Belly introduces the free sample to its local-business loyalty and rewards program. Through the Belly app, businesses can offer free goods and services to lure customers into their stores. Read more »
Timed to Halloween and the presidential election, New York-based social loyalty startup CrowdTwist analyzed user data related to brand preferences for chocolate and political affiliation. Its data suggest that Democrats tend to prefer non-premium chocolate, while Republicans opt for more up-market sweets. Read more »
Marqeta is trying to give merchants a Starbucks card-like approach to loyalty with a new card-based system that lets people preload cash on to a Marqeta card for a specific merchant, who throws in extra cash as a reward. Read more »
Foursquare is building out its merchant services by adding a new tool called Local Update that allows businesses to reach loyal customers nearby with news and updates. This is part of an effort to make Foursquare’s business tools valuable enough that merchants will pay for it. Read more »
LevelUp, a Boston-based loyalty and payment startup, is laying down the gauntlet to other payment competitors by doing away with processing fees forever in what it calls a bid to achieve “Interchange Zero.” It will only make money from selling offers and loyalty services. Read more »
App users are a flaky group, easily discarding apps in favor of the hot new thing. But new data suggests they are developing more loyal toward apps, abandoning them less frequently and visiting their favorite apps more often, according to app analytics firm Localytics. Read more »
LevelUp, the local loyalty and payment app, is getting $12 million to expand the service nationwide. The service, which is an offshoot of location start-up SCVNGR, now has 200,000 users, who are spending $2 million a month with the app. Read more »
Groupon is reportedly testing out its own Square-like mobile payment service. It’s a sign that local deals and loyalty providers are increasingly looking at adding mobile payments services to help build out their tool set for merchants and retailers. Read more »
Mirth and Cardify are two of the latest start-ups that are building loyalty programs that tie into credit and debit card accounts. That’s a growing opportunity thanks to enablers like CardSpring but it also means more competition. Read more »
In an attempt to move beyond being a provider of deals, Groupon is launching a loyalty program for U.S. consumers and merchants, part of a bigger effort to become the “operating system for local commerce.” Groupon Rewards gives merchants a way to track and recognize loyalty. Read more »
No one has really emerged as a leader in helping local businesses retire their old punch cards. Andreessen Horowitz is laying down a $10 million bet on Chicago-based Belly, which launched last year as a provider of customized loyalty programs for small and medium sized business. Read more »
Facebook confirmed that it has acquired customer loyalty service Tagtile, which helps merchants distribute rewards, offers and coupons to in-store customers via their phones. The deal follows the acquisition of Instragram this week and it shows that Facebook is looking at shoring up its mobile needs. Read more »
Mobile shopping reward app Shopkick is realizing its full potential by tying into Visa’s payment processing network, helping close the loop on transactions and providing new incentives for users to make purchases. Users will now get rewarded not just for visiting a store but buying products. Read more »
Social Passport is leveraging NFC and QR codes to create a social loyalty tool that enables consumers to socially interact with merchants and retailers in the real world, helping them check in, like, follow or tweet about their experiences, sometimes in exchange for a discount. Read more »
Square, the mobile payment acceptance tool, is getting a lot more useful for merchants with version 2.2 for iOS and Android. It brings loyalty rewards for Square Card Case users, hardware integration with cash drawers and receipt printers and more back-end tools. Read more »
American Express wants to have a stake in the next big digital commerce start-up and it’s establishing a new $100 million fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out. It’s another sign that 162-year-old American Express is anxious to keep evolving. Read more »
Crowdtwist, a New York startup that recently graduated from TechStars’ New York class has been on a roll lining up customers like JCPenney, Live Nation and Sony Music. Now it’s announcing it has raised $6 million to expand its gamified social loyalty program. Read more »
Badgeville is introducing Social Fabric, a technology allows a website to quickly add a host of real-time social features on their site that charts user behavior, updates users on their on-site activities and allows people to follow any piece of content or fellow users. Read more »
Gamification is growing up. First it got its own conference, a new certification program and now consolidation. BigDoor, a gamified loyalty platform used in hundreds of websites, is announcing it’s buying up web check-in rewards provider OneTrueFan. Read more »
Gamification, that buzz word panned as hype by some, has increasingly won over companies, investors and even research firms like Gartner, which now predicts half of all companies will use gamification by 2015. So what’s next? How about gamification certification? Read more »
Recently, I stumbled across a new service called Alice that lets you buy all of your household essentials online. Alice is awesome, and as soon as I figured out just exactly how awesome Alice was, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew about the service. Read more »
It seem that many of us are so focused on our own presences in social networks that there is little talk about what we expect from our friends, fans and followers. My own company has been hyper-focused, however, on our clients’ FFFs, particularly “fans” on Facebook. Read more »
A new survey by research firm Crowd Science brings bad news for BlackBerry maker RIM, and some good news for Apple. The company that comes out best of all, though, is Google, whose Android operating system seems poised to see some major growth in the near […] Read more »
