NYTimes Gadgetwise Blog - Posted Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:08:39 UTC +00:00

Last week’s App Smart column featured cooking and shopping apps for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The shopping apps mentioned, however, failed to include a brand new one that deserves consideration. Goodzer (free on iPhone) offers items and prices for local stores, which is a weak spot in the current lineup of shopping apps — and, for that matter, Web sites. Local stores are not great at tracking their own inventories, much less putting that data online for others. Goodzer aims to get around this by scanning product information from retail Web sites and linking it to the retailers’ physical locations. Dmitry Pakhomkin, Goodzer’s chief executive, said that 90 percent of the time, the local store’s inventory would match the goods included on the Web site. The company has more than 500,000 brick-and-mortar stores in its database, and more than two billion items. Goodzer was slightly inconsistent, returning better local results on Read More