The Google post said that the company is eager to work with the Waze community of users “who are the DNA of this app,” and to integrate the real-time traffic updates and other information that the network provides into Google Maps:

“We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out ‘fender bender…totally stuck in left lane!’ and showing faster routes that others are taking.”

This kind of integration is one of the reasons why many argued that Google should try hard to snatch the company out of Facebook’s hands (Apple was also at one point rumored to be interested in the company), since the addition of Waze’s real-time traffic info could make for a significant competitor to Google’s app.

Product team to remain in Israel

On the Waze blog, the company’s founders said that they agreed to the acquisition offer from Google because CEO Larry Page and the Google Maps team “share our vision of a global mapping service, updated in real time by local communities, and wish to help us accelerate.” The founders added:

“Nothing practical will change here at Waze. We will maintain our community, brand, service and organization [and] we will continue to innovate our product and services, making them more social, functional and helpful.”

Google’s blog post noted that the Waze product team would remain in Israel and operate separately “for now.” According to reports in the Israeli media, the issue of moving the company’s staffers to California was apparently a sticking point in the negotiations with Facebook, and a commitment to keep the company based in Israel may have made the difference for Google in the negotiations.

Waze, which has been growing rapidly, has a user base of about 50 million in 110 countries, who shared more than 90 million reports of traffic conditions, speed traps and other data on the network in 2012. The company has raised $67 million in venture financing from investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Li-Ka Shing and Blue Run Ventures.

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Whistle on Wednesday announced it has raised a $6 million Series A round led by DCM Ventures and it debuted its eponymous device. The small metallic puck that clips contains a three-axis access accelerometer that tracks a wide range of canine motion – or lack thereof. The device has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy radios, which it not only uses to send its data payloads to the internet and your smartphone, but also for proximal location. For instance, Whistle knows your dog is at home if it’s sniffing your house’s Wi-Fi network, and if it’s detecting your smartphone’s Bluetooth signal it knows the you and dog are together.

Your dog probably doesn’t care about counting calories and steps, but in the interest of keeping their pups healthy, dog owners certainly do. And that’s why the cornerstone of Whistle’s service doesn’t live in the collar sensor or phone app, but in the cloud, CEO and co-founder Ben Jacobs told me.

Whistle has been working with leading veterinary schools to create a hefty database of dog health information. It tries to determine what a dog’s optimal exercise and sleep levels should be based on breed, weight and age, and then compares them to a dog’s actual activity patterns. Dog owners can access all of that data through a web interface, and track activity on a smartphone app. They can also use the software to send or print out reports for their vets.

“We translate that accelerometer data into info you can use and give you a snapshot of what your dog’s day looked like – walks, playtime and the time spent resting,” Jacobs said.

Whistle, however, isn’t just graphing data and comparing it against a few charts. According to Jacobs, its analyzing millions of individual data points per animal, looking for patterns or “vectors” such as restless sleep or interrupted play that would indicate that something isn’t right in Fido’s world.

“Dogs tend to hide their pain from you,” Jacobs said. “They will act how their owners want them to act. Dogs will run a marathon with their owners until their paws bleed. That’s not an indication of health. That’s an indication of loyalty.”

Whistle’s job is to ferret those patterns out from perceived behavior, he said. What’s more, Whistle plans to aggregate all of its canine data and offer it up to its research partners. Despite the high level of dog ownership in this country, there’s a lot vets don’t know about individual breeds, Jacobs said. Whistle wants to supply them with the country’s largest live case study – giving them real data on how real dogs behave in domestic environment, not just the lab.

Though the major value of Whistle comes from its cloud service, the company is taking an Apple approach to the market, making its money off of hardware. It’s selling each Whistle device for $99.95, but will never charge for the data collection and analytics service, Jacobs said. He added Whistle might pursue additional revenue streams through a version of its analytics portal optimized for vets so they can keep track of their patients.

The quantified pet is definitely going to be an interesting space, and it targets a market segment that goes nuts over their pets and has money to spend on them (I can speak from personal experience). According to Whistle, pet owners spend $50 billion annually on food, treats, equipment, medicine, veterinary bills and even massages for their pets. The idea of a Fitbit for your pooch might sound silly to many people, but to dog owners used to fussing over and pampering their pets, Whistle’s wearable doggie tech is by no means a stretch.

