TheFind Integrates Coupons into Product Search Results

TheFind, which offers an iPhone app with local inventory data, has just started integrating third party coupons directly into search results. According to the press release that went out earlier today:

On each search results page, consumers can immediately see all matching products, including ones that have coupons and discounts offered by stores. Shoppers can filter their search results to only show products on sale, or with special offers, such as free shipping or percentage discounts. 

Here's an example search result and an example of how the coupons are integrated at the product level:

When users roll over products they will see a window:

I haven't yet spoken to the company but I assume that this will ultimately come to the mobile offering as well.  

AOL Launches "My Places" on MapQuest for Mobile

Today AOL/MapQuest launched "My Places" for MapQuest4Mobile. My Places launched online last year as "My MapQuest," offering personalization to PC users of the MapQuest site. It allows users to save maps and directions online and, now, access that content in mobile. It offers a much richer experience than standard "send to mobile" online maps functionality.

The renaming of the product captures its intent in a more intuitive way according to Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest. Dwyer and I spoke about a range of things associated with the mobile launch and evolution of the MapQuest site online.

There are two primary mobile products from MapQuest:

• MapQuest4Mobile
• MapQuest Navigator (a paid turn-by-turn GPS application at $7.99 per mo.) 

MapQuest4Mobile is a free application basically is available for BlackBerry devices today. It launched in September and Dwyer said that on a limited number of handsets he's seen 15% month over month growth. He added that MapQuest4Mobile would quickly expanding rapidly to other devices, including the iPhone and Android by Q2. Today MapQuest offers a special iPhone-optimized version of the site, accessible through mobile Safari.

Dwyer said that his team sees convergence going forward and that they're striving for a uniform experience whether on the PC or in mobile. 

Dwyer and I also spoke about some of the developments at Bebo and what's now being called the AOL People network, which includes the AIM property. There are some pretty interesting scenarios -- provided they can be executed -- involving mobile, location and sharing/social. 

After a long period of inertia, MapQuest is moving to upgrade and improve the user experience. My Places on MapQuest4Mobile is just one of a string of recent announcements that involves a new MapQuest PC homepage and MapQuest Local online, which is a compelling product that will probably make its way into mobile in the future. 

Another development today, MapQuest Local launched a concert tracker widget that pushes local concert information to users based on default location. 

Yahoo! Mobile a Big Step Forward

Dan Miller and I sat down on Friday morning for breakfast and a demo of the new Yahoo! Mobile with Marc Davis, who has several hats but is known by the formal title "Chief Scientist and VP of ESP, Yahoo! Connected Life."

Both Dan and I were very impressed with the new apps and experience, which brings oneSearch, oneConnect and onePlace together in a more intuitive way. It also makes the experience more consistent across platforms. Most of the caffeine fueled discussion was off the record. But I'll say a few things.

Previously Yahoo! created some confusion in my view with a range of experiences across a range of mobile sites and apps. There was "GO," the uber-app; there were oneSearch, oneConnect and onePlace. Then there was the mobile Web version of the Yahoo! homepage, which was completely divorced from these other experiences. The client app oneConnect was available for the iPhone but oneSearch didn't have a dedicated iPhone app. Nor was there a iPhone GO app. GO contained all these subsidiary tools/experiences but wasn't widely available. 

Now that's all cleaned up and subsumed under "Yahoo! Mobile." And the mobile Web version is really terrific -- as good or in some ways even better than the dedicated app. GO, for its part, is being phased out over time.

The entire Yahoo! Mobile "suite" is compelling. But the surprise for me was oneConnect, which I've had on my iPod Touch for many months, but haven't used with any regularity. Its intention is to organize users' contacts and social networks in a single tool that allows you to update status or broadcast one-to-many from mobile devices. Though imperfect, there is radical potential in the oneConnect functionality of the new Yahoo! Mobile. 

Overall the new Yahoo! Mobile is a dramatic improvement over Yahoo!'s prior collection of mobile experiences. It's not simply a mobile search engine but a comprehensive set of tools and functionality that covers search, feeds/news, social media and third party content distribution. 

There's nothing else out there right now that competes with it. Now Yahoo! just needs to bring it to market and show people the benefits of using it. 

Here's a video that offers a little taste of the new experience. 

