monkey!

December 30, 2007

Someone create this deal/savings mobile service

As I was walking to the grocery store two days ago I had an idea for a simple service that would allow for anyone with a simple internet-enabled cellphone to get deals and special offers at the store(s) you’re going to.  Here is how it would work:

Deal Database (and website)

Create a database of deals. You can do this one of two ways, either create a community-driven site where people would submit special offers and savings from the stores in their area, or create a mash-up of all the current deal sites out there. Only problem is, there are not that many (If at all?) sites that display deals for brick-and-mortar stores, and most focus on online shopping. Each deal would be tagged with the store name, as well as GPS (Or Street address) location.

Using the service

The service would be very simple to use and have two ways you could use it.

• Simple search: With this method, I could be heading to my local Walmart and go to the services website and type in “Walmart Waterloo”, or “Walmart N2V1K7″ (Postal code search) or any other variety of searches to narrow down your location so you can see the deals for that specified store.
• Multiple deal search: Similar to the simple search, this one would allow you to search via city, postal code, street, etc and display all the deals from stores in the given area. This way, I could be heading to the mall and get all the deals from the 50+ stores within the mall.
• GPS/Location search: This one could work for GPS-enabled phones as well as any phone that can access Google Maps as it can now track your location as well. With this, I could simply log into the site and see all the deals within my area via a Google maps mash-up, or maybe a simple text feed depending on the power of my phone. Additionally, you could also simply search for “Walmart” and it will know your location via GPS and show deals for the Walmart near you.

With user settings, the user could simply setup what they would like to always use, but the initial setup would promote a more simple search, unless we can check and identify if the phone is GPS-enabled (Can you do that?)

That’s my idea in a nutshell, obviously there is a bit more to it but this is just a simple blurb on it. As for making money, programming it and publishing it, that’s another story.

If anyone is interested on working with me on something like this, let me know, otherwise tell me how silly my idea is.