We’re starting to see the emergence of all kinds of internet of things devices designed to let our pets “talk” to us and interact with their environments. Whistle, however, is particularly compelling because it doesn’t appear to be building a one-trick application, such as GPS tracking collar or an NFC emergency tag.

According to Jacobs, Whistle is trying to build a platform from which it and partners can launch new hardware and services. Future software updates or versions of its collar could use proximal location to create geo-fences or even allow for remote doggie door entry. We humans can get into our homes with Bluetooth keys. Why not our pets?

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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I couldn’t agree more. Which is why, other than some modest help, we opted to not pursue investors for our company and go it alone instead. I’m convinced that for a lot of startups (though certainly not all) choosing to bootstrap instead of  searching out VC money is the better strategy for a number of reasons.

A focus on pleasing customers, not investors

When you don’t have a lot of money, you’re forced to turn to the funding source that rarely tolerates mistakes: customers. Specifically, focusing on the product results in the creation of  a “minimal viable product,” a pared-down, core offering that delivers a clear value to customers. And if all of your efforts are focused on designing a product that customers want, enjoy, or find useful, you’ve got a much better chance at success than someone who’s focused instead on convincing investors that the business will be viable one day.

Skeptical? Companies like SquareSpace, WuFoo, Braintree, Lynda.com, 37 Signals, Campaign Monitor, Github, and many more were able to become successful without relying on traditional rounds of funding. And we built our company, Bizness Apps, from the ground up, without any significant outside funding (and we not only turned out just fine, we’re also profitable).

Now, that’s not to say that a business can’t chase both customers and investors at the same time, as clearly many successful companies have done just that. But in our opinion, it can be harmful to worry about what investors think when you should be worried about customers, a much more sustainable and important funding source.

Limits set useful boundaries

Being broke is a wonderful system for cutting through the options and setting limits. It forces you to think creatively about how to get things done. So where many established or funded companies would tend to throw money at a problem and explore all the avenues possible, a bootstrapped company will have to find the best way, fast. This leads to a culture of problem solving that almost every successful company has, to some extent.

At Bizness Apps we learned this while working on our mobile food ordering system. We couldn’t afford to develop both a native and mobile web version at the time, and so we made the conscious decision to develop an HTML5 version initially that would work across all mobile devices. The decision saved months of time and thousands of dollars in development costs. Doing so not only got us to market faster and cheaper, but allowed us to get user feedback sooner and improve the product.

Urgency inspires efficiency

When you’ve got money in the bank and know the bills will be paid for months to come, it’s easy to spend late nights debating the company’s choice of colors for the logo while more important matters tend to get left for tomorrow. The bootstrapped company, on the other hand, is grinding it out to produce a product that sells. A lack of funding has a way of making prioritizing tasks easier. A core sense of urgency usually leads to the most critical tasks being handled first, while less important matters are saved for later (as they should be anyway). The result is that spending is more prudent, the product is designed in a focused manner, team members and resources are employed more wisely, and the business as a whole enjoys a great return on each dollar and hour spent.

Without a huge runway at Bizness Apps we went above and beyond for our first paying clients. Even though our service was “do-it-yourself,” we bent over backwards to help new customers set up their mobile apps for them – knowing that we wouldn’t have a second chance. The extra effort  paid off. Not only did this help improve our product and convert users to paying customers faster, but we gained invaluable feedback along the way.

Enforcing discipline and accountability

There’s no room to be loose with resources, with design, or with responsibilities in a bootstrapped company. As a result, a culture of discipline in many areas of the business tends to arise organically (otherwise, the company falls apart pretty quickly). So deadlines can’t be allowed to slide far, if at all, and every member of the team is held accountable for delivering their share. It’s the discipline of a well-run acrobatic family: Everyone has a job to do, and a mark to hit at a particular time and place, or everything else comes crashing down.

In any industry, maximizing returns from time and money spent is often the most basic central goal. In a bootstrapped company, it’s woven into the fabric of the enterprise. At the end of the day, all entrepreneurs who hope to build something more than just a salable idea should ask themselves one fundamental question: Do I really need funding?

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app and mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM for selling to small businesses. 

