Sprint didn’t reveal their identities, naming the companies W, X, Y and Z, but Company W is most certainly MetroPCS, a carrier Sprint has been dancing around for more than a year. The proxy statement – which Sprint submitted ahead of a shareholder vote on the Softbank deal – said Sprint was in negotiations with Company W between December 2011 and February 2012 over a possible merger, but the talks fizzled out.

That fits in with reports back in February a year ago that Sprint and Metro were on the verge of closing an $8 billion deal, only to have it quashed by the Sprint board. What’s more, Company W frequently pops up throughout the filing as a Sprint acquisition target throughout the rest of 2012, the last reference to a possible deal being in late September. A few days later, T-Mobile and MetroPCS announced their own blockbuster merger plans. Sprint reportedly weighed countering T-Mobile’s bid, but decided against it.

Surmising the identities of the other three companies is a bit more difficult, though a good guess is that Company Z is Dish Network. Between May and September, Sprint was negotiating a potential spectrum partnership with Z, but nothing came of it because Z’s CEO was “focusing on certain regulatory issues.”

At the time, Dish and Sprint had long been rumored to be working out a network share, in which Sprint would host Dish’s new LTE network on its towers. Dish, however, didn’t get approval from the FCC to use its satellite airwaves for 4G until December. By that time Sprint’s relationship with Dish became hostile. Sprint forced Dish to make concessions on how it could use its spectrum, and Dish has been trying to block Sprint’s acquisition of Clearwire.

Companies X and Y remain bigger mysteries. According to the filing, in 2011 Sprint entertained a spectrum-for-equity deal with Company X, while between May and September of 2012, Sprint and Softbank were extensive discussions with company Y over a possible three-way tie-up.

Spectrum policy analyst Tim Farrar speculates that Company Y is T-Mobile USA. If that’s true, Softbank must have been considering quite the blockbuster deal, combining the third-and fourth-largest carriers in the U.S. T-Mobile and Sprint have been the subject of merger rumors in the past, but such a deal would be loaded with complications. Not only would it be a tough sell to the regulators after AT&T-Mo, but the two companies use different 2G and 3G technologies, which would make integrating their operations a nightmare (Sprint is still learning its lessons from Nextel). Farrar said that Softbank probably soon realized that a T-Mobile-Sprint merger was infeasible, which is why it authorized Sprint to pursue Clearwire in December.

As for Company X, Farrar thinks it’s SpectrumCo, the cable-operator venture that sold its airwaves to Verizon last year. The timing makes sense. A few after Company X’s negotiations with Sprint ceased in 2011, the cable operators announced their blockbuster deal with Verizon.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Paul Fleet; Sprint photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Susan Law Cain

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While there are innumerable coupon apps in the market, they’re primarily designed to access the world of online promotional offers. There’s still a wealth of small-bore grocery coupons and deals offered by national food brands and local grocery stores alike that never make onto a website or into a daily deal app. They’re trapped in the merchandizing software that the grocery stores use to manage their inventory and sales.

But Seattle-based startup GroceryServer.com claims to have tapped into those systems, translating their proprietary grocery data into a language a web or mobile app can understand. CEO and co-founder Corbin de Rubertis said GroceryServer is now putting that data to work to create a hyperlocal digital marketing platform for grocers.

ZipList, a recipe aggregator and grocery app maker owned by Condé Nast, is integrating GroceryServer’s data into its shopping list app. Using ZipList’s web interface, accessible from its own site as well as through 200 partner recipe sites, you can search for coupons and grocery offers by food category, brand, zip code and even specific stores. If you’re looking at a specific recipe saved from one of ZipList’s partner food sites, the engine will tell you if there are any national or local deals for the ingredients in that recipe.

ZipList CEO Geoff Allen said that ZipList would soon give its couponing engine the smarts to reverse the meal-planning process. Instead of matching deals against your menu, ZipList will be able to generate menus based on deals available in your area or specifically in the stores you shop in. For instance if there’s a stellar discount on ground sirloin at the local Safeway, ZipList will scour your saved recipe library for dishes that utilize ground beef. “We have a goal of localizing every recipe on the Web,” Allen said.

Bridging the broader world of food — from restaurant menus, recipe ingredient lists and nutritional data as well as mac-n’-cheese coupons – with the web is a huge problem that we have explored in depth at GigaOM. Food and nutritional data come from multiple sources and they’re used by multiple end-points and applications, not all of them friendly to outside sources of data. One of those sources is the cash register, which presented a tricky problem to Grocery Server and ZipList.

Delivering individual digitized coupons with their own bar codes is counterproductive if you’ve got a stack of offers you’re trying to take advantage of. GroceryServer and ZipList have tried to solve the problem by uploading coupon data to customers’ loyalty cards – when you scan in your Safeway or Kroger card, the discounts are automatically applied to your bill. For customers who don’t have loyalty cards (or stores that don’t offer them), ZipList allows you to print out a scan form, which can be handed the cashier.

