Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it – the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it’s raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures, real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing.
Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great.
Outside.in says that its headlines will soon be run on CNN’s website, much like MSNBC has said it will run hyper-local news from the related site it acquired this year, EveryBlock. EveryBlock tends to discover a lot more information than Outside.in does. Its public records discovery is especially good. It’s a lot of fun to read health department inspection reports from neighborhood restaurants (in a perverse sort of way) and that’s not something Outside.in unearths.
EveryBlock has to date been limited to a handful of big cities around the US, though. Outside.in has no such limitation.
Things not to love about Outside.in include a garish new advertising-filled page layout (just subscribe by RSS feed) and a heart-breaking iPhone app. That app discovers your location and brings up area news – lots of fun to use when house-hunting in different neighborhoods. Not so much fun when it fails to work, which is more often than not in my experience. If you want a good local news iPhone app, check out Fwix. I’m eagerly awaiting the launch of Nozzl Media, a related service we profiled in our report The Real-Time Web and Its Future.
These kinds of data parsing services, tied to real-life experiences like geographic location, are becoming an important value add now that more and more data is coming online. Everyone wants to discover the future of news – these kinds of services could well be an important part of it.
Note: Outside In is also the name of a 40 year old youth social services agency that also deserves respect, speaking of local.