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Photo courtesy docent/Shutterstock.com.

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According to Connectify, Dispatch — which went live in December — has some inherent limitations. While it was able to aggregate multiple wireline and wireless connections into a single fat pipe, allowing your Windows-based PC to take advantage of every available internet link, Dispatch could only ship certain types of content over one of those connections at any given time, Connectify President Bhana Grover said in an email.

“This worked fantastically with multi-threaded applications like web browsing and Bittorrent,” Grover said. “But the feedback we got from our backers and customers was that they wanted a more robust connection aggregation technology: one that could speed up video streaming, uploads, and VPNs… and was Mac-compatible, too.”

Switchboard basically works like a virtual private network (VPN). All of your internet connections — whether Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G — link to Connectify’s servers in the cloud. Those servers then go about dismantling content or files into their component packets and routing them over those different connections. Over Dispatch, a Netflix movie would stream over the highest-bandwidth connection available to the PC. If you were on public hotspot or cellular network that connection might be fairly slow. With Switchboard that single Netflix stream is split between multiple connections, resulting in faster buffering and better resolution.

Connectify has developed a prototype for Switchboard on both the PC and Mac, but it wants to raise $100,000 in funds on Kickstarter over the next month to complete its user interface, develop customer management software and deploy its first cloud-based servers. As with Dispatch, Connectify plans to sell Switchboard on a subscription basis, but due to its software-as-a-service element Switchboard is setting capacity limits as well. That means the more data you consume via Switchboard, the more you pay. Backers of the project, however, will get early discounted access to the service this fall.

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Boland co-founded phone baseband chipmaker Icera in 2002, heading up the company as president and CEO for nine years. In 2011, Nvidia — anxious to add radio chips to its mobile processor portfolio — acquired it for $367 million in cash. Boland stayed on as Nvidia’s SVP of mobile communications, but according to his LinkedIn profile Boland left the company in October.

Cambridge-based Neul makes wireless chips, but not for the cellular industry. It’s focusing on the emerging white spaces broadband segment — in particular the Weightless standard gaining traction in the U.K.

White spaces use the spectrum in between TV transmissions for two-day way data communications. The Weightless Special Interest Group hopes to use those airwaves as a backbone network for the internet of things, connecting low-power devices such as smart meters and mobile sensors.

Neul’s principal founders will remain with the company. Former CEO James Collier will become CTO, while William Webb has moved from CTO to chief strategy officer and will maintain his role as CEO of the Weightless SIG. Formed in 2010, Neul has quite the pedigree in mobile silicon. Many of the company’s key executives founded CSR, the U.K. fabless semiconductor giant. Neul, however, has only 45 employees and spent its first two years developing its first radio chip.

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Envelope tracking might sound like a certified mail service, but it’s really a technology used to tame LTE’s normally power hungry ways. LTE is unique among cellular technologies in that its power levels rise and dip dramatically throughout the course of a transmission – think of an LTE signal like the wild crescendos and quiet interludes of classical music.

Envelope tracking closely matches the power fed into the radio with the power needed at given moment to transmit. The result is a highly efficient power supply that can reduce a phone’s power drain by as much as 25 percent over current 4G devices. Given the miserable battery life of first generation of LTE phones, a 25 percent improvement is nothing to scoff at, and once combined with other power-saving technologies such as integrated handset silicon as well as improved batteries, we’ll see phones that can go much longer between charges.

Quantance’s latest $12 million round is its Series D with all of its existing investors — TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital – chipping in. Quantance raised $30 million in its previous rounds, going all the way back to 2006, the last of which was an $11 million investment in 2011.

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1.  Get inside the factory

I’ve met too many people in this game who make one trip to China, pick a manufacturing partner, and never visit again. All of the companies they represent eventually end up with enormous problems when it comes time to launch. Get out on the manufacturing floor and talk to the line managers and operators. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about the manufacturing process and about your manufacturing partner. Seemingly small pieces of information from the factory floor can later help you refine product design for better manufacturability or even clue you in to larger issues with factory management.

In 2010, we had a supplier in China that had agreed to increase capacity by 50 percent over the next nine months. It had been a few months since anyone from my team had visited the factory, so I stopped by to see how the expansion was coming along. To my surprise, only about half of the new equipment needed was actually on order. After speaking with the floor manager, we learned that he was not given the resources to meet our expansion plans. Needless to say, we had to have a fairly direct conversation with senior management to get the expansion back on track.

