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Founded: June 1997

Management: Kendall Fargo is Founder and CEO - he was VP of Internet and Enterprise Business at Handspring up to 2003 and oversaw the company's e-commerce business. He was also VP of Operations at Beyond.com. Jad Dunning is President. He was one of the founders of CompareNet, which Microsoft bought in 1999 and he continued on there working on MSN Shopping.

Investors: In December 2005, StepUp Commerce closed its series B raising $6.6M from Allegis Capital and Granite Ventures with existing investors.

Business Model: Type in your zip-code and search or browse for products in your hood, the either buy online or get directions to the store. The company currently claims over 1,200 retail partners ranging from small locals to some big ones like BestBuy. StepUp has signed a marketing agreement with IBSYS, which operates a number of local TV station Web sites and it received some spotlight from Google for being an early adopter of Google Base. However, Google's Froogle uses competitor ShopLocal to populate its local shopping sections.

A Search On Pajamas Brough Up Local Dog Pajamas & Astrology Pajamas - That Sucks

Competitors: Cairo.com, ShopLocal.com.

Dirt: We understand what the company wants to do, but after all these years in business, StepUp has no traffic and use of the site makes it clear why. Searching for Christmas presents in our neighborhood turned up no results for items that we wanted, including a knife sharpener; a search for men's pajamas inappropriately returned a listing for cheesy, silky boxer shorts, sold at a store 45 minutes drive away; and even browsing for featured items turned up empty shelves. We had to laugh at the fact that the Google Adsense ads that appear next to our results returned far more appropriate results. ShopLocal is kicking SteUp's but, and we think that Cairo is better too, so we hope these guys will use their recent funding to figure it out soon.