New Management, New Services at Idearc

If you visit the venerable Superpages.com this morning you will notice something decidedly different. A new service called “SuperGuarantee” now occupies top billing on home page, and it represents a breakthrough product for Idearc, superpages.com and, ultimately, the Yellow Pages directory business at large. There are also enhancements to the mobile version of superpages.com that we’ll note in more detail in a later post.

My colleague Greg Sterling has his take on SuperGuarantee here. As you will see, it reflects new product positioning and new sales tactics by a company with tremendous incentive to reshape itself and the sets of services that it offers. It reflects a new approach brought to the organization by Scott Klein, who was hired to be CEO in June 2008. A combination turn-around expert and packaged goods maven, Klein melded a small set of marketing “outsiders” with the top performers among incumbent employees to launch a series of initiatives that do nothing less than transform a Yellow Pages publisher with diverse and disperse Internet properties into the sort of local advertising and promotional consulting firm with a broad array of products designed to help small businesses survive and thrive during this economic downturn.

SuperGuarantee, the initial offering, is such a product. It is a high-visibility service assurance program whereby SuperPages issues a “SuperGuarantee Shield” to eligible businesses that have bought advertising in the printed Yellow Pages directory. For those businesses, Idearc guarantees customer satisfaction, first by bringing an alternative vendor in to “fix it” or by paying the customer up to $500 toward successful repairs or completion of the task. The guarantee applies to some 3,000 categories, primarily service companies. It explicitly excludes a good number of professional service providers – such as doctors, lawyers, travel consultants and even churches and hairdressers – where make-goods could lead to significant liability or where the definition of an unsatisfactory job could be highly subjective.

Starting today, eligible local businesses are invited to register “free of charge” for the first year. They can then display the SuperGuarantee badge on their storefronts, business vehicles, uniforms and advertisements. We see it as a bold move by a Yellow Pages publisher to define a broader set of services on behalf of local business and we’ve been told by CEO Klein that there are many more innovations to be introduced in the next few months that will help redefine the services – across multiple media and mobile resources - that local businesses can employ to help attract more local customers. All portend a broader and different role for the local directory publisher.

NY Times on Maps, 'Augmented Reality' and LBS in Mobile

John Markoff, a terrifically thoughtful writer on technology for the NY Times, has written a sweeping piece on mobile mapping, navigation, LBS and augmented reality. It touches on most of the issues and possibilities for "local mobile search" as a metaphor for finding things locally on a mobile device. 

Most fascinating to me is the notion of "augmented reality," which exists already to varying degrees in Japan and somewhat on the Android compass function. This is a very strong future direction for mobile mapping and LBS. Imagine holding up your camera at a restaurant from the outside and seeing all the reviews for that restaurant. That's a very mundane example. Imagine doing that at a store and seeing what brands were on sale on the inside, etc.

Something along these lines is the reconciliation of the realities of privacy and user behavior with the long-held LBS "Starbucks coupon" fantasy. Regardless, such use cases exist or are not far away.

I've long been fascinated by the "point and search" functionality that already exists from GeoVector, NeoMedia, SnapTell, Mobot and others. There's keyboard/keypad as a query entry mechanism and more recently voice search (e.g., Vlingo, Tellme, Google, Nuance, etc.). But the camera on a smartphone represents another input system that may prove equally if not more powerful. ShopSavvy on Android, as well as other bar code and QR code readers, are starting to gain attention and some adoption in the US.

I could be mistaken about the emergence of augmented reality and/or camera-phone based search functionality in the US but I don't think I am. It's really just a question of time. 

USAToday: ChaCha Best of 'Voice Search'

USAToday Personal Tech columnist Edward Baig writes about and compares various "voice search" tools based on his own experiences with several services:

• ChaCha
• Vlingo
• Yahoo! oneSearch (powered by Vlingo)
• Google voice search 

His reviews of all of the services are mixed but his favorite is among them is ChaCha:

ChaCha is addictive, because you feel compelled to ask just about anything and more often than not get a decent reply. "What has more calories, peas or carrots?" (It's peas.)

It's a little bit "apples to oranges" because ChaCha uses human beings to respond to queries. Also missing from the comparison were Tellme and/or any of the "free DA" services.

