Groupon and Loopt have partnered to to give Loopt users access to alerts from Groupon’s recently launched Groupon Now service. “The big thing Loopt brings to this is location-specific alerts,” Loopt Corporate Communications Manager Sharon Howell tells WebProNews. “Loopt’s Reward Alerts feature integrates nicely with Groupon Now’s time-limited deals. With Loopt, Groupon fans can get the deals based on their current location (so as Groupon Now expands, you can get them when you travel to a different city, for instance).”
Groupon Now announced 9 days ago for Groupon’s hometown of Chicago (actually launched today), which is also where it is currently available for Loopt users. It provides realtime offers to users on their mobile devices based on their location. This ad from Groupon sums up what the service is all about:
Loopt, a location-based service aimed at “uncovering need-to-know info about your city” launched its Reward Alerts a couple months ago.
“We built Reward Alerts into Loopt so that people could opt in to extremely targeted, time-limited deals. Loopt is the only service that can notify you of these deals based on your current location without even opening the app,” says the company says in a blog post.
Users will get once-a-day location-based Groupon Now deal alerts. They’ll also be able to use Loopt’s existing features to spread the word, plan get-togethers around the deals, etc.
While it’s only available in Chicago for the time being, Loopt plans to offer the service nationwide. Of course Groupon doesn’t even offer it nationwide yet, so there’s no telling when that will be.
The service is available for iPhone and Android users.
It’s pretty clear that we’re going to continue to see the location-based service and offers spaces merge. There’s little doubt that we will see more and more partnerships of this type. Groupon even recently acquired Pelago, the makers of the check-in app, Whrrl. You can pretty much count on Groupon competitors like Facebook and Google getting their deals/offers products integrated across various check-in apps.
The winners in the check-in app space will be the companies that can provide the most value to consumers. The deal and aggregation of not only deals, but relevant deals is going to be key moving forward. That relevancy factor is going to give both Facebook and Google their respective edges, but in different ways. Google knows your search activity (among other things) and Facebook knows your friends and your interests. Combine these factors with location, and there are some pretty powerful opportunities for advertisers.