Newspaper-Backed Wanderful Media Revamps Its Local Deal Service Find&Save

Wanderful Media, a startup backed by of a bunch of major news publishers, announced today that it’s launching a dramatically improved version of its Find&Save service.

The company’s vision is to create the online version of the deal- and coupon-filled circulars that are delivered with newspapers and in the mail. The first version of Find&Save seemed to take that idea quite literally — it converted print circulars to digital and posted them online. However, CEO Ben T. Smith IV admitted, “It got interesting content out there, but it wasn’t interesting.”

Find&Save was actually part of Travidia, a print-to-digital conversion company that Wanderful acquired. (Wanderful also acquired the shopping service iCircular from the Associated Press.) This new version, Smith said, is Wanderful’s chance to put its own spin on the service.

Basically, the revamp makes the experience more personal and social. In addition to browsing deals and products, users can now save them in lists and set up alerts for expiring sales. They can also share products and lists on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and email, as well as follow users, retailers, and product categories.

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Find&Save sites will also work on mobile browsers (useful for checking in the store), and the company plans to launch native mobile apps this summer.

Looking ahead, Smith said Wanderful can become even more personal and helpful, because it now has lots of data, so it can tell at a local level when something is a really good deal. (That data still comes from physical circulars, as well as retailers and other digital sources.)

“We know the price of a two-liter Pepsi in Los Gatos for the past two years,” Smith said. “We can make it easier and much more personal so that everybody’s getting their own experience over time. It will continue to evolve with more data.”

As with the previous version, the new Find&Save is integrated as the main local commerce experience on a number of newspaper sites. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can visit the Find&Save pages for the Dallas Morning News, the San Jose Mercury News, or the San Francisco Chronicle.