coupons

In the digital-coupon market, the number of daily deals and revenue each rose 9 percent overall in August compared with the previous month, according to Yipit, a daily-deals aggregator and market watcher.

Total revenue for the industry rose to an estimated $228 million, compared with about $209 million in July, Yipit reported. Groupon, the industry's much-hyped leader, increased revenue by 13 percent in August for a total of $120.7 million, up from $106.6 million in July. The Chicago-based company now commands 53 percent of the daily-deals market, up 2 percentage points, beating its closest competitor, Living Social (… Read more

A few weeks ago, or maybe a few months ago, I saw a Groupon that was too good to pass up. Or was it a Facebook deal? Anyway, I bought it. I remember thinking it was the deal of the century. But now, for the life of me, I can't remember what it was, what service I bought it on, where I saved the info about it, or when it expires. Oops.

There are too many deals services floating around, and many of the deals are really quite awesome. But people are forgetting and losing, or "breaking" (in industry parlance) their coupons all the time. There are services out there designed to keep track of your coupons, and even some that let you sell your about-to-expire coupons to other people. The space to manage these deals, which are in essence a form of currency, is changing fast. One newly updated service, CityPockets, puts more of the pieces together than many, if not all, of its competitors.

First, it is a deals wallet. You send it your deals, and it remembers them for you. CityPockets works with 30 deals and coupon services (but not yet Google's, unfortunately), so almost all the bargains you commit to can be stored in it.

Second, there's a mobile app, so you don't have to carry about a stack of paper coupons on the off chance that you might be able to use one when you're out. CEO Cheryl Yeoh told me that the average deal user has nine active deals at any one time, and that some women, she says, carry around 30 vouchers. Just in case. With CityPockets, you can see your vouchers on a map.

Third (this is where the business is), it's a deal exchange, like Lifesta, DealsGoRound, and CoupRecoup. If you have a sea kayak lesson deal in your wallet that's about to expire, you can put it on the market for anyone else to buy. Except they won't, since sea kayak lessons are the soap-on-a-rope of online deals. Maybe a half-off deal at a good wine store, then. If you sell a deal, CityPockets takes a commission. If you want to buy a deal, for services with APIs (like Groupon and Living Social), CityPockets will verify that the voucher is both unexpired and unused.

The deal exchange is in the mobile app, too.

Finally, it's becoming a deal search and recommendation engine. In addition to letting you search or filter the exchange for deals other users are trying to dump, it'll also, soon, tell you about deals you can buy directly from one of the many deal sites there are. To bolster this feature, the company recently acquired DealBurner, which will send you a message about deals near you when you check in to a location on Foursquare or Facebook.

The company is also working on doing more with "instant" deals, watching for deals you might like that are on short fuses.

This whole space is immature, just like Groupon's S1. Also, competitors in this space are leveraging the fact that consumers are dealing with Groupon clone overload. Once this business starts to consolidate, which it must, the deal wallet companies will have to slow down, grow up, and find ways to scale. Right now they're still stabilizing feature sets. … Read more

I recently heard two different pitches from entrepreneurs who think that the business of focusing on physical restaurant or retail check-ins--in other words, Foursquare--is old fashioned and played out. At least as a business. They're pitching start-ups that check in your transactions, using the receipts you get when you pay.

The idea is not to get you to share your financial history with the world, as Blippy did at first. That was nuts. Instead, DailyGobble and RewardLoop are loyalty programs, in which you use your receipt as a virtual box top, a proof of purchase that gets you some consideration from the business you just patronized.

What makes these two services modern and smart is the way they're designed to take the hassle and friction out of making your claims. In the case of DailyGobble, the whole check-in process is stealth, which may appeal to people who don't want to appear to their dining companions to be coupon surfers. First, you find a restaurant deal you like on the DailyGobble site or mobile app. Then you go to that restaurant and have your lovely meal. Afterward, you snap a picture of the receipt from your phone and upload it using the app. Then you get a cash payback in your PayPal account.

What you have to do when you arrive and leave the restaurant: Nothing. DailyGobble execs pitch the fact that you don't have to present "embarrassing" coupons and potentially suffer "inferior service" from waitstaff who know you're dining below normal rates. I'm not sure that's a big problem, but I do like the simplicity of the DailyGobble deal flow.