2. Build prototypes close to home

3D printing houses and rapid prototyping shops are popping up all over the U.S.. You often get what you pay for in this realm, so it isn’t where you want to pinch pennies. Use the proto phase to refine, refine and refine some more. That way, when it comes time to spend money on pricey mass-production equipment, you only have to do it once. Mass production molds for plastic parts can cost upwards of $50,000, so finding out two parts just don’t fit together quite right after you’ve started mass production is an excellent way to jeopardize and even kill your company.

The added benefit of prototyping close to home is that your engineering team can iterate faster.  3D prototypes can be on your doorstep in a few days, compared to the four to six weeks needed for other prototyping methods. Expedited turnaround times accelerate overall development cycles, and in turn, reduce development costs. Rapid development also gets your product to market faster than the competition!

3. For mass production, China isn’t the only game in town

Examine the total cost of your supply chain. If you’re building product in China, you need to do the math on how it is getting to the U.S., where it will be packaged, cost of import duties, what happens if a product is defective, and a thousand other questions. Each of those factors has a cost implication, and when added together, startups sometimes discover that Chinese manufacturers are not price leaders after all.

Look for manufacturing opportunities closer to your customer. For instance, there is tremendous manufacturing talent and capacity in places like Guadalajara, Mexico, where you can benefit from NAFTA tariffs and reduced logistics costs, not to mention low cost of labor.

4.  The job doesn’t end after launch

Once you launch (congrats!), resist the temptation to sit back and watch it all happen. To the contrary, monitor your supply base like a hawk. There is a reason Apple has thousands of supply chain professionals on the ground in countries around the world. When things go wrong, they can go very wrong very fast. Actively monitoring supply chain data and maintaining a transparent relationship with managers at each node in the supply chain will prevent most issues.

When it comes to tracking data, inexperienced startups are often overwhelmed with the amount of data and tracking options a modern-day supply chain produces on a second-by-second basis. It doesn’t take an Apple-size team to avoid most supply chain issues. Figure out what your key data points are and track those on a daily or weekly basis. Take the time up front to build reporting tools that make it easy for you or your team to see at a glance if there is a problem building.

For instance, my team was able to monitor over a billion dollars of annual procurement across 22 factories using just six spreadsheets. Careful planning and foresight will go a long way towards ensuring that data can be used to proactively identify and resolve issues.

5.  Tim Cook is right – inventory is “fundamentally evil”

Most startups I’ve encountered are unaware of how excess inventory can quickly crush a small business. The simple answer to inventory management is to never carry more inventory than you absolutely, positively need (easier said than done). Before production starts, set realistic goals for inventory turns and days of inventory. If inventory exceeds pre-defined levels, shut down your supply chain. Shut it down entirely.

You simply can’t afford to have more product coming off the line if you’re not going to be able to sell it. You may find yourself in an uncomfortable position with your supply chain, but that discomfort is minor compared to the pain of writing off a massive inventory. If you don’t agree with this approach, please refer to RIM’s colossal $485 million inventory write-off at the end of 2011.

Oh, and one more thing:  Fire any engineer that ever says “it’s not possible.” That no-can-do mentality has no place at an innovative startup. Attitudes are infectious and that one is positively poisonous within an engineering organization that strives to innovate. People who are motivated by the challenge to push a manufacturing process to a smaller tolerance or a larger scale than ever achieved before are the lifeblood of innovative hardware organizations. Everyone else is just dead weight and a liability to your mission.

Bill Banta is currently a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and CEO of Stealth HD, which builds 360-degree video technology for the military and media broadcasters. Previously he worked at Square and also at Apple.

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Those apps — which include Skype, Pinger, WhatsApp, Tango and Viber — are all great apps, said Julien Decot, the new VP of business development and monetization at TextMe. The problem, Decot claimed, is they’re five separate apps, each specializing in a different set of features. TextMe, however, has a plan to combine the best aspects of each of those services into a single multidimensional communications tool.

