Jun 7, 2007

Sprint Puts Shoppers In Touch With Slifter; GPS Service Locates Stores Offering Items Selected by CellphoneBy Riva RichmondOnline.WSJ.com

Sprint Nextel Corp. today begins offering a mobile-search service from closely held GPShopper LLC that uses global-positioning-system technology, enabling consumers to use cellphones to find products in retail stores.

The service allows shoppers to learn where they can buy, say, a certain iPod model or new Nike sneaker, based on a location signal, and at what price.

Previously, users of the service, called Slifter, needed to punch in a ZIP code (which they still can do) along with product-search terms. Not knowing a ZIP code was a roadblock for people in unfamiliar locales.

Slifter saves items to a shopping list, which can be shared with friends via text messages. The downloadable application costs $1.99 a month for Sprint subscribers with data plans, which typically cost from $15 to $25 a month.

New York-based GPShopper said GPS technology opens the door to wider adoption of Slifter. GPS has become available in many cellphone models and is increasingly familiar to consumers because of its use in automobile navigation systems.

Slifter has been used by several hundred thousand people, most of whom learned of the service from friends through Slifter’s sharing feature.

Alex Muller, founder and chief executive of GPShopper, said that through the connection with Sprint, “many people will say, ‘Gone are the days where I have to drive from store to store to find what I need.’ ” Using cellphones, he said, they’ll discover “there’s a place just around the corner that has the product in stock.”

Slifter draws on retailer inventory data on 65 million products at 30,000 store locations, including retail giants such as Best Buy Co. Inc., Staples Inc. and Toys ‘R’ Us Inc. Retailers provide the data to GPShopper and pay the New York start-up a fee whenever consumers click on a link to one of their product listings, much as advertisers pay search engines such as Google Inc. for clicks on keyword-based text advertisements.

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