Today, as we announce our latest round of funding from our incredibly supportive investors, I wanted to reflect quickly on all that we’ve accomplished this year and try to set the stage for 2009.   We’ve launched products, formed partnerships, tackled some tough challenges and above all, we’ve grown.  At the beginning of the year we had a few hundred thousand people each month using our products.  Today, it’s millions.

In the past year our business really started to organize around helping bring the goodness of the GeoWeb to three distinct audiences: consumers, publishers, and advertisers.

For consumers this year we launched Radar: the first truly personalized local news experience.  Tell us where you are and we can tell you what’s happening within 1,000 feet of you.  The experience of consuming news and media based on proximity—it’s important because it’s close to you—is proving to be incredibly valuable.

Heading into 2009, we expect to bring the value of Radar more front and center for our users.  Expect to see some cool upgrades here in the near future, as well as new versions of Radar for mobile devices.

Publishers are starting to embrace the need to get more local.  The issues surrounding traditional newspaper and media companies are well known.  We feel strongly that there are real opportunities for these companies to leverage some key assets—namely their strong local brands, experienced sales forces with deep advertiser relationships, and a significant base of traffic—to build successful new models.  We’re working like crazy to help them get there.

In 2008 we launched our GeoToolkit, now used by thousands of local sites.  It’s a full suite of products for publishers to geo-tag, organize, distribute and eventually monetize their local content.

Our first product in the GeoToolkit was the StoryMap.  Local publishers write about places and neighborhoods and are constrained by publishing platforms that value recency over proximity.   So, we created StoryMaps: “geo navigation for geo content.”   We have hundreds of local sites now using them to promote their content and drive more traffic.

We also started working with larger publishers to help extend their editorial coverage to more granular and local neighborhoods.  We are creating discrete Neighborhood News pages for many publishers now in multiple markets.  Simply, we aggregate all the news and discussions on the Web and organize them by neighborhood.  This gives the publisher a more local and targeted editorial page and does so at a fraction of the cost of putting a reporter on every corner in every neighborhood.  Expect to see the announcements of some of these partners early next year.

We believe that our data must “flow” for it to increase in value for all of the users, so we also began opening up APIs into our dataset in 2008.  We’ve seen some cool things get built, like near.ly, and we are already working on the next wave of enhancements to the API.

And above all, we have remained focused on being a great distribution partner for all of the sources we aggregate.  We embrace and support the incredible sites that cover hyperlocal markets and we are passionate about driving traffic to them and helping them grow.

2009 will bring even more products in the GeoToolkit.  Expect them all to help sites organize, promote, distribute and monetize their local content even better.

So, thank you to all of the people creating great local content, to our investors for your support and vision and thank you to the Outside.in team for all of your hard work and energy.

Stay tuned…

Outside.in Caps Year of Growth
with New Funding and Network Launch

BROOKLYN, NY (December 15, 2008) – Capping a year of significant growth, Outside.in, the web’s leading platform for personalized hyperlocal news and conversations, announced today the closing of its latest round of funding.  The financing is primarily from existing venture and angel investors, including Union Square Ventures, the New York City Investment Fund, and Betaworks.  It comes after a year of considerable growth in audience, technology, and product development.

This fall, the company also successfully began the distribution of its GeoToolkit service to a network of thousands of local media sites.  GeoToolkit is a suite of tools designed to help local publishers optimize their content for the geographic web.  The first major product is StoryMaps, which offers publishers “geographic navigation for geographic content.” Thanks in part to the adoption of StoryMaps, Outside.in’s unique users grew more than 400% from January to November.

StoryMaps can been seen on leading local newspaper sites such as the Boston Herald and Sacramento Bee, as well as popular local blog networks and sites including Metblogs.com, Mommypoppins.com, Eatingwithmymouthful.com, New Columbia Heights Blog, and Riverwest Neighborhood Network.

“New products, partners and growth made 2008 a great year for Outside.in,” said Mark Josephson, CEO.  “We have built a tremendous platform for organizing and distributing hyperlocal news and conversations, and with this support from our investors we expect a strong 2009.”
About Outside.in
Outside.in (www.outside.in) is a data and technology platform that creates, organizes and distributes hyperlocal news.  Outside.in monitors all the news, blogs and discussions on the web and dynamically maps it to offline locations, enabling hyperlocal news discovery and sharing.  The company’s GeoToolkit (www.outside.in/geotoolkit) provides powerful tools for content creators of all sizes to optimize, promote and distribute their local content. Outside.in is supported by leading investors including Union Square Ventures, the New York City Investment Fund, Betaworks and Milestone Venture Partners.  For more information, visit www.outside.in, the company’s blog or follow us on Twitter.