How local is local?

GroceryServer is capable of parsing the databases of big national grocery chains and food distributors like Kraft, but a good deal of the potential savings on groceries is available at the local level. We’re not just talking the corner market or the independent butcher shop. Individual outlets of the national chains run their own sales based on what they have in inventory, and except in rare cases, those offers aren’t entered into the national merchandizing databases, GroceryServer’s de Rubertis said.

GroceryServer has tried to tackle both issues by creating a multi-tiered marketing system, which not only tracks nationwide promotions automatically but also allows grocery managers to manually enter local limited-time sales into its system. If a store has an abundance of halibut – whether it’s the independent fishmonger or the seafood counter at Whole Foods – a manager could create a promotional offer in GroceryServer’s system and have it appear right next to the coupons for Coca Cola and Velveeta in ZipList’s grocery list app.

Such a system can help revolutionize the concept of local grocery marketing, de Rubertis said. Instead of relying on circulars that have to be designed, printed and distributed days, if not weeks, in advance, stores can react immediately to their changing inventories. Rather than focus on processed or packaged foods, as most couponing campaigns do, deals move to the perishable-good fringes of the market where expiration dates and shelf life require much more nimble merchandizing. And instead of making coupon clipping the realm of the big box grocery stores, GroceryServer’s hyperlocal platform can scale all the way down to the local fruit stand and farmers’ market.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Chris Howey.

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A new report examining the changes in the Runet over the past couple of years shows that dealflow in the Russian internet market tripled between 2010 and 2011, with more money, more investments and more active companies as a result.

The numbers, pulled together by Fast Lane Ventures, show that there were more than 200 investments and deals made in Russia’s internet market in 2011 — far higher than the 59 deals made the previous year. The overall investment amount, too, was up: from $225 million in 2010 to $540 million a year later.

Then there were a few substantial exits: from Qik’s sale to Skype to the IPO of Yandex.

In addition, there’s a large dark space — because so much activity takes place privately.

According to Fast Lane’s Andrey Kulikov, this could be substantial.

“We are aware of at least 100-150 seed investments completed by businesses and non-public holdings, and 20-30 major investments whose financial information is completely closed,” he said.

Put it all together and you get an image of a market that is definitely more vibrant than ever.

It’s not all great news, however. The report, put together by the incubator-come-clone-factory Fast Lane Ventures — whose CEO Marina Treshchova I interviewed earlier this year — also points out that there are some trends to be careful of.

While the volume of seed, early-stage and growth investments increased, the fact that funding did not keep pace means that each deal was worth less on average. Blockbuster funding such as Ozon’s $100 million round last September aside, the average deal size is now smaller than it was at the end of 2010.

And, of course, this data is about fundraising and major exits — not revenues. It’s unclear how many of the companies involved in this survey are profit-making, and with many of them copycats of Western businesses, any internetnaional expansion plans must be severely limited.

Still, Treshchova says that expansion through copycats is the “logical” solution to help meet demand in a fast-growing internet market — and it can still provide significant profits.

“This is a logical trend. Using proven business models minimizes risks of failure and can significantly speed up the process of developing and launching new companies,” she said. “This speed is critical within the internet market. Ideas are flying in the air and the winner is the one who implements them first.”

Her own company is a prime example of this in action: since launching in 2010, Fast Lane has already made a couple of significant exits, selling Zappos copy Sapato to Ozon and then Shopping Live.

Photograph used under Creative Commons courtesy of Flickr user Yeowatzup

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The report is interesting, and we’ll have to see if the tests lead to a widespread product. It could put more pressure on existing payments players and potentially cut into the growth prospects of Square and others if it can find traction. Groupon is reportedly offering merchants a free iPod Touch, not just a credit card reader, to process transactions.

But it got me thinking that it seems like a number of loyalty and deals apps will start going down this road, adding mobile payments as a way to build out their services. These days, there’s a big land grab going on in local. People are trying to provide merchants with tools for deals and offers, loyalty and payments. Some of the latest payments plays like Google Wallet’s and Isis’, two NFC wallets, are trying to tackle all of those services. But we have some other startups who are coming at this from a deals or loyalty angle, and increasingly they are moving to offer the entire package to appeal to merchants.

Paying with LevelUp

LevelUp, for example, started out as a Groupon competitor but then retooled by building its own payments system into its app using help from Braintree. Now consumers can not only take advantage of discounts but also transact right through the app, closing the loop on offer redemptions. That’s a key point, because it means a merchant can understand how effective these programs are because they can see exactly how much money they’re generating.

