessed with the touch of your finger, while talking on the iPhone.”

Slappa Ballistix AURA Silver/Orange Laptop Shoulder Bag was recentely reviewed over at Geek with laptop. Besides the “funky” colors on this laptop bag it has a few neat qualities that are mentioned in the review. The bag is made out of water and tear resistant 1680-D ballistic nylon and has 1500 cubic inches of space. For you who don’t know how much that really is, the guys at Geek with laptops tested how many oranges they could fit in the bag. When they ran out of oranges (101 standard sized oranges) it still had room for more. The laptop compartment fits both 15.4″ and 17″ notebooks and it has dedicated compartments for storing laptop accessories.

The bag measures 18 x 15.35 x 6.3 inch (W x H x D), weights 4.26 lbs. , and costs $134.99 over at Slappa.com.

The Geek with laptop team also tested the water resistance by showering the bag for 30 seconds, and cushion padding by throwing the bag of a 90 feet cliff. Interested to know what happend? Check out Geekwithlaptops review of the Slappa Ballistix AURA. In the same review they’re also checking out the Slappa Ballistix PTAC Matrix, so check out their review.

A QA function has been released on Testfreaks, so now you can ask the community if you have any questions about a product or a category. We’ve already seen some questions and answers pop up on a few products. Hopefully you’ll find the answer you’re looking for or you may be able to assist a fellow freak in need. The QA section can be reach either from the category pages or via the product pages.

So checkout our new QA!

After a couple of months with a free theme for our blog we decided it was time to give it a design that was more in line with the rest of the site. Hope you guys like it! If you have any suggestions just post a comment on this post.

Cheers for now!

Something had to change, I have really never understood why Apple ships their excellent music players with subpar headphones/headsets. So I have tried out a pair of Sennheiser MM 50 iPhone for a couple of days now and needless to say, its a big step up from what Apple offers with the iPhone. What hit me first was how close the mic is to my mouth, at first as saw this as a bit negative but after using it now it is really a benefit. Previously I could have the mic down in my jacket and people I spoke to on the phone didn’t here me that great all the time.

The package form Sennheiser contains three sizes of ear-buds so all of you with Small, Medium or Large ears should be satisfied.

Short Specs:
Headphones:
Frequency response: 18 - 22, 000 Hz
Impedance: 16 Ohm
SPL (1kHz, 1Vrms): 106 dB
Microphone:
Frequency response: 80 - 15,000 Hz
Pick-up pattern: omnidirectional
Impedance: 2,2 K Ohm
Sensitivity: -44 dB v / Pa

The dirty details
Every morning I put my iPhone in my pocket and take a short 15 minutes walk down to the TestFreaks office. The walk is next to a busy road with a lot of construction work and I have always had maximum volume turned on and even so at times I have a hard time hearing the music or my favourite podcasts. Yesterday morning everything changed, I was in my own little world were the only thing I heard was the sweet sound of Coldplay, Radiohead and a little Bob Marley.
The sound isolation is  the best I have heard from in-ear headphones so far.

For the first day I had the equalizer settings off on my iPhone to try and get the feeling of how the MM 50 iPhone really sounds before getting into changing the settings. The sound from the headphones is what I would categorize as easy listening, they behave nicely to most music I have listened to. I remember my Shure E2C which sounded great for high quality recordings with high bitrate but not so with the low bitrate music and poor recording quality. MM 50 gives all music equal value and I know if you are a purist you are probably going to say the lay it on a bit thick, and yes they do but I like it. I prefer easy listening when I listen to music on the fly I am not looking for the pure Hifi experience. When listening to Mötley Crüe  playing  “Too Fast For Love” with the MM 50 it’s easy to hear all the instruments and the guitar sounds brutal and alive, just like I want it to do. The base is very present and at times a bit heavy but in the end my bet is that this is what most listeners prefer when listening to their iPods, I do anyways.

So today I mixed around a bit with the equalizer and I always seems to go for the “Rock” setting on my iPhone. In short it gives the music I listen to most a bit more push at both ends, I think this will be the setting I’m going to use from this day forward.

Final thoughts
All in all the sounds quality is pretty good, it’s not the best there is but value for money they are great. What’s lacking in my opinion is a crispier top range, the rated frequency response looks great but there is always a big difference in reality. Now its time for me to take a short 15 minute walk home and listen to some Bob Dylan. In conclusion I would recommend these headphones to anyone who are looking for an upgrade of what Apple is offering out the box. It will make your iPhone come to live in a new way and listening to music will be more fun then before.

At Testfreaks you can look for more Sennheiser MM iPhone reviews and headphone reviews.

We haven’t been that active in the blog, sorry for that. I thought it was time for a short update on what’s going on. First of all we have launched a bunch of new categories since December.

Home Theater Systems

LCD Monitors

Multi Functional Printers

Nintendo Wii Games

PlayStation 2 Games

PlayStation 3 Games
Xbox 360 Games

So a lot of games, which is fun. We just got a Wii to the office the other week and and we are still trying to decide who is the best tennis player. In the comming weeks you will get some more games, such as: Gameboy Advance Games, Gamecube Games, Nintendo DS Games, PC Games,  PSP Games and of course Xbox Games.

When it comes to functions on the site there is a lot going on behind the scenes that will come out in the next months. Last week we added Wiki functionality to the site which is really cool. We have a few users trying this out now and we will push it out next week or the week after pending any changes that has to be made.

With the Wiki functions we have also added a a cool ajax login / register function that you will see soon. The wiki-editing will be directly on the page which makes it really fast and easy to use.

Besides more categories you will get new filters and product specifications shortly and one or two other functions.

If you have any suggestions or ideas please send me an e-mail at info ( at ) testfreaks . com
/Stefan

First of all thanks to everyone who helped us test out our beta version and all the great feedback we have received. We will take all input into consideration while we continue to develop TestFreaks.

Soon you will see more filters, better search, Freak Rank and a lot more categories and a few more interesting features. We added three new categories that are almost completed but you can get a sneak-peak at DVD Player Reviews, Projector Reviews and AV Receivers Reviews. We will continue to roll out more categories in a few weeks in a higher pace than we have done before.

As from now you can also see prices from two separate price comparison partners; Shopping.com and PriceSCAN which we are proud to have working with us to bring you not only the best products but also at the best prices available. As for the merchant ratings we want to keep them as up to date as possible and from as many sources as possible. The ratings are from the last 6 months and are aggregated from a large number of sources to help you feel secure while shopping.

Stay tuned,

TestFreaks

Behind closed doors, we are getting ready to send out invites to our private beta test. The interest has been huge and we are happy to see that so many of you are interested in finding better products and being a part of Testfreaks. It’s not too late to ad your e-mail addresses to our beta program, but there is no guarantee that we can give everyone an account in the first beta.

At the moment we are implementing the new design and trying out new interesting features. The design looks amazing and we are all exited to take a step forward with the private beta.

See you soon, behind closed doors, here at TestFreaks.

Today we received the four servers we ordered from Dell just last week.
They were delivered much more swiftly than we expected, which in the end is a good thing.

Out of the four servers, two quad-core machines will be used as application servers and for serving the database. One machine will be used for backup and one as an allround server for subversion, jabber, e-mail and other internal services.

The final decision on which OS(es?) to run has yet to be made, but we’re currently leaning towards Ubuntu. We think Ubuntu would be a good choice and it has been good to us so far.

For the server naming scheme, we’re looking towards beer brands. Just imagine the grand naming ceremonies we will be able to have.