However the tools that Baig used above are all more flexible "search" services that allow people to go beyond the conventional address and number lookups of the DA and free DA services. 

Yahoo! Upgrades oneSearch Shortcut with Auto-Locate, Voice

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced several upgrades to its oneSearch Shortcut (which requires a client download) including improved search suggestions, voice and location triangulation. The oneSearch shortcut is available on Nokia, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. Unfortunately it's not yet available for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

According to a Yahoo! blog post from earlier this week:

Today we’re launching several new features for the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut, including an auto-locate feature that uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect the user’s location, enhanced Search Assist that incorporates the user’s recent search history, and a Windows Mobile client.

As mentioned it also includes voice search (powered by Vlingo). Collectively these features are terrific. However Google has largely the same feature set already.

In order to make up some lost ground in mobile search Yahoo! will need to roll out new features more quickly to more platforms and add things that aren't available at Google. 

Yahoo! oneSearch and the Yahoo! Go client were ahead of rivals when they first launched. However Google in the past year has matched much of that original functionality and has more recently been quicker to upgrade and roll out new mobile features and products. 

Survey: iPhone Users See More Ads, 25% Went to Store or Purchased

A survey from mobile social network Limbo on the attitudes and behavior of 2,000 mobile phone users in the US and UK in Q4 shows, consistent with other data, that iPhone owners are more engaged across the board and are seeing more ads. They're also responding more too.

Here are some topline data from the survey report:

• 80% of iPhone owners use mobile data vs. 60% of other mobile users
• 10% of mobile phone owners used LBS tools in Q4: e.g., map, friend finder or restaurant locator. This was true for 22% of those in the 25-34 age group. 
• 33% of mobile users recall seeing mobile ad in Q4 vs. 41% of iPhone users (reflecting greater ad penetration on the iPhone platform)
• "The vast majority of these ads were seen in text messages"
• Phone owners are 2X as likely to see ads and 4X as likely to see game-related or LBS advertising

Source: Limbo/GfK Technology (2009) 

More than 162 million consumers used text messaging in Q4, by far the dominant form of mobile data usage

Women and younger people (18-24) are most likely to respond to ads

Specifics regarding ad response:

• 16% of ad-aware consumers said they made a phone call to a number in an ad
• 1 out of 7 (14%) went to a mobile website
• 1 out of 7 "reported that they had bought a product or visited a store as a result of seeing a mobile advertisement." For iPhone users that same number is 1 in 4 (25%) actually bought something or went to a store after seeing a mobile ad (based on self reported data)

Latitude Brings Google into Mobile Social Networking -- Big Time

Google missed the boat on social networking -- big time. While Google CEO Eric Schmidt occasionally points out here and there that Orkut is popular (outside the US), the company had a chance to buy MySpace and it declined before the network was picked up by News Corp several years ago.

We wrote yesterday that mobile social networking is on the rise and Facebook has reported strong growth in mobile users on a global basis. Now Google has entered the "mobile social networking fray" with a new service called Latitude, which is part of Google Maps for Mobile. It allows users to share location in real time on their mobile handsets and/or through a desktop iGoogle Gadget.

Rather than a new "social network" however it's a logical extension of Google Maps for Mobile. It uses Google's existing "My Location" and other tools to enable people on Maps for Mobile to share their location with a selective group of contacts -- those who opt-in to participate.

After an initial period of testing the service has launched in 27 countries in North America, Europe and Asia and on the following platforms: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. An iPhone/iPod Touch version is coming soon. 

I've written extensively about Latitude on Search Engine Land and will be issuing an Advisory to LMS clients shortly. 

On the central question of privacy, Google has taken pains to give users total control over whether they opt-in to use the service at all, whom they connect with and whether they can be seen or are hidden. It's conceptually like IM in that regard. Indeed, the new service integrates with Google Talk on the mobile handset (where supported). This is a key feature that should be quite popular. 

Users can share location and add one another via email address or their GMail contacts. Thus the set up is relatively painless and Google accelerates adoption because of the dual installed base of GMail and Maps for Mobile users. Accordingly we predict it will be immediately competitive with (or leapfrog) similar services from Loopt, Pelago/Whrrl and uLocate, among others. It also shares features -- like manual control over location -- with Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle. 