Meanwhile, the restaurant gets your business, plus some details on who you are and what you ate. DailyGobble itself gets to build a dossier on your preferences and collect a per-seating fee from the restaurants. The business is like OpenTable's, but without that service's traditional recurring fee for its restaurant customers (a newer program, OpenTable Connect, is pay-as-you-go). It's a smart update on the aggregator/loyalty program model.

DailyGobble was part of the 500 Startups demo day in Mountain View last week. … Read more

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Friday, August 12.

• Bay Area Rapid Transit, a regional transportation system in the San Francisco area, cut wireless service prior to a planned protest at four downtown San Francisco subway stops. Activists were responding to a shooting by a BART police officer, but their protest seems never to have materialized because of the disruption of cell service. "BART staff or contractors shut down power to the nodes and alerted the cell carriers," James Allison, deputy chief communications officer … Read more

Oh, 8coupons, where were you last night when I stopped for dinner at Ruby Tuesday? With about three taps of my iPhone's screen, I could have saved 15 percent on my entire bill!

I won't make that mistake again. This new app serves up local deals from thousands of sources, showing them on a map or in a big searchable list. For serious bargain-hunters, it's an essential mobile companion.

But an imperfect one. For starters, you're limited to deals in your immediate area--unless you manually scroll the map to another location. There's no way to load up the deals for someplace you might be heading, which would be helpful for, say, determining ahead of time where you want to have dinner.

What's more, many of the deals I found required printed coupons, and the app offers no means for printing them. Indeed, in many cases 8coupons merely routes you to a Web page listing the deal, one that's not formatted for mobile viewing--and certainly not for mobile printing. That's a pretty major limitation.… Read more

Been eyeballing a tablet? There are some pretty spiffy new models hitting the streets right now, most of them powered by Android Honeycomb. Alas, prices start at around $400--less than what you'd pay for the low-end iPad 2, but still pretty steep.

If you have a Staples store near you, you can save $100 on nearly any tablet using this printable coupon. Yowza! That translates to some of the best tablet prices anywhere.

For example, the Acer Iconia A500 10-inch Android tablet sells for $399.98, but when you stroll in with your coupon, you can walk out with … Read more

Google today introduced Google Wallet and Google Offers at an event in New York City.

The company says it plans to bring all parts of the retail experience together to make "tomorrow's best shopping experience," said Google Vice President of Commerce for Stephanie Tilenius.

The services will combine coupons and discounts and payments at the time people buy things through their phone.

Together the services will work like this: Coupons for items you buy regularly will pop up on your phone, or an item that the store you're shopping at is out of will pop up … Read more

At a press conference scheduled for today in New York City, Google is expected to lay out the beginning of something mobile-technology experts have been foretelling for years: using mobile phones to pay for almost everything via near-field communications chips, or NFC.

NFC is a chip technology that, when placed in two different devices, lets small amounts of data be sent over very short distances between them. This can include data such as credit card information, train ticket info, and a coupon bar code.

We already have credit cards with NFC chips inside, and some figure moving away from credit cards to paying with a phone is the next step. Rumors have swirled that Apple has been hatching a plan to turn the iPhone into a mobile credit card via iTunes for over a year. Amazon.com is reported to be considering such a service, as have some credit card and wireless companies.

But talking about NFC and actually making a usable service for consumers happen with phones are two different things. Different companies in different industries need to work closely together for it to work in a straightforward manner for mobile phone users. That includes phone makers, mobile software companies, wireless service providers, banks, retailers, and makers of payment terminals.

That challenge -- as much of a management issue as it is a technological issue -- helps explain why no one has done it on a wide scale yet.

Google is perhaps best-positioned right now for instituting a mobile-payments system for several reasons: First, Google already makes one of the two phones in the world with NFC chips inside, the Nexus S (Nokia makes the other, the C7) and is likely to make more. Second, Google also has its own software, Android, which it can configure to the advantage of NFC chips in a phone. Thanks to Android, Google enjoys relationships with carriers too. Reports indicate it's planning to launch the NFC service for "select" phones on Sprint.

Retailers are a different story. They need to be able to accept a… Read more

Scoutmob is a location-aware coupon service that pushes local restaurant and retail deals directly to your mobile device. No need to print or purchase anything, just scroll through the local 50 percent off (and more) coupons available, click "USE THE DEAL," and flash your screen at the location. It's like Groupon, only simpler and better.

What gives Scoutmob its edge over its other deal-serving competitors is that there's no need to purchase anything ahead of time. If your GPS-enabled mobile device detects that you are at the deal location, you get the deal. And most deals … Read more