Viralogy

With the success of deal sites like group-buying service GroupOn, brick-and-mortar retailers may find it useful to tie their deals and loyalty programs more closely to the web and mobile devices.

Recently, Discover, Barclays, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile announced that they would be working together to find a way to eventually eliminate debit and credit cards in favor of paying with smartphones. In the meanwhile, Verizon has put $400,000 into a mobile application called CardStar.

CardStar, a Boston based smartphone startup, is an application that allows users to combine their loyalty cards and membership rewards from various retailers all into one place - on their phone. Although Verizon’s investment is not particularly remarkable, it signals an interest in mobile commerce from wireless carriers. CardStar is not an application built specifically for mobile commerce; rather, it is an application that enhances “regular shopping” (physically shopping in a store). However, it emphasizes just how significant smartphones have become - people are growing to rely more and more on their cellular devices for their everyday needs. And as phones are used to do things such as aggregate deals and shop online, retailers need, as quoted above (from Reuters), to begin focusing more on the potential of optimizing themselves for mobile commerce.

Sources:

Reuters, GoingCellular, Mobiledia, CardStar