Center’d’s The DealMap, which serves up more than 350,000 “live at any time deals” from over 150 daily deal and offer/coupon sources, has released an iPhone app that “mobilizes” the service’s top features, including game mechanics, real-time discovery, crowdsourcing and user-generated content.

The app, much like the Web site, utilizes a location-sensitive “relevance algorithm” to select salient deals for users across eight deal types and 10 business categories within a one-mile radius of their present ZIP code. CEO Jennifer Dulski told us that the equation behind the algorithm tabulates “location + price + sentiment + time” to equate with purchase intent.

Offers originate from national deal providers, a booming list of deal-a-day companies, social media and other sources. The DealMap has formalized revenue sharing agreements with “several dozen” deal-a-day companies and derives the majority of its revenues from its affiliate partners.

Dulski says that where the app distinguishes itself from the online hub is in mobile’s real-time saving, sharing and user-and-merchant-creation functionalitites. The platform offers a suite of standard sharing capacitites — Facebook, Twitter, e-mail — as well as the ability to save deals for later viewing and add deals from local business that are not advertised elsewhere, all of which closes the customer feedback loop.

User deal generation promotes an element of “real-time discovery” endemic to mobile by uncovering local sales and deals that otherwise would never surface beyond the storefront. The DealMap incentivizes user submission through increasingly popular game mechanics, which reward deal submissions, downloads and pass-alongs with tangible rewards. A points-driven leaderboard tracks activity.

Merchants can also submit their own deals directly without funneling through third-party providers.

Dulski believes that the app marks a major advance in fostering a “true cross-digital platform” that incorporates Web, mobile, social and APIs that allow developers to build on top of The DealMap’s aggregated offerings. This networked positioning with partners, publishers and developers could aid The DealMap in separating from the increasingly dense playing field, with sites like Yipit, 8Coupons and Deal Radar also vying for market share.

As to our suggestion that a deal a day does not especially lend itself to mobile, where people are “on the go,” Dulski delineated between “impulse deals/buys” and “timeless buys.” Mobile is very good for impulse deals, she suggests.

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Deals found by The DealBot are added to 8coupons’ geolocated “MoneyMap” showing deals and merchant locations. Users can weigh in on coupons by affirmatively voting on a section called “Is this deal real?” The overall capabilities of the offering appear to be similar to Center’d’s “The DealMap,” which launched last month.

Founder Landy Ung says she expects The DealBot to add from 5 percent to 10 percent more offers to 8Coupons, which currently boasts over a million coupons from more than 300,000 merchants. The site has 1.5 million monthly users, she says. Most of the site’s coupons come from partners such as ValPak, Money Mailer and RedPlum. 8Coupons’ technology enables national companies to detail local offers. (That would have been helpful last week when I brought a Denver-based coupon from Einstein’s Bagels to Carlsbad, forcing the local manager to override her computer system.)

Some are also sent in by users — some via mobile, which was the company’s initial orientation and remains a channel. The site also aggregates “deal a day” offers from Groupon and 80 others, which Ung says have been very popular, driving a “spike in traffic.” In addition, the site adds context to offers via relationships with 30 to 50 shopper-bloggers, such as 89th and Broke. “We drive a lot of traffic to them,” says Ung.

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Center’d, the local/social events and city guide site, has consistently reported growing traffic. But in its three-year existence, the site has never really found a niche that would set it apart from the competition.

The site, however, has kept on hammering away at local/social trends, with a strong emphasis on sentiment analysis and local mapping — no surprise, given that its leadership comprises CTO Chandu Thota, the former Microsoft Virtual Earth leader, and CEO Jennifer Dulski, the former head of Yahoo Marketplaces.

Now, the success of Groupon and other deal-a-day sites has apparently led the site’s executives to an epiphany: One of the next waves of local is likely to be deal aggregation — a path already taken by such sites as 8Coupons.com and Localofferlounge.com (and before that, by Judy’s Book). Research conducted by the company showed the power of the deal. Indeed, 80 percent of those surveyed said they feel “exhilarated” by finding a good deal.

Dulski previewed concepts behind The Deal Map at our Marketplaces 2010 conference in March –see Mike Boland’s post here — and the site went live yesterday. The Deal Map aggregates the whole gamut of socially driven deals and information, which include coupons, sales notifications, frequent flier type points, sweepstakes, new product information, events and recipes.

The goal, says Dulski, is to finally move deals beyond the silos of mail, TV and newspapers, store windows and e-mails. All are better served by a true cross-digital platform that might include the Web, mobile, social media, aggregated e-mails and APIs.

Dulski’s expectation is that a certain portion of the deals themselves may be sent in by users, some of whom will be motivated to contribute sites and reviews by cash incentives for super-frequent users. But other offers will be grabbed from a wide range of sources, including large, national deal providers; deal-a-day providers; and extracted from e-mail newsletters, social media and other sources. A larger portion of the deals will eventually be driven from the social efforts than from coupon feeds, says Dulski. The site will also have several revenue streams, including revenue sharing with the deal-a-day sites.