Decot spent the last five years at Skype tailoring the VoIP giant’s corporate strategy, and while he believes Skype has designed a juggernaut of a communication platform, it was one that was always optimized for a PC environment. The hole Skype left in mobile was filled led by numerous mobile over-the-top (OTT) communications apps like WhatsApp. What the market needed, Decot said, is a made-for-mobile Skype incorporating the new features of the emerging class of OTT apps.

Note: This story is just one in an occasional series of stories on important under-the-radar mobile startups.

Starting with a clean slate

Julien Decot

Microsoft obviously wasn’t going to rebuild Skype from scratch, but Decot found his new Skype in TextMe, a 2-year-old San Francisco bootstrapped startup, which has already seen 10 million installs in the last two years of its Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

TextMe provides a unified voice, messaging and video chat platform, but it can also reach beyond its own network of users to touch any phone number in the U.S. and more than 200 other countries. It’s designed a device-agnostic platform that can turn any tablet into a phone. And to top it all off it’s created a “freemium” charging platform that allows customers to earn credits for services they would normally pay for.

One of the most interesting aspects is how it has overcome one of biggest problems plaguing a new over-the-top app developer: cultivating the network effect. To become truly useful, a communication or social network needs a large number of users. TextMe has solved this problem by issuing every user a phone number just as Google Voice does in the PC world. That means any TextMe member can automatically send and receive text messages from any mobile device as well as place or receive calls from any phone — whether or not the person at the opposite end is a TextMe user.

Of course, not all of the services are free. As with its competitors’ apps, all in-network SMS, voice and video communications are gratis, but TextMe also doesn’t charge for out-of-network text messages to U.S. numbers or for any inbound call, no matter where it originates. TextMe charges for phone calls to non-TextMe numbers, both domestic and international, and this week TextMe this week also introduced a paid international SMS feature.

Customers start out with 10 free credits, which is enough for a 10 minute domestic or U.K. call or a two-and-a-half minute call to France. TextMe sells credits in buckets: $1 for 40 credits or $10 for a bundle of 500. But the startup also offers ways for customers to earn credits through promotions. If you watch video advertisements or download promoted apps from your devices app store, you’ll accrue credits in one-to 20-point increments.

“Most of our credits are earned not purchased, but that’s fine with us, as long as it keeps our customers happy,” Decot said. “We get revenue either way.”

Forget innovation. We need aggregation.

Like I said before, all of these features are available in one form or another in other OTT apps. Pinger assigns phone numbers to handle its voice messaging and out-of-network texts and calls. Skype and Tango offer in-network video chat, and Skype offers exposure to the wider telephone grid with SkypeIN and SkypeOut. WhatsApp is the king of rich-media mobile messaging. TextMe just wraps them all into a single service.

TextMe has so far focused its efforts on smartphones, tablets and iPod Touch (effectively turning the Wi-Fi device into a softphone), but the company is exploring PC clients — bringing it full circle back to Skype — and even WebRTC browser-based communications technologies, Decot said. TextMe will even let you make a mobile phone call without a mobile network connection, tapping into Open Garden’s ad hoc mesh network.

As for competition, take your pick. There is more OTT software in mobile app stores than you can shake a line of code at. The company closest to TextMe’s model, though, is the similarly named TextPlus (formerly named Gogii), which also issues a phone number to each and every user. Last time we checked, TextPlus had racked up 27 million users, and it is even showing signs of adopting an earned-credit charging model via a new partnership with FreedomPop.

TextMe, though, has stumbled onto an interesting idea. A quick look at my smartphone reveals a miasma of IM, chat and social communication apps. If I wanted to reach out to my wife there are literally 20 different services I could use to reach her. Each of those services offers some kind of compelling feature to recommend it — not only could I call, IM, text or video chat with her I could use an app like Sidecar or Glympse to let her know where I am or where I’m going.

What I really want is one service that does all of the above.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that TextMe was able to reach 40-plus countries with its international voice and SMS services. The company recently expanded its reach to over 200 countries.

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Tempo’s app – available as a free download in the iTunes store – is a very simple concept with a lot of underlying functionality, said Tempo CEO Raj Singh, a veteran of Skyfire before joining SRI. The app replaces the calendar in the iPhone with a much richer interface and then connects to multiple user accounts: personal and work email, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Yelp and the iPhone’s address book. From there, Tempo starts parsing those accounts for useful information related to appointments and populates that information in the calendar.

