In short, Sprint thinks that hotels, rental car agencies, airlines, supermarkets and big box retail stores – pretty much any business with a loyalty card – would make excellent resellers of its 3G and WiMAX data service. Hotels could rent or lend 4G data modems to their out-of-town guests; grocery stores could sell prepaid 3G hotspots right next to the batteries and the international dialing cards. Those data services could be linked directly to any loyalty program – for instance, for every megabyte you consume earn a frequent flyer mile or get 10 cents off your next purchase of frogurt.

Sprint is inviting these companies to become mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) on its data networks, offering a compelling proposition to companies that normally wouldn’t have a clue how to run a wireless business:  Sprint will deploy all of the infrastructure and manage the service, while its partners focus on their customers.

Photo by Tomás Fano

Such MVNOs could work much the way the hotel, airport and airline Wi-Fi services function: access to a key set of company Website functions might be free, but customers would buy access to the Internet at large by the hour, day, week or bucket. Companies would also have the opportunity to toy with those business models, for instance subsidizing access fees with advertising and sponsorship revenues or allowing customers who accrue a certain number of flight miles, hotel stays or grocery to tap into free buckets of megabytes.

The new program is part of the “MVNO in a box” platform Sprint launched in July. Traditionally MVNOs have pretty much supplied all of the components necessary to run a mobile operator – devices, back office and billing, customer service, etc. – save the actually mobile network. That means MVNOs have commonly been the purview of companies with the experience and infrastructure necessary to run a carrier or companies like Best Buy willing to invest in those resources.

Sprint’s new single source platform, however, is geared at anyone with a customer base and a Website. Sprint is contracting with Telespree to handle the activation and management of potentially millions of subscriptions spread over dozens of different brands through its cloud-based wireless data enablement platform.

So far Sprint is making its WiMAX and CDMA networks available through the program, so its biggest impact may be regional. Sprint is an MVNO of sorts itself, reselling Clearwire’s WiMAX service, which is available in about one-third of the US. Its CDMA EV-DO network, however, probably doesn’t have the oomph to stand in as a primary mobile broadband service. Once Sprint completes the rollout of its LTE network, though, it will probably start offering it up to its MVNO partners. Many operators are keeping their newest networks close to their vests, but Sprint has already allowed MVNOs like Ting to tap into its nascent LTE systems.

 Hotel sign image courtesy of Flickr user Tomas Fano 

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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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