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  June 9, 2009

  Yowza mobile coupon application for iPhone has grass roots celebrity support

  Posted by Cian
  
  It was bound to happen eventually. We’ve had celebrity-centric apps on iPhone for a long time now. But Yowza, a mobile coupon application for iPhone, takes it one step further. The co-founder of Yowza is Greg Grunberg, star of popular TV show Heroes. With grass roots celebrity support, Yowza has a lot of money to throw at popularizing the service. But is it any good?
  
  Short answer: yes. Yowza has learned a lot from mobile coupon services that have gone before, and has integrated a lot of features that add fantastic UI. The coupons work just the same as paper coupons - you just display them on the iPhone screen at the checkout.

  
  Not an aggregator: Yowza doesn’t collect coupons that are already available. Instead, retailers have complete control over their coupons on the Yowza service. With real-time metrics built into their accounts, retailers will be able to measure the response to each coupon as it goes up. As a result, many of the deals found on the service will be unique to Yowza.
  
  LBS: Users can search by product or retailer when using Yowza. The service also lists the coupons available based on how close the stores they can be redeemed in are. Users can choose to be notified of coupons with 5, 10 or 15 miles. The service also includes turn-by-turn directions on a map.
  
  Click-to-call: Each store listed can be called by clicking on it’s entry in-app.
  
  Mobile wallet: nothing to do with NFC! If you’re planning ahead for a shopping trip, you can scan the coupons ahead of time and save them in a “mobile wallet” that can be accessed at the checkout.
  
  Savings ticker: Quite a smart function for keeping users happy, the Savings Ticker keeps track of how much money you have saved with each Yowza purchase. This info can then be fed back to Yowza to be used for future publicity.
  
  While it’s only currently available on iPhone, Yowza is planned for further platform releases, and a European release.
  
  Source: Crunchgear interview with Cali Lewis, picked up from Twitter.
  
  What we think?
  Remember what I said about throwing money? Boy, do I mean it. Greg Grunberg announced two of the strategiesYowza is using for publicity. One will be a massive billboarding campaign announcing how much money Yowza has saved it’s users. Then there’s the “golden tickets”. The golden ticket is a limited run of special offers that will be distributed randomly to Yowza users at the point-of-purchase. If you get a golden ticket, Yowza will buy your entire basket/trolley for you. Now, those are both great services but they’re expensive as hell. I guess it’s good to have a celebrity on board!
  
  Quite apart from that, I actually think this is a great service. The UI is very well designed to make it as appealing as possible for the iPhone user. It worries me that there’s absolutely no facility for users to input coupons they’ve found. This is another Open vs. Closed argument right here. That this is a closed environment means that users are restricted to only the coupons that the retailers want them to see. But it also guarantees quality, and means you’ll never be stuck at the check-out with a dead coupon in hand.

  Source: gomonews.com

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