GoodGuide

Just in time for the crazed holiday shopping season, San Francisco-based GoodGuide releases the first iPhone app that lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls "impartial" health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.

As our Webware staff wrote in August, "GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web." And as we report in Health Tech just this week, GoodGuide is an invaluable resource … Read more

GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web. Anyone who is concerned with the impact their purchasing has on their bodies, the environment, and other people can benefit from the information provided by GoodGuide. And let's face it: such awareness is quite the trend nowadays, and that means demand for such a site is sure to grow going forward.

At it's core, GoodGuide is a product recommendation system focused on safe, healthy, and green products. Along with telling you … Read more

GoodGuide, the service that tells you how environmentally friendly your bottle of shampoo or other household product is, now tracks food items. And not just nutritional content either. The site puts food items up against the same microscope it does for all the other products in its database, showing you how a food item stacks up against others in the same category, and what kind of score the parent company has.

Essentially it's all the things that makes GoodGuide really work, like finding out if your laundry detergent is killing polar bears; something you can now check for your … Read more

One of my favorite companies from the TechCrunch 50 launch conference was GoodGuide (review), a slick database of safety and social responsibility data on consumer products. At launch, the service covered health, beauty, and cleaning products. Launching now (and as originally promised): coverage of toys, and the company's iPhone app.

Cutting to the chase: The GoodGuide database will tell you if that toy you're thinking of buying has lead in it. Based on that, I'm sold. And having that info available on the run, via the new free iPhone app, makes it that much more useful.

The … Read more

Last week I got a glimpse at GoodGuide, a new product recommendation service that rates products as safe, healthy, and green based on their ingredients, manufacturing, and distribution. It's part of a new class of services that are bringing data transparency that can save money, lives, and the environment, not necessarily in that order.

BillShrink.com recently launched a recommendation service that focuses on unpacking the complexity and cost of cell phone plans. The free service analyzes wireless phone bills and rate plans from the major carriers, and then monitors usage and makes recommendations for saving money. Another company, … Read more

GoodGuide is a new product recommendation system focused on "safe, healthy, and green products." It will tell you what chemicals are in your toothpaste, or if your socks are made with sweatshop labor.

The company's real value add is in acquiring the data on the products. The packaging of the data into a site is the easy part, but we think they've done a great job at it.

That's it, simple story. Looks like a great product and service. iPhone app coming, and expansion into other areas as well: Food, toys, electronics, adding to the … Read more