Google Acquires Pointy To Increase Visibility Of Local Retail Inventory In Search

• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, 7 hours ago

Google has been working to bring real-time visibility of local retail merchandise into search results, and on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Irish tech firm Pointy for an undisclosed sum.

Pointy gives small retailers the ability for consumers to search online and find their merchandise locally without having to invest in an expensive ecommerce system.

“Over the past several years we’ve developed a very close partnership with Google,” wrote Pointy Founders Mark Cummins and Charles Bibby in a blog post on the company’s website. “It became clear that we shared the same vision of how technology can improve local retail businesses. So today is a natural next step in our journey.”

Retailers either connect the “Pointy box” to their barcode scanner or it can use with a point-of-sale system from several providers such as Lightspeed, Clover, Square, and Vend. The products appear online in Google search results and a Google feature called “See What’s In Store.” Store pages are optimized for search engines.

The company also has something called Pointy ProductAds that automatically runs ads on Google for all available products.

The company will continue to operate and develop products from its own Dublin offices.

The two founders are very familiar with search engine technology. Cummins also cofounded visual search engine Plink, acquired by Google in 2010.

Pointy has raised about $19.2 million from a variety of investors including Frontline Ventures, Polaris, LocalGlobe, and Google Maps cofounder Lars Rasmussen.