Wanderful Media, which has been tasked by the newspaper industry to remake the circular industry in the mobile social era. has raised a new round of $14.5 Million. Altogether, the company has raised $50.5 Million since its September 2012 launch.

The company is primarily known for Find&Save, which relaunched one year ago. It now serves 500 affiliate sites, including all Top 50 DMAs. Find&Save provides geo-targeted distribution of offers for 375 retailers and 150,000 retail locations. While iPhone and iPad apps have been Find&Save’s initial focus, an Android version was launched today.

Speaking at the Local Search Association meeting today in Huntington Beach, CA, CEO Ben Smith said the company is set to put the new money to work. Upwards of $10 million will be committed this year to app distribution and “making sure people are installing our apps,” he said.

“It’s much like managing your SEO — it’s not trivial and requires significant investment,” said Smith. He added that mobile customers typically only use 10 apps on a frequent basis. “The better way to approach mobile is to consider geo/location data as a way to augment and craft customized marketing messages,” he said.

Facebook integration is also key to “tying it all together,” added Smith. “We get the geo/location data from the mobile app — but Facebook provides the demographic context required to make the data acquired by Wanderful actionable.”

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For the last month or so, I’ve been playing with the developer build of Wanderful Media’s Find & Save iPhone app. Today the app launched, just in time for the barrage of shopping holidays that the online and retail worlds continue to seemingly invent (Home Appliance Tuesday!).

In seriousness, the app addresses a unique use case at the intersection of local product search and deals. There are a handful of apps in this category each with different combinations of features. Find & Save differentiates on search & browse usability and depth of local shopping content.

The latter comes from Wanderful’s longstanding position of distributing circular content. This gives the company a comprehensive user experience, rather than the “cold start” challenge of many local shopping apps. And if we need to say it again, data will make or break mobile shopping.

Oft-underrated push-alert functionality is also included — key for the mobile use case developing around location based discovery. That will be pushed forward (no pun) in local shopping by things like iBeacon and Google Glass. Until then,push alerts are key (see Valpak app).

The free app joins Find & Save’s iPad app with a similar feature set, but more tailored for on the go use (Read: higher buying intent). There are also lots of personalization features to save items or retailers, in order to be alerted later when nearby…back to push alerts.

More on the feature set can be seen in the bullets below provided in today’s release. You can also download the iOS app in the App Store.

–All sales nearby. Shoppers will receive a list of all nearby stores with their latest sales based on up-to-date retail circulars and their current location. The app provides a map view of stores in the area and details like phone number, address and directions.

— Browse weekly ads. Whether they are browsing through the latest holiday circular while in the store, or checking out weekly ads of stores nearby, shoppers can browse sales across all retailers in one app.

— One shopping list across all devices. Instead of carrying around a bundle of circulars, or having to multiple lists scattered around a purse, Find&Save for iPhone brings the shopping list to the back pocket. Shoppers can access, create and/or edit the same shopping list on FindnSave.com, Find&Save for iPad, and Find&Save for iPhone.

— New sale alerts. Shoppers can follow their favorite stores and opt-in to get notified whenever there’s a sale.

— Share deals with friends. Whether shopping alone or with friends, the app comes in handy for shoppers who want to quickly share finds via text or email.

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Last November, major players in the newspaper industry bought Travidia as the cornerstone of a new shopping strategy. Travidia had been mostly known for its print to digital circular business, but it had recently repositioned itself with FindnSave, a new shopping platform that included digital circulars, along with inventory search via eBay’s Milo.com, and slots for deals, offers and coupons.

Investing newspaper companies represented local titles reaching 80 percent of the U.S. population. They included Advance Digital, A.H. Belo Corp., Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett Co., GateHouse Media, Hearst Corp., Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Co. and The Washington Post Co.

Today, FindnSave announced the appointment of Ben T. Smith IV to lead the effort as an outsider more wedded to consumer preferences than to newspaper sales requirements. Smith is the founder of MerchantCircle and previously served as CEO and founder of Spoke.com, a LinkedIn-like social site for professionals.

In a discussion with BIA/Kelsey, Smith noted that FindnSave will have to be both a social experience, utilizing tablets and smartphones, as well as a “lean back” experience. “Shopping is not a lean forward and search” medium, he says. “It is a series of destinations.”

Smith says he plans to bring his experience as a Silicon Valley insider to bear, and in fact, will move the company’s headquarters there from exurban Chico, California. “Six- or seven-person teams make things happen,” he says. “We’ll have a series of teams, including mobile talent and people with a bunch of social DNA. There will also be a series of apps addressing very specific demographics.”

Ultimately, FindnSave will serve “two constituencies — and newspapers aren’t one of them,” says Smith. “The constituencies are consumers and major advertisers. People looking for 49-cent chicken aren’t the same people who are flipping Nordstrom or Macy’s ads,” he observes.

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Shopping portals have moved beyond “federated search,” and now combine the best of daily deals, coupons, weekly ads and other promotional information in ways that are more efficient — and drive more shopping.

At the national level, Gannett’s ShopLocal.com has been moving in this direction for some time. At the local level, we’ve recently seen the launch of Local.com’s multi-pronged shopping portal. The daily deal and coupon aggregators such as The Dealmap, 8coupons, Deal Radar and Yipit probably also qualify as shopping portals.

New to the game is FindnSave.com, an effort by Travidia, the digital media vendor that works with 700 newspapers. Two McClatchy sites are currently launched: The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star. Next up are McClatchy newspaper sites in Charlotte, Fort Worth, Fresno and Tacoma.

Travidia Chief Marketing Officer James Green says the newspaper sites have seen an immediate and dramatic increase from their previous shopping areas, which had a lot of information but were not presenting shopping information as efficiently. “They caused consumers to go off in a million directions,” he notes. “Consumers just want the best deal, regardless of the source.”

With newspapers, however, one size doesn’t fit all, Green emphasizes. Some newspapers have different vendor deals locked in, while others want to emphasize different types of information. Both The Sac Bee and KC Star, for instance, feature Groupon deals, Milo.com inventory information and standard features such as a Twitter board of local shopping Tweets.

But The Sac Bee also opted to include online coupons, while The KC Star opted out of online coupons. Such customization isn’t always easy to pull off: Most shopping related vendors don’t have an API that can make them easier to plug in their feed.

The result is that FindnSave has been developed as more of a customizable platform, rather than a turnkey site. Its primary feature is the development of “search blocks” that are integrated on top of the database, and extract relevant information.

Is it better than the competition? Green believes that FindnSave has a competitive edge via the newspapers’ localized information, plus the deep integration of the platform. Eventually, it will integrate various types of shopper-related content as well, such as local shopping blogs, ratings and reviews.

Another asset cited by Green is FindnSave’s easy verticalization, which can be used to create entirely new online vertical properties. The Sac Bee, for instance, is using the product to create a dedicated grocery portal. The portal will feature a slightly different user interface, as well as a combination of newspaper and syndicated content.

Ultimately, FindnSave has been “10 years in the making for us,” says Green. “It’s been a natural evolution. The bottom line is we are not trying to facilitate e-commerce; we are trying to facilitate in-store traffic.”

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