{"id":174517,"date":"2010-01-13T11:20:15","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T16:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/?p=24808"},"modified":"2010-01-13T11:20:15","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T16:20:15","slug":"real-time-mobile-savings-scoutmob-brings-local-deals-to-your-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/174517","title":{"rendered":"Real-Time Mobile Savings: Scoutmob Brings Local Deals to Your iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ScoutMob\"Some mobile startups do something that can’t be done online<\/a>. Others copy an online business and bring it to mobile.<\/a> And then there are companies like Scoutmob [iTunes link<\/a>]. They take a great online business<\/a> and make it ten times better by allowing you to take advantage of the service on-the-go.<\/p>\n

Scoutmob is Woot on mobile, done on a local scale. Scoutmob provides location-aware coupons directly to your mobile device. They launch in Atlanta, and their first offer is for 50% off at Murphy’s, which is a 4-star restaurant according to Yelp<\/a>. The offers, according to CEO Dave Payne<\/a>, have a rapid expiration time (in this example, 24 hours), so you need to use the coupon within one day. They’ll have a different offer every day, so don’t weep if you can’t fly into Atlanta by midnight – you’ll be able to hit up Octane Coffee Bar and Lounge tomorrow<\/a>.
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For those of you who caught it, one obvious downside is “they launch in Atlanta.” That’s not to say Atlanta isn’t a cool place (hey, they brought us Coca-Cola and the Dirty Bird<\/a>), but just that I doubt there are as many iPhone owners there as in San Francisco or New York City. That said, Dave’s existing business, SkyBlox, is a company that provides WiFi to 2,500 local businesses in Atlanta, so they’ve got an incumbent customer base to draw on for their offers.<\/p>\n

\"ScoutMob2\"Scoutmob seems to be entering an interesting business at a great time. Real-time and location-based mobile apps are hot as balls right now, and the virtual coupon business is making headlines<\/a> too. Of course, it’s also super crowded – as there are many location-aware coupon apps on the iPhone, including Yowza!<\/a>, which has made headlines because its founder is Heroes star, Greg Grunberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An interesting side-story (and a knock against Scoutmob) is that Dave has no technical expertise himself and does not have a technical team to make or maintain the application. Instead, he outsourced the technology to a web developer friend from college who didn’t know Objective-C. How the hell did he make an iPhone app with Push, a native UI and geolocation with a web developer? He used Appcelerator<\/a>’s Titanium product, which enables web developers to create iPhone and Android applications. I’ve sat down with CEO Jeff Haynie, and Titanium, which is free, seems to be a cool way for web developers to create native-looking iPhone apps without having to code in Objective-C.<\/p>\n

Scoutmob is available on the iTunes store<\/a> and their first promotion is today.<\/p>\n

Crunch Network<\/em><\/strong>: CrunchBase<\/a> <\/em>the free database of technology companies, people, and investors<\/p>\n

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Some mobile startups do something that can’t be done online. Others copy an online business and bring it to mobile. And then there are companies like Scoutmob [iTunes link]. They take a great online business and make it ten times better by allowing you to take advantage of the service on-the-go. Scoutmob is Woot on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":776,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}