WHERE (formerly uLocate) continues to redefine itself as a mobile local content and ad targeting play. It’s latest move offers coupons and nearby specials to users that check in to places through its mobile app.

According to today’s release:

When using WHERE to help discover local places, consumers will now receive coupons from local merchants when they check-in to a location. WHERE offers one of the most comprehensive collections of mobile coupon and offer inventory available from restaurants, retail stores, spas, and other service providers. With hundreds of thousands of deals presented daily, WHERE is a leader in helping mobile users find great deals nearby.

This clearly plays to a growing trend and interest in mobile coupons and on local deals. The latter is on fire right now. This also further motivates users to check-in; another big trend in mobile. The increasingly popular WHERE app already had check in functionality but this puts a new spin on it.

There is growing market sentiment that more has to be offered by mobile check in services. The game mechanics and virtual goods (i.e. foursquare badges) only get you so far and the novelty can wear off. So not only do we see check-in functionality make its way to nearly every mobile local app lately, but feature sets are quickly evolving.

Foursquare, for example, just improved its places tab to more intelligently suggest nearby places to check in or visit. It previously listed the closest venues, but now takes into account additional factors such as time of day. And it’s nearby offers continue to grow.

We’ll see lots more innovation here, especially as Facebook’s looming entrance to the space ignites competitive differentiation. Though there is lots of talk of Facebook as the category killer, I still feel there is room for differentiated smaller players like Foursquare, WHERE, MyTown, etc.

If anything, Facebook will “mainstream” the segment. In addition to its own speculated mobile check-in features, look for it to also federate check-ins from various apps and allow them to plug into the open social graph. This could help smaller players more than it hurts them. Lots of development in store for the coming weeks.

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The Forum has given a cautious welcome to the appointment of the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his stated intention to form a coalition government between his party and the Liberal Democrats.

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Center’d, the local/social events and city guide site, has consistently reported growing traffic.  But in its three year existence, it has never really found a niche that would set itself apart from the competition.

The site, however, has kept on hammering away at local/social trends, with a strong emphasis on sentiment analysis and local mapping – no surprise, given that its leadership is comprised of CTO Chandu Thota, the former Microsoft Virtual Earth leader; and CEO  Jennifer Dulski, the former  head of Yahoo Marketplaces.

Now, the success of Groupon and other deal a day sites has apparently lead the site’s executives to an epiphany: one of the next waves of local is likely to be deal aggregation – a path already taken by such sites as 8Coupons.com and Localofferlounge.com (and before that, by Judy’s Book). Research conducted by the company showed the power of the deal. Indeed, 80 percent of those surveyed said they feel “exhilterated” by finding a good deal.

Dulski previewed concepts behind The Deal Map at our Marketplaces 2010 conference in March, and the site went live yesterday. The Deal Map aggregates the whole gamut of socially driven deals and information, which include coupons, sales notifications, frequent flyer type points, sweepstakes, new product information, events and recipes.

The goal, says Dulski, is to finally move deals beyond  the silos of mail, TV and newspapers, store windows and emails. All are better served by a true cross-digital platform that might include the Web, mobile, social media, aggregated emails and APIs.

Dulski’s expectation is that a certain portion of the deals themselves may be sent in by users, some of whom will be motivated to contribute sites and reviews by cash incentives for super-frequent users. But other offers will be grabbed from a wide range of sources, including large, national deal providers; deal a day providers; and extracted from email newsletters, social media and other sources. A larger portion of the deals will eventually be  driven from the social efforts than from coupon feeds,  says Dulski. The site will also have several revenue streams, including revenue sharing with the deal a day sites.

Dulski makes a case for the Deal Map’s uniqueness by noting it is the only site that mixes “location,” “price” and “sentiment” (i.e. how people feel about a product or location).  On the map, locations of deals are clearly coded by one of ten category icons (restaurants; health & beauty; shopping; events & attractions; hotels; food & drugs; automotive; Services; Home  & Garden;  and medical. The intensity of deal areas is also indicated by a heat map.

It all looks great and is very easy to use, compared to other maps we’ve recently played with where everything tends to bunch up too much.  It will be even better in future iterations when users can set up personalized categories.

While The Deal Map is billed as a a project that is both separately branded from Center’d, and integrated within it, it seems realistic to think that it becomes Center’d’s primary purpose now, just as Living Social’s Daily Deal is its primary purpose, not its Virtual Bookshelf. The space is going to be big, and the people at Center’d seem poised to ride with it.

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Small businesses thriving in Austin
Several months ago, Austin received national recognition for being the best place in the country to start a small business.  According to the Austin Small Business Alliance, locally owned businesses are seeing some of the same affects from the economy that other businesses are, but it’s the support of locals who insist on buying locally which has local businesses thriving for the most part, a …

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Web site vendors may be well-positioned to jump-start Groupon-like “deal-a-day” offers. Analog Analytics and Adility, for instance, are seeking to leverage their respective media and sales channel relationships for deal a day.

Now jumping into the pool is Utah-based Matchbin, a CMS and digital advertising platform provider that has partnered with community newspapers, TV stations and radio stations — including Hispanic and Chinese language media. World Journal will provide Chinese speakers with offers in its six key markets: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Texas, Vancouver and Toronto. Spanish speakers will have access via Entravision’s 51 TV stations and 48 radio stations. Also on board is Impremedia, a Spanish language newspaper and content company that has titles and services reaching 31 percent of all U.S. Hispanic adults.

But first things first. Today, Matchbin rolls out its “HotDeal” program with a florist/nursery promotion at thepress.net in Brentwood, CA. The promotion will run two days, which will be its model as a weekly — launch the deal with the paper on Thursday and run it through Friday, which is its biggest day for page views. Next week will feature a senior graduation photo package. Beyond that, Matchbin’s plans are to offer the capability to all 420 of its local media partners.

“We will immediately have a much larger number of communities/cities running daily deals than Groupon, Living Social or any of the other competitors,” says CEO Reed Brown. Brown also notes that the Hot Deal ratchets up the daily deal value, with selective use of such features as “Buy One, Get 2” coupons and $50 gift cards for user referrals.

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