Dulski makes a case for the Deal Map’s uniqueness by noting it is the only site that mixes “location,” “price” and “sentiment” (i.e., how people feel about a product or location). On the map, locations of deals are clearly coded by one of 10 category icons (restaurants; health & beauty; shopping; events & attractions; hotels; food & drugs; automotive; Services; Home & Garden;  and medical. The intensity of deal areas is also indicated by a heat map.

It all looks great and is very easy to use, compared with other maps we’ve recently played with where everything tends to bunch up too much. It will be even better in future iterations when users can set up personalized categories.

While The Deal Map is billed as a a project that is both separately branded from Center’d, and integrated within it, it seems realistic to think that it becomes Center’d’s primary purpose now, just as Living Social’s Daily Deal is its primary purpose, not its Virtual Bookshelf. The space is going to be big, and the people at Center’d seem poised to ride with it.

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One of the challenges of running conferences is keeping our analyst hats on and covering the world outside the venue walls. We’re still catching up on notable media and tech news items from last week.

But luckily there’s a fair amount of activity happening within the conference walls. This year’s Marketplaces conference hosted great presentations and announcements from the likes of Google, Groupon, Yelp, Loopt as well as emerging topics like game mechanics.

Day 3 of the show saw a solo spot from Center’d CEO Jennifer Dulski. In addition to the company’s yet to launch Dealmap product, Dulski outlined “sentiment analysis.” This looks at the set of criteria by which local decisions are made, and on which local search tools are increasingly built.

Making Deals

Back to Dealmap, the site will be part of the budding trend of local deal sites. The most popular of these is Groupon, but many others are developing new twists on deal search and, to a certain extent, group buying. Similar sites we’ve seen recently include Closely and Keynoir.

The Dealmap proposes to pull in deals from a broader swath of sources than Groupon, which forms individual direct relationships with merchants for daily featured deals. One of the challenges here is finding enough inventory to fulfill demand among both users and merchants.

Groupon argues this scarcity creates value for both. The other side of the argument is that it creates churn. Advertisers, if happy with the results, have to go to the back of the line to wait for their next turn, possibly migrating to a growing list of competitors to get their next fix.

Groupon is looking at ways to create more inventory without devaluing these deals — perhaps by spinning out different categories or verticals where deals occur. The company suggested as much on and off the stage last week.

The More, The Merrier

Meanwhile, the Dealmap will similarly segment offers in different categories, including those that match Center’d’s own categories (i.e., “romantic,” “kid friendly,” etc.). It will do this by scraping a variety of online sources to create a repository of deals — presumably on an affiliate revenue basis.

Dulski argues that the time is right for this type of product, and that data indicate growing demand for local bargain hunting. The market likewise indicates this hunger, which is at least partially a result of cyclical (recessionary) and secular (increasing media transparency) shifts.

Slide credit: Jennifer Dulski/Center’d (click to enlarge)

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Center’d started its mission in June 2008 like most city guides, albeit one largely aimed at women and planning. But over time, the local space has changed. And the site itself has refocused to meet “the missing pieces” in local.

CEO Jennifer Dulski and CTO Chandu Thota, in a conversation with us, say they’d encountered  a noisy ecosystem of local sites suffering from content overload and meaningless, one-dimensional user-generated content that gives four stars + to everything. “There is certainly not a lack of content,” says Dulski.

Their solution: comprehensive information and deeper context. Dulski, the former head of Yahoo Marketplaces, says the Center’d team has spent the past year building “Sentiment Analysis,” a data platform that pulls in and analyzes data and language from social media sites, maps and other sources. “It is more robust than it appears at first glance,” she says, noting that it actually understands language, while most sites are focused on a keyword approach.

The platform, which has some similarities to Marchex’s OpenList, “understands food terms. We know that salmon and crème brulee is food.” The presentation of the analysis is also more complex, showing sentiment as a series of bar charts, rather than simple “star” systems.

“One piece of this is like Zagat,” the popular ratings company, says Dulski. “But it is much broader,” partnering with sites such as Topix, Mobimissimo, Insequent, Silicon Valley Moms Blog Network and various other local and travel blogs and Web sites (a few dozen or so). At the same time, Center’d’s own count of city guides has expanded from 12 to 50 cities.

The site has also added a Twitter page and a popular iPhone app. Dulski, in fact, projects that mobile is going to play an increasingly important part of the city guide business, perhaps accounting for 50 percent of usage within a few years.

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The year-end money deals continue. Today, The San Jose Business Journal reports that Center’d has raised another $1.875 million on top of the $6.5 million it previously raised.  The two-year-old, mom-friendly local search and events planning site, initially launched as “FatDoor,” is led by former Yahoo Marketplaces head Jennifer Dulski and former Microsoft maps exec Chandu Thota. Among its board members is former <a href=”http://www.intuit.com”>Intuit</a> head Bill Harris.

The site is working to differentiate itself from competitors on the city guide side such as Citysearch and Yelp, and on the events side such as Eventful, Zvents and American Towns with an orientation toward mothers, and features such as “Sentiment Analysis,” which, like Marchex’s OpenList,  semantically analyzes what people are saying about local places on the Web, sucking in information from local and travel review sites, review aggregators and blogs.

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