As mentioned, there is mobile-desktop integration through an iGoogle Gadget (though not Google Maps proper). However the Gadget is only currently available in the US. According to senior product manager Steve Lee, there are no plans to monetize Latitude beyond that which is already going on in Google Maps/Search. 

Here's a video demonstrating how the service works. 

NearbyNow Powers Lucky Mag Shopping App for iPhone

At Internet2Go NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap demonstrated the new Lucky Magazine iPhone application that his company supports. The idea is to tie merchandise featured in the magazine to a rich mobile user experience that allows people to browse and find products in local retail stores. (Right now the products are limited to shoes.)

Users can shop by shoe type (trend), brand or color. The application relies on NearbyNow's inventory data and infrastructure to confirm the availability of shoes in local stores. Users may also shop online. The application will expand beyond shoes in the near future. 

This is a fascinating combination of traditional media (a magazine) with mobile (iPhone application). It extends the Lucky brand into mobile and also provides a connection between the pages of the magazine and the point of sale. 

TheFind's iPhone application (which uses NearbyNow data) also provides the same functionality across a broader range of products. However, this application offers Lucky a powerful selling tool for advertisers that recasts the magazine as a dynamic "platform" for brands and products aimed at the Lucky demographic. 

Coupons Inc Buys iPhone App GroceryIQ

CPG Coupon provider Coupons Inc. has acquired popular iPhone shopping list app GroceryIQ. Here's what the press release has to say:

GroceryIQ is the leading grocery shopping application for the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application comes preloaded with more than 130,000 items commonly found in supermarkets across America. The critically-acclaimed software enables users to organize their personal shopping lists by store, aisle, buying history, favorites, as well as customizing item sizes. With more than a thousand new installs daily, GroceryIQ has been the #1 paid application in the “Lifestyle” category of the iTunes app store since its release.

The coupon-enabled application will match shopper’s grocery lists with Coupons.com coupons, and provide multiple ways for consumers to redeem the coupons from their handset. The free upgrade will also allow users to download layouts of nearby supermarkets based on ZIP code and organize their shopping list by store layout to save time shopping.

This deal is a no-brainer for Coupons, Inc. which will be able to insert mfg coupons in contextually relevant places on the app. People will definitely use the coupons; the only question is whether the stores are prepared to redeem them from a mobile handset. 

This coupons-shopping app integration is not unlike that on the Kraft iFood Assistant.

Report: ChaCha Raising More Capital

Mobile answers and voice search provider ChaCha is raising more money ($30M) according to this report:

ChaCha Search Inc., a Carmel, Ind.-based search startup, has secured around $11 million of a $30 million Series C round, according to a regulatory filing. No new shareholders are listed. The company had previously raised around $14 million from Morton Meyerson, Bezos Expeditions, Rod Canion (founding CEO of Compaq) and Jack Gill (partner at Maven Ventures). It also had secured a $2 million grant from 21st Century Technology Fund.

ChaCha successfully reinvented iteself as a mobile company after a false start on the desktop. The company sits in almost a unique position in the mobile world, although DA provider kgb has recently started encroaching on its turf. 

ChaCha offers the broadly accessible platform of voice (and SMS) as an input mechanism -- like DA -- but the flexibility of search. Other "voice search" and free DA competitors are more structured and rigid in their approach and capabilities. Automated services such as Live Search Maps, Google Maps for Mobile and others aren't yet evolved to the point where they can compete with the human guides that ChaCha employs on the back end to answer queries. 

However that "distributed call center" approach is costly. 

ChaCha will be on the SMS/Text-based advertising panel at Internet2Go later this week in San Francisco:

Panel: SMS - Not Sexy but Voluminous
Americans now spend more time texting than talking on their phones. The monthly volume of mobile messages has now reached 75 billion -- with a "B." SMS is also device-independent and can be done on the more than 85% of the market constituted by feature phones. Yet most marketers and pundits appear to be looking beyond SMS to the "mobile Internet." Are they missing a huge opportunity? How should agencies and advertisers think about SMS and where it fits into a mobile marketing plan?

