Our Mission:

1. To promote a better environment, especially on the internet, in which humans can make decisions.
2. To assist in good decision-making by humans in all areas of their lives.
3. To encourage product improvement according to consumer needs and preferences.
   

Try this: Google search “best compact digital camera for less than $200,” and visit the first 5 links.  Did you get 5 different answers?  Do you trust any of them?  How long would it take you to find a good answer to that question?  30 minutes?  Several hours?  More than a day?  When you search on the internet, how often are your questions answered?

While finding information on the internet is as easy as typing a string of letters into a search bar, actually finding the answers to a important questions is a chore, if not outright impossible (don’t worry, it’s not just you!).  Plenty of websites aim to help you find answers: Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon.  However, what none of those sites will do is take the final step and put you in control of what you see (and eliminate results you don’t need).

Search engines like Google organized the world’s information in a helpful way, but it was a baby step in making the web more usable.  Amazon put a bunch of products at one place, but then they sorted the results by what made them the most money, not what you needed to make a better decision.  Wikipedia consolidated information, but they have no feature to let you analyze, rank, or prioritize that information to get to the answer you’re really trying to find.

Looking beyond the mess of the internet, you are probably making decisions you don’t know you’re influenced to make.  Fortunes are made and lost on getting you to make certain decisions, making decisions that benefit corporations who want you to buy their products –it’s marketing, and it’s so effective that most companies spend more on marketing than they do developing their products.  Marketing works to get people to make certain decisions about products, but it’s not intended to help consumers except to help them fork over their money.  Clever marketing campaigns confuse the dialogue by encouraging you to buy based on an emotional response, not based on an open, transparent dialogue about the product.  If marketers were thinking about your best interests when selling you a product, they probably wouldn’t be marketers.

With all of the confusion caused by search and marketing goliaths, we at Pikimal want to help human beings cut through the mess and assist people in making the best decisions for them.  Our goal is to organize and provide information it in a way that’s usable and ultimately puts you, the consumer, in control of getting the best results.

How are we going to do it?

While we’re keeping our mission broad so as to be able to explore new venues of helping our users, our goals centered on our website, pikimal.com, are straightforward.  We aim to use the Pikimal site and blog to accomplish the following:

• Provide a helpful web tool, the piki, so that consumers can use it to make good decisions according to their preferences.
• Publish specs of items and spec-by-spec comparisons of items
• Publish our research about products and decision-making on our blogs
• Using expert support in specialized areas of interest, such as electronics, parenting and food, to interact with users directly about products.
• Publicly identify companies and products that encourage bad decision-making.
• Publish exclusive data that we have gathered using the piki tool on our blogs, for increased transparency on what people seek in products and how users work with our tool
• Sell collected data to manufacturers so that they may improve products according to consumer needs.

You know you’re interested.  Support our mission further by visiting and following Pikimal!

Visit our site! www.pikimal.com

Friend us on Facebook! www.facebook.com/pikimal

Follow us on Twitter! www.twitter.com/pikimal