DEMO: Gazaro launches its personal sales flyer

Gazaro is launching what it calls a personal sales flyer today at the DEMO 2009 conference. Think of it as if it were a paper sales flyer that’s been filtered to include only the best sales on exactly what you want to buy.

You specify what you want on a web site, and then Gazaro uses its artificial intelligence (AI) to sort through the best deals on the web for you. It delivers the results electronically so you don’t have to keep checking in on it. It can send alerts via email, RSS, or, later on, Twitter. You can list products, brands, and stores. The idea is to save you money in turbulent times by getting you the best deals without wasting your time.

The company was founded in 2007 and has eight employees. Competitors include shopping sites such as FatWallet, Shop It To Me, and SlickDeals. There is also competition from notification systems such as Google Alerts and Yotify. According to the Journal of Retailer and Consumer Services, retailers spend something like 33 to 50 percent of their marketing budgets on non-targeted sales flyers. Gazaro flips that around so users can opt into receiving flyers in a targeted fashion.

Sam Zaid, chief executive of Gazaro, which is based in Humble, Texas, said that the Gazaro service will rate your results from one to ten, based on how good the sale is. He describes it as a smarter version of Google Alerts built around shopping.

He said Gazaro makes money on commissions from web-driven sales through existing affiliate network programs. The company can also do specifically targeted ads. The company has raised $1 million in angel funding from Apption Software, a maker of enterprise AI that Zaid founded and which incubated Gazaro. Gazaro’s AI technology includes the ability to analyze text, extract features, and classify objects.

This company got caught up in a media tempest last year. It won the TechCrunch 50 Disqualification Award last fall for using booth babes to lure people to its exhibit. The award recognized the “company with the most unethical, despicable, and utterly inhumane yet overly effective marketing tactic for directing attendees to their DemoPit booth and collecting voting chips.”