Speakers:

Zaw Thet, CEO & Co-Founder, 4Info
Jay Highley, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Cha Cha
Greg Hallinan, VP of Marketing, Verve Wireless
Alec Andronikov, Chief Mobilizer/CEO, MoVoxx

Wired on Local Mobile Search

Wired is running two interesting pieces on location-aware mobile apps. The first is a run down of largely iPhone and Android applications and what they do: Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location. Here are the apps discussed in the article:

1. Trapster
2. iNap 

3. JOYity 

4. Cab4Me 

5. ShopSavvy 

6. Google Earth 

7. Locale 

8. GoSkyWatch
9. SafetyNet 

10. SitOrSquat 


The second article is called I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle.

As the title suggests it's a lengthly first person account of living with and using location-aware applications (mostly on the iPhone). The article discusses a wide array of these apps and also explains the various targeting technologies used on mobile devices, how they work and their relative speed and accuracy: GPS, Cell & WiFi triangulation. 

In the end, the article is mildly entertaining, generally informative but also ultimately inconclusive -- perhaps appropriately so. One can't embrace location on mobile devices without some ambivalence because of the privacy issues and potential for abuse in some contexts. But because of their utility and potential benefits, one should not simply dismiss location-based applications either. That would be a kind of knee-jerk "Luddite" stance. 

As much as we're proponents of local mobile search, we're also cognizant of the dangers for abuse or improper tracking and monitoring. And this is one of the main critiques expressed in the recent consumer groups' FTC complaint and preemptive strike against mobile marketers, which speaks about the dangers of geo-location in particular.

But as has been said in other contexts, the "genie is out of the bottle." We can't and shouldn't take these applications away from people who want them. The question, rather, is how to balance their capabilities with legitimate consumer privacy concerns.

Yell Group Results Illustrate Growth in Internet's Importance

In his Screenwerk blog, Greg Sterling made passing reference to some very interesting results for U.S. based YellowBook, nestled in Yell.com's six month financials. On page 6, six month results for YellowBook show a doubling in revenue for Internet advertising, based largely on a near doubling of the average revenue per online advertiser (from $19.58 to $36.92 per month) compared with 2007.

In spite of the apparent price ups, the number of online advertisers of record grew modestly while the number of advertisers in the printed product stayed flat. Thus the 394,000 online advertisers at the end of the reporting period is abour 14% more than the 346,000 buying print ads. Spending for printed Yellow Pages advertising declined 1.5%.

The 8:1 ratio (roughtly 12%+) between printed revenues and online shows the staying power of the print product, where erosion is staved off by an increase in the number of books published and increased loyalty among core advertisers (where retention rates remain around 70%). Last year, only 6% of revenues were generated by online products.

Top Google Android Engineer Goes to Coupons Inc., Android to Other Devices

The Wall Street Journal is running a story this morning that is interesting for a couple of reasons. The basic news is that the senior Android engineer, Steven Horowitz, has been hired by Coupons Inc.:

Mr. Horowitz was recruited in February 2006 by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who has spearheaded Android, as one of the first engineers to work on the project. He said in an interview, that after “spending so much time and energy” on the effort it was a good time to move on. Mr. Horowitz added that he was also attracted by the fact that the worsening economy has accelerated business at Coupons, which also operates a Web coupon site for consumers. The company plans to hire 40 new employees by the end of the February, he said.

This is a very interesting choice for Horowitz, to move from arguably a cutting-edge project to one that is probably quite a bit more mundane in most respects. Nonetheless, coupons are much beloved by consumers and especially so in this bad economy. It's a giant market offline; yet, coupons have never really hit their stride online despite their early presence on the Internet.

Partly the lack of "inventory" or the easy ability to find them and partly manufacturers and retailers' fears about fraud have held back coupons' advance in the digital world. Surely their (economic) moment has arrived. We'll see what happens over the course of the next couple years and whether they truly take off online and in mobile or continue making incremental steps. (Here's all my past writing about coupons at Screenwerk.)

The other interesting thing to me about the piece was the confirmation that Android is being readied and used for devices other than cellphones:

After focusing on releasing the first version of the software late last year, the engineers are shifting their focus towards making the software work with a greater variety of phones and devices. Mr. Horowitz added that he is aware of companies trying to translate Android — whose software is open source, making it easier to customize — to devices that aren’t phones, like netbooks (a new breed of low-end portable computers), or televisions, but declined to go into details.

This essentially confirms an earlier report that Android would be on so-called netbooks within a year. 

