For a long time, the tech world has been talking about how cool it will be when location, deals and mobile apps get together in some three-part harmony, so that as you walk down the street your phone will buzz you with some great offer from a local business that you can stroll right into.
Now Loopt, one of the oldest of the new report-your-locations-to-your-friends services, says it has built that application. Loopt calls it "Reward Alerts" and plans to debut it to attendees at SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which runs March 11 to 15.
"You will get a message: 'Microsoft is giving away a Kinect at this street corner' and you will SXSW attendees racing across the city to get there first," Loopt founder Sam Altman told Wired.com.
Of course, not all attendees will get that message — only those who have installed the Loopt application on their iPhone or Android-powered smartphone, and opt in to constantly broadcasting their location to Loopt's service (you can set it so that only Loopt can track you in real time, or so that all or select Loopt users can see where you are as well.)
Loopt plans on giving away an estimated $45,000 in giveaways, including Jawbone Jamboxes and plane tickets from Southwest Airlines, in an attempt to become the killer app of SXSW, an honor that heralded the rise of Twitter when it took the geek convention by storm in 2007.
After the conference, Loopt will begin working with merchants who want to offer deals that are time and location sensitive. For instance, a restaurant that is having a slow night could decide to run an offer to get customers in the door, according to Altman. But there's no interface yet for merchants, and Loopt will be experimenting with payment models, which could be similar to that of daily discount sites like Groupon that typically get 40 percent of a deal purchased by users.
Loopt isn't alone in pursuing this idea. PlacesCast just announced a similiar service called ShopAlerts, using instant messages to alert people to deals and offers to mobile phone users who cross into a defined geographic area (even non-smart phone users).
Altman says Loopt already has users who are only interested in deals, not sharing locations with their friends, and thinks the new service will be really popular. But for that to work, Loopt users will need to turn on location reporting all the time (other services such as FourSquare and Facebook's location service rely on user's checking in). Already more than half of Loopt users choose that option, according to Altman.
Deal targeting can also now be very targeted, since location-reporting no longer relies solely on GPS, which can be spotty or unavailable in malls or downtowns. Now location services can figure out where you are by checking what WiFi networks your phone can see, which may make it possible for a local coffee shop to send deals to Loopt users as they are about to walk past a Starbucks around the corner.
Photo: Smartphone users walking. Credit: Funkdooby
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