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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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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