With more payments tools like Braintree, Stripe, Card.io and CardSpring, which allows people to sync their credit card to an app, we are seeing more apps build in payment services. I just wrote about two loyalty services, Cardify and Mirth, that launched this week that use CardSpring as a way to track and reward spending. Groupon itself introduced its own Groupon Rewards loyalty program earlier this month that allows consumers to sync their credit cards to get rewarded for their purchases at certain merchants.

Ultimately I think we’ll see more of this convergence as these apps try to become a one-stop shop for merchants, providing deals for demand generation, loyalty for continued engagement, and payments to close the loop and track spending. It’s going to get really confusing for local businesses, which are going to have to decide who they want to turn to as their local operating system, a term Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason coined recently.

That also means I wouldn’t be surprised if Foursquare gets into the mobile payments arena. It already provides specials, and with its partnership with American Express, it allows those cardholders to redeem AmEx deals by just using their credit card. But if it wanted to, Foursquare could easily add a broader payments system or a card-tracking system of its own. That would help it explain to businesses how valuable the Foursquare service is. Right now merchants are rewarding user check-ins, but they don’t have a way to tie rewards to actual spending through Foursquare. This could introduce a new level of complexity for merchants, depending on the solution chosen. But it may be worth it for Groupon, Foursquare and others to look at becoming more of a resource and service for merchants.

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The money comes from CologneInvest and constitutes Coupies’s first proper investment round, which is impressive considering it’s a 10-person operation that already has a reach of three million users.

Coupies is one of the first mobile couponing companies to embrace near-field communications (NFC), the short-range wireless tech that’s built into millions of smartcards, bank cards, and increasingly phones. Apple is yet to go NFC, but Nokia, RIM and a bunch of Androiddevices are already there.

Once the user has signed up for Coupies, they can be targeted with deals on a location basis. They get coupons sent to their handset, which they can then redeem at the store.

Coupies supplies retailers with little stickers that they can keep at the point-of-sale, with each sticker including both a printed QR code and a tiny NFC chip. If the user has an NFC-enabled phone, they can just touch it to the sticker to tell the system they’re redeeming the coupon, otherwise they can photograph the QR code to do the same.

While the Coupies app itself only has 80,000 users across all the big smartphone platforms, the service is also integrated into a host of partners’ mobile apps, which is where that three-million reach comes from.

These partners include the VZ Networks social platforms, various daily deals outfits and also several augmented reality platforms, such as Wikitude and Junaio. The telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom is also a sales partner.

All in all, Coupies’ services are available in Germany, Spain, Austria, Switzerland and also in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia, under the name mobileFOXX. According to spokesman Thomas Engel, an Australian launch is imminent and the new-found funding will enable more.

“We want to increase our reach, which means more partners and more own-app downloads,” he told me. “We want to further internationalize our service – at least two more new countries this year.”

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When the iPad 2 first debuted in Apple’s refurb store, discounts were relatively small: $50 off each model, representing discounts of between 5 and 9 percent, depending on which model you looked at. Now 16 GB models are discounted $80, and 32 GB and 64 GB versions carry an even steeper $100 price drop, representing between 12 and 16 percent off the value of a new, nonrefurbished device.

The new pricing applies to both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models, and Apple currently lists pretty much every model as being in stock, with the exception of the 64 GB AT&T model. All Apple-refurbished iPads come with a full one-year warranty, a new battery and outer shell, and free shipping. There’s really no downside if you’re looking for a gift when comparing these to new iPads, except that you can’t get engraving on refurbished gear.

Apple doesn’t say anything about these price changes’ being limited-time offers, but, as is always the case with refurbished products, supply is limited. You have to wonder if this isn’t a precursor to the arrival of an iPad 3 early next year.

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In the old version, users had to purchase their offers via other means, then could redeem and track them via the Google Shopper app. Now you can buy the offers directly, and also subscribe to offers for specific locations right from an iPhone. The purchases you make bypass Apple’s in-app purchase system entirely, and instead use Google Checkout to complete the transaction via an in-app browser interface.

But the Shopper update is just one of three major recent Google software changes that bring features previously only available on Android devices to the iPhone and iPad. Just Monday, for instance, Google+ got an update that brought improved notifications, full resolution photo uploading, and search function. And late last month, the Google Search iPad app got a considerable overhaul, which introduced slick built-in quick-access interfaces for Google Apps, making it almost like a limited version of Chrome OS within an app.

Google’s doing a good job right now of making sure its experiences reach as broad an audience as possible, but which experiences, specifically? Google+, its fledgling social network, is a major play to win back some of the ground it has already given up to Facebook in terms of being a destination on the web. In order to succeed at its goal of amassing as many users as possible, Google is aware that it has to reach mobile users on the platform where they live, even if that’s not its own.

Google Shopper, especially now with its local offers, is likewise a product that benefits Google most by being in front of as many eyes as possible. It’s purely about advertising reach and selling to groups, so it makes sense that Google would want to count iOS users among potential customers.

