Slifter, a mobile product-search engine.
It searches nearby stores for the product you're looking for and lets you know whether or not the item is in stock.
Slifter, which works through its WAP site or a downloadable application that's compatible with many mobile phones, is owned by GPShopper, a mobile marketing company based in New York City.
There are a number of companies, like Krillion, NearbyNow, ShopLocal and Yokel, that offer local product search, and AOL recently launched a mobile comparison shopping engine of its own, but Slifter has achieved notable distribution, thanks to its partnerships with Sprint and Nokia and its proclivity for showing up in organic mobile searches on the major engines. The company says that over one million people use Slifter every month.
It also has a substantial index, spanning 100 million products across 100,000 stores.
The experience on Slifter's WAP site is simple and smooth. You type in the name of the product you want and your zip code, and Slifter will return with nearby stores that currently have the item in stock. If you have a GPS-enabled phone, you don't need to enter the zip code; Slifter will automatically find the closest stores. You can see the prices, save the item to a shopping list, and see the location of a store on a map. But we have to wonder: Considering that all of this data is readily available online, at a regular computer, how many people will actually need it on the go?
The company recently raised an undisclosed sum from Allen & Co.
