If mPire can live up to its stated ambition, the reward will be large. The company that is trying to be the Kelley Blue Book of the web pitched at the the Under the Radar conference being held today at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus today. Panelists consisted of Canaan Partners' John Balen, Lockergnome.com's Chris Pirillo and Forum Nokia Americas' Doug McMillan.

The web site provides data that consumers need to make better purchasing decisions by telling users what they should be paying for things on the web. The 11-person company was founded in 2004 and garners 800,000 unique views per day. Its strategy is to distribute its technology across the web via widgets and APIs so that it doesn't need to pay to attract users. Its business model relies on a revenue share with other publishers and pay per click and cost per action.

I've summed up the question and answer period between mPire CEO Matt Hulett and the judges. Some are quotes and others are my best attempt at paraphrasing.

Canaan: How do you grow and break away from the pack so you don’t look like everyone else?
That's like saying there was no room for travel sites after Expedia but what's happened is Kayak.com has done well to grow. The breakthrough for us is distribution and for us it's a focus on the widgets which have brought a lot of traffic back to the site. Also, it's the comprehensiveness and inventory. People can shop aspirationally… Also visual shopping with trends could be a great way to differentiate it.

Nokia: I saw Amazon.com mentioned in the demo. What motivation does another merchant have to offer this?
It’s a user initiated download and we’re not doing anything egregious to Amazon.

Pirillo: Did I see something like Farecast that offers predictive pricing?
A lot of folks can offer historical pricing. We don’t offer predictive pricing yet but we’re looking at that…

For more on Dealmaker Media's Under the Radar conference, see:
Josh Lowensohn
Under The Radar

Tags: mpire, undertheradar, undertheradar2007, vc, utr2007, utr, venture+capital