With the Google Search app for iPad update, the goal is once again to make sure as many people as possible are using its search products and apps like Docs, all of which help drive traffic to its primary properties and therefore, encourage ad revenue, too.

In short, Google’s improvements to its iOS business are strictly self-interested, which means users hoping to gain some of the more useful elements of Google services on Android devices will likely ultimately be disappointed. Don’t expect turn-by-turn navigation in Maps, for instance, or an official Google Music native player; these are things that remain valuable as competitive advantages for Android devices, rather than as standalone efforts to be promoted in and of themselves.

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Micromat’s TechToolPro 6 is the bundle headliner this time around, offering some of the most comprehensive diagnostic and repair tools for your OS X system available anywhere. TechToolPro 6 is the most recent version and normally retails for $99.99 on its own. It checks your drives for potential errors or signs of failure, helps you rebuild your disk directories and optimize performance, plus recovers data from corrupt drives.

Another highlight is Postbox 3, the latest iteration of one of the best options out there for power email users who aren’t satisfied with what the build-in Mail.app offers. It’s a better fit and better designed than Microsoft’s Outlook for the Mac, and it’s a great Gmail client, too. The only downside is that there is no Exchange support, but it has a load of organization and filtering features that make tackling even the most unruly of inboxes a much easier task. Postbox 3 is normally $30 on its own.

One more app on the list that merits closer inspection is Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s a few years old now, but the game really stands up well despite its age. RPG fans will love it, especially if you enjoyed the first installment or if you’re a fan of games in the Diablo vein. Ordinarily, Neverwinter Nights 2 retails for $20 on the Mac App Store.

There are eight other apps in the bundle, too, as well as one more for the first 15,000 buyers. There is something for everyone, including the FontPack Pro Master edition, which ordinarily retails for $300 and includes every typeface designed by the SummitType font foundry (handy for designers), and Hear, an app that adds audio equalizer options to every app on your Mac (nice for the audiophiles in the crowd).

The deal lasts until Dec. 21, so you still have another 16 days to decide if it’s tantalizing enough to merit your hard-earned cash.

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The App Store is a bit of rolling sea of pricing turmoil, according to madvertise’s findings in the U.K. App Store, with regular highs and lows that make shopping on certain days more advisable than on others. Fridays turn out to be the best possible time to spend your hard-earned cash, since 19.58 percent of iPad and 18 percent of iPhone app prices on average see a drop just before the weekend, and none of the top five categories of apps see any price increases on a Friday.

Don’t jump the gun and think you can get away with buying earlier, though; Thursdays are the worst possible day to shop, with 17.9 percent of iPad and 17.36 percent of iPhone apps showing an increase in price that time of week. Thursdays are good for one thing, however, since along with Wednesdays it’s the most common time for new apps to arrive in the App Store. Updates also come most frequently on Thursdays, with Tuesdays coming in a close second.

Madvertise’s study, which it created in conjunction with AppZapp, a bargain-hunting tool for App Store shoppers, concludes that Friday is the best day to shop for apps. That’s not too surprising, since a lot of publishers seem to promote their wares with weekend sales in order to lock in lucrative positions high up in the App Store rankings.

All bets are off during this weekend, owing to Black Friday, but there’s little reason to doubt Friday won’t be a great time to pick up some cheap apps, both in the U.S. and abroad, too.

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The images posted by 9to5Mac appear to be from an internal staff leaflet or flyer detailing the Apple Store’s Black Friday deals. In addition to the Mac sales (which are actually pretty good at $100 off even the cheapest models), a lot of accessories are on sale, including Apple’s own iPad Smart Cover ($11 off all models), wireless input devices ($11 off keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad) and networking devices ($11 to $51 off AirPort and Time Capsule hardware).

But some of the standouts include sales on products that, while excellent, are normally out of reach for a lot of consumer budgets (mine included). For instance, the Jambox by Jawbone gets a $51.95 discount, making the Bluetooth speaker only $148 on sale. Jawbone’s breakout hit, the fitness tracking UP wristband, is also significantly cheaper according to the spy shots, getting a $21.95 temporary price drop. Bowers & Wilkins’ excellent C5 stereo headset, which we recently picked as the best overall iPhone headphone companion, is on sale for $128, a full $51.95 off its original price, and the same company’s Zeppelin Air, which is the best and brightest of the AirPlay speaker lot, hovers a little closer to being affordable thanks to a $101.95 price break, making it ‘only’ $498.

I may not have expressed much enthusiasm about Apple’s Black Friday sales in the past, but if this flyer turns out to be accurate I’ll be singing a different tune. Deals on high-end Apple accessories don’t come along often enough, and wireless, room-filling sound just might be worth waiting in line for. Check out the full flyer snapshot at 9t05Mac and let us know if anything catches your eye.

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