The playing field is still open for mall search engines like NearbyNow
As the dot-com crash proved, the Internet doesn’t spell the end of the brick-and-mortar store. While shopping startups like Boo.com and Webvan went belly-up, the traditional mall continued to thrive, relatively untouched by the web phenomenon.
Getting data about the local mall on to the web is the point of NearbyNow, a search engine that tells us it has just raised a fresh $11.75 million round from Norwest Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company, now in its second year of existence, has gone from a single mall in its database in late 2006 to 202 malls today, and says it’s within range of half the population of the United States.
Instead of just searching within a geographical area, though, NearbyNow asks users to pick a specific mall. They then need to enter a search term, like “jeans”, with results showing for all the stores in the mall. The results can be narrowed by categories like “men’s apparel” or limited to specific stores.
While I was checking out NearbyNow, I decided to test out the company’s claim that it can tell you whether an item is available in a store within 10 minutes. It’s a simple process — just enter your desired size, color and quantity and either an email address or a mobile phone number.
True enough, I got a reply within about eight minutes on my first request. Unfortunately, the item I wanted wasn’t in stock, but it did offer a link to buy it online. A second request reported that there would be a delay before the store could check on the item, which ended up taking about 15 minutes more before I was told that item was also out of stock. Two failures would be enough to wear out the patience of many searchers — there’s some hard work to be done in keeping the site up to date with what’s actually in stores.
One the other hand, the engine provides a good way to look through the sorts of styles different stores carry. As readers pointed out in our first story about NearbyNow, the company’s challenge isn’t developing a useful product, but rather distinguishing itself amid the noise of competitors like Krillion and ShopLocal. None have yet captured the market.
NearbyNow is based in Los Altos, Calif. The company has raised $19.25 million to date, including a first round of capital from DFJ.
Next Story: Hey Japan, meet Twitter — hope you like ads!
Previous Story: Search Wikia takes a step closer to the promise of ’search meets Wikipedia’
About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.