Survey: Use of Mobile Phones in Shopping

ForeSee Results as part of its holiday shopping consumer survey asked people about the use of mobile phones as part of the in-store shopping experience. The data were compiled from “more than 9,000 responses collected from December 1, 2008 through December 18, 2008 from shoppers who had visited the Top 40 retail websites at any point within the prior 14 days.”

Here are the key points:

Have you ever used a mobile phone as part of your shopping experience in retail stores?

• Yes -- 29%
• No -- 71%

How mobile phone was used as part of retail shopping experience:

• To ask someone about a product I might purchase -- 72%
• To send a picture of a product I might purchase -- 40%
• To use the Internet to look at comparison prices -- 24%
• To use the Internet to look at product reviews -- 15%

The emerging conventional wisdom is that people using mobile phones in store are more likely to buy online (after confirming what they want) or go elsewhere where they might get the item less expensively. However ForeSee concluded "shoppers who use a mobile phone as part of an in-store shopping experience are 6% more likely to buy something in the store."

The top two responses above support this conclusion. They indicate that people are seeking validation or approval for their intended purchases. The ability to communicate with a friend, spouse or other interested party (and gain approval) seems to then trigger the purchase. 

In terms of mobile Internet, there's a huge loyalty and marketing opportunity with branded shopping applications, such as those launched by the Gap and Target over the holidays.

kgb Completes Consumer-Facing Transformation

KGB, formerly InfoNXX, has completed its transition from a directory assistance wholesaler to a more consumer-facing "mobile find" provider. (This has been true in Europe for some time.) We've written about KGB's transformation a couple of times in the recent past:

• kgb Running New Ads, but Where's Free DA?
• kgb Evolves Model with Acquisition of 'Social DA' Firm Texperts (clients only)
• kgb Moves Further Beyond 'DA' with Texperts Acquisition

Today the company formally launched its "multi-modal" mobile find (their characterization) services (Web, mobile, SMS). From the release:

Leading the way in the new kgb suite is its premium mobile text answer service, kgbkgb/542542. (www.kgbkgb.com) This launch follows the success of kgb's similar "Ask Us Anything" premium text answer service in the United Kingdom which demonstrates that consumers have a growing need for an always-available mobile service that helps them find accurate and timely answers and relevant information while on their mobile phone. kgb is also launching mobile web applications for Smart phones and the iPhone, a WAP site, plus an Alpha kgb Web service this year to further expand the suite of information services it will offer in North America.

Responses are provided by a mix of technology and humans. The latter category is moving to a hybrid between call centers and kgb "special agents," who are trained but non-professional responders. This is very similar to the ChaCha model and largely inspired by Texperts, which was recently acquired by kgb.

To get people used to the idea that kgb allows people to "ask any question" -- rather than just business listings information -- it offers a scrolling "ticker" of actual questions coming across its network, similar to what you see in some of the Google campus reception areas:

The company's TV campaign is also convey this idea while at the same time "recruiting" for agents:

Some of the kgb services are free while the SMS services will require consumers to pay and will also feature ads as well. 

Interestingly in the US there is no voice entry point for the kgb service, except through telco partners. For the time being the company has decided that on the "voice search" front it's not going to compete with its customers for whom it provides DA wholesale services. 

Mobile Fast Food Ordering Has Arrived

The blog MacRumors points out that quick service Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle has added iPhone ordering. The company already has online ordering but this is a progressive and forward-looking step that will boost loyalty and potentially store revenues. (Apple filed a patent application around mobile ordering like this.)

The sign-up process is quite lengthy and flawed in that respect. (For example it doesn't tell you you need an eight character password.) However the actual app is very nicely done and will likely be heavily used. Registration can also be done online.

In the sign-up the default setting is "send me special Chipotle offers and news." This means promotions/coupons may go to mobile phone numbers and/or email. This is also smart and potentially very effective to draw people into stores. Imagine an email that goes out at 11 a.m. offering some sort of coupon. I don't know whether the back end supports location targeting but, assuming it does, promotions could be targeted to specific geographic areas (i.e., w/in 5 minutes driving distance, etc.). There is also a store locator in the app. 

Chipotle may be ahead of the curve, but it's only a matter time before every major fast-food chain tries mobile ordering.