Ripple chief executive Ray O'Neill said the company will buy data from Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo! and other sites, including details on sales volumes and trends for different products sold through their portals in different countries.

Ripple's software will then analyse the data to provide market information to online retailers.

O'Neill said his experience working for a company selling products through Ebay that listed products "by trial and error", convinced him there was a need for such a software program. "We didn't have the feedback fast enough about the market, " he said.

Ripple has been testing its software . . . which O'Neill said can provide information such as consumer buying habits and sales of similar products . . . with a number of online retailers. It would also help companies formulate "optimum retail strategies" and react quickly to changing market conditions, he said.

He said the goal was to become "the Bloomberg" for online auction sites, a reference to the New York-based financial news service that provides analysis and stock market data to banks, traders and media outlets.

Dublin-based Ripple plans to have a proof-of-concept version of the software ready by May. The company, which won a 10,000 prize at the Dublin Docklands Innovation Park enterprise awards to help fund its research, hopes to raise money to bring the software through to a commercial launch.

"We're trying to raise investment of circa 1m to bring the product to market.

At the moment I'm trying to court venture capitalists, " O'Neill said.