The app isn’t just attaching email addresses and phone numbers to names appearing in your schedule. It’s intuitively determining the intent and context of any given meeting, Singh said. For instance, if you were to create a simple event reading “Meet John at Starbucks,” Tempo would be able to determine which John of the many in your address book, as well as which Starbucks out of the hundreds in your city.

It does this by parsing your email looking for any recent conversations referencing someone name John. For instance if you just had an email exchange with John Smith discussing your meeting, Tempo would have no trouble applying that context, Singh said. If there weren’t something as obvious as a recent email trail, Tempo wouldn’t be lost, Singh added. The cloud-based intelligence in the app would apply heuristic methods to determine the best possible candidate for “John,” analyzing past meeting history, frequency of contact and numerous other factors, Singh said.

As for location, Tempo can tap into Foursquare, identifying the Starbucks you check into most, or look for clues in your email exchanges or calendar history. Once Tempo has all of the data it can collect, it inserts it directly into the calendar, adding contact info, maps, phone numbers, conference bridges and passcodes, even flight info. If there is more than one likely choice for a bit of information, Tempo will present the user with multiple options.

“Tempo will pick up on the semantics of the event,” Singh said. “Right now we’re focused on the 80 percent most common type of meetings.” That means is Tempo is best at parsing events like business meetings, conference appointments, travel plans, dinners and birthdays. But Singh said the goal is quickly expand Tempo’s vocabulary and conceptual awareness – as well as tap into new information sources like Evernote and Facebook – to create a greater level of contextual understanding. “We want Tempo to know what to do when you opened up an event that says ‘gym’ or ‘anniversary.’”

A growing smart calendar market

Other companies have tackled the smart calendar, most notably Cue (formerly Greplin), which has evolved from a personal data search tool into an app that generates a snapshot of your day by scraping data from email, calendars, social media and apps. The big difference between Cue and Tempo, Singh said, is that Tempo has built its technology on the notion of a traditional calendar. Cue automatically searches your data to generate events. Tempo puts the calendar directly under the user’s control. You create the event and Tempo plugs in the context, Singh said.

Tempo came out of the same SRI group that created Siri and fundamentally uses the same artificial intelligence and semantics technology to produce its results, but Singh said Tempo uses a “push-based” rather than a “pull-based” approach to gathering its data. Singh described personal assistant technology like Siri as “broad but shallow” – you can ask it anything but there are limits as to what it can do.

Tempo’s scope is far more narrow, but within that narrow context it can accomplish much more, he said. For instance, Tempo is developing intelligent reminder capabilities for the app. Instead of alerting you about every appointment automatically 10 minutes before it occurs, Tempo could know what appointments you’re generally late for based on past history. It would then provide some extra prodding to ensure you arrive on time, Singh said.

Tempo is now officially an independent startup, spun off from SRI just as Siri was in 2007 before being acquired by Apple in 2010 (SRI launched another virtual assistant company, Desti, last year). Singh said SRI has provided Tempo with an undisclosed amount of seed funding, as well as critical access to its patents and research, but the fledgling company will be seeking independent funding shortly.

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Belly is a Chicago-based startup backed by Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz that is trying to take retail rewards programs down to the small business and the local level – while providing something much more sophisticated than the buy-10-get-one-free punch card. Belly users either use their Belly app or a QR code on a physical card to check in at a store’s iPad whenever they stop in at a participating business. That allows stores to track their customers’ purchases, award points and market more effectively to their most loyal customers.

The Belly Bites program adds a more active component to a normally passive rewards system. Instead of waiting on the customers, businesses can lure them in by offering a free tidbit, which is then highlighted in Belly’s app. In fact, customers can use the app as a sort of goodie radar, following the path of free treats and services around their neighborhoods. According to Belly, the free samples focus is much more manageable than a daily deal coupon campaign, while still introducing new customers to local businesses.

Belly also revealed today that it has revamped its Android app. The app is now compatible with all versions of the Google OS, but the biggest improvement is for frequent Belly users with the latest Android handset. The new Belly widget can be used to place a customer’s loyalty QR code on the home or lock screen of an Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) device, turning it into a physical card.

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