UGenie's Harish Abbott talks about his new start-up, a comparison shopping search engine. UGenie is coming out of its stealth mode and unveiling its beta version on November 1, 2006.

Harish and Krishna Motukuri founded the start-up in June, and received their first round of investment of $5 million from Sierra Ventures and BlueRun Ventures.

Prof. Rajeev Motwani of Stanford University is an advisor to UGenie. Prof. Motwani's students founded Google.

This is how Harish describes UGenie:

"Our core focus for the current release is true price discovery - what we call helping consumers finding the "credit card damage". We attach taxes, shipping, coupons and discounts to a specific purchase and give full visibility to the customers to change whether he/she likes mail in rebates or does like to buy from lower ranked merchants and/or want his/her items in two days instead of standard shipping. We believe providing an honest (not advertisement driven) picture to merchants with total charges to credit card is a big need that is missing from the marketplace."

UGenie has another unique feature called "bundling" where the customer gets the best prices for his/her bundle of goods.

UGenie currently allows comparison shopping for four categories: books, movies, music and games. Over the course of the next few months they plan to add more categories.

Harish and Krishna previously worked for Amazon.com.

UGenie has offices in Palo Alto, CA and Bangalore, India.

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