Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.

To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around them. Businesses interested in taking part can register on Superpages and go through a process to create or upload coupons.

According to the press release, this includes:

• create up to three different coupons,
• set a start date and expiration date,
• add a disclaimer,
• apply coupons to multiple store locations,
• include a promotion code to track specific offers; and
• update coupons at any time.

Coupons are then automatically tweeted out by the geographically appropriate Twitter handle. Of course this is only as good as the number of followers of each of these city-specific accounts, but they should build followers quickly.

The growing interest for coupons on Twitter combined with Superpages ability to cross promote this, will make it happen. Meanwhile you can check out the aggregated feed of all of the 72 city promotions on Twitter (and link directly to your city’s account) at @superpages/superpages-cities.

Like SP411, this is a clever integration, utilizing only a standard Twitter account to communicate and create additional touch points with users looking for local business information. The coupon angle makes it that much more enticing.

As we said at the SP411 launch, media is fragmenting and Superpages is meeting users where they are going. This is an important paradigm that traditional media need to take to heart, as a once siloed world becomes more about presence across platforms and less about owning destinations.

Lots of news coming from mobile local app provider WHERE today. Just a week after it opened up its WHERE Ads local ad network, it has launched a new Web site and officially changed its name from uLocate to WHERE.

The company not only provides the WHERE local app but is also an app production house, which my contacts in the publishing world tell me has solid technical chops. It will continue to build this side of its business but the name change reflects a friendlier consumer brand, in line with the familiarity of its flagship local app.

As for the Web site launch, this is similarly meant to solidify the brand and create a more integrated local experience between PC and mobile device. True to the cloud computing trends driving a great deal of online and mobile media, the site lets you log on (or register) to view and manage your local activity, such as the places you’ve checked in from mobile.

Other features, from the press release, include:

• Keep track of all the places they’ve been to in the past, those they want to go to in the future, and their reviews with Placebook
• Record their current location with Check-in
• Share their WHERE activity with their social network via Facebook and Twitter
• Search, discover and review local restaurants, businesses and services
• View nearby concerts, sports games and other events

In terms of creating continuity between the online and mobile experiences, Foursquare has a similar site but it’s not as functional (though we hear Web site updates are coming).

Lastly, some news from our Marketplaces 2010 conference next week. WHERE VP of Product David Chang is joining us onstage to discuss mobile monetization in a segment that caps off our mobile forum. He’ll join MoVoxx, LocalAdExchange and CallSpark in a discussion about the growing area of mobile local ad networks and monetization. We’re expecting a great session.

Six months after launching its iPhone app, Coupon giant Valpak has announced an app for the Android platform. Reaching the enterprise BlackBerry set is next on its list. The company currently delivers about 17,000 offers via mobile which is equal to its online volume.

Features of its mobile couponing include (verbatim from release):

• Search savings by categories of dining, auto, beauty, health, shops, leisure, home, professional and general
• Use the phone’s GPS to locate savings around you
• Automatically sort results by distance from your current location
• Click on an offer and use the phone’s mapping function to get directions
• View multiple discounts at any given time
• Tap business phone numbers, making it easy to call for more information

Meanwhile mobile couponing continues to heat up, as it follows the overall growth in mobile data consumption. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to our recently released User View study reported using online coupons when shopping for local products. Mobility makes the coupon search and redemption process more integrated, and we’ll see a greater pace of growth in mobile. New Compete data out this week supports this.

Valpak’s move to Android will be important as the platform’s market share gains pace. Gartner believes Android will be the second-largest mobile platform globally by 2012, behind only Symbian. This will happen as its open nature attracts developers, its price tag (free) attracts device manufacturers, and the combination attracts users in search of iPhone alternatives.

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Related: Flurry released data today showing Motorola’s Droid has outpaced iPhone sales for the first 74 days after launch.

If you’ve been reading TechCrunch this week, you’ll know (or be annoyed by repeated claims) that this year’s SXSW conference will be all about location-based mobile apps. They’ve dubbed it the “location wars.”

Everyone is doing and thinking about location targeting and mobile. Twitter has been doing it for months with its geolocation API and Friday went live with automatic location tagging (opt-in) on its own domain. Loopt and others in this space have been doing it for years, while Facebook and Google loom quietly.

Meanwhile, usage skyrockets. Foursquare has 500,000 users and had its biggest day yesterday with more than 250,000 check-ins. Anecdotically, I went from being the only one of my friends using Foursquare three months ago, to most of my extended social circle now using it (and fruitlessly competing for my mayorships — yes you, Jen).

But the interesting part is how mobile location apps have evolved. Based on privacy and other issues, the check-in has replaced pervasive location tracking as the catalyst for communication. It’s a clever form of opt in. Realizing this, other leaders in the mobile local space such as Loopt and Yelp have integrated check-ins in the past few months.

For the local space, this is relevant because check-ins revolve in some way around physical places — often a business — rather than a meaningless lat/long reading. The next step, of course, is monetization. How do you create a lead out of someone raising his or her hand and saying, “Here’s where I am, and (by implication) here’s what I’m interested in?”

Foursquare has begun to turn check-ins into leads, as have MyTown and Brightkite. And more check-in services continue to come out of the woodwork (see Causeworld). Many will die in an inevitable shakeout, but the overall trend is here to stay. More importantly, this will be the basis for new monetization structures that take form in the coming months.

Of course, none of this is terribly new; we and other local analysts have been eyeing it for some time. But it’s reaching mainstream awareness (Foursquare’s TV ads don’t hurt). Over the next 10 days, SXSW will cause a bump in usage that will bring it even closer to the mainstream — or closer to the questionable $12.7 billion LBS market that Juniper Research predicts for 2014.

The pace of innovation in mobile is swift. We have new supposed iPhone Killers every week, and mobile app stores are bursting with new and upgraded apps. In the mobile local world, aside from the flood of social LBS apps happening around SXSW this week, YPG Canada has come out with an iPhone app upgrade.

Six months after its last upgrade, this includes a more intuitive and “shiny” look and feel. Lots of functional upgrades too, including more intuitive category selection, map results and more content. YPG’s Darby Sieben asserts that the app’s main goal was to accomplish these upgrades while maintaining simplicity, usability and just plain accurate content.

More details, screen shots and comments from Sieben on his personal blog.

In its evolving product search efforts, Google has been dabbling in “find it in store” functionality over the years. This is a challenging area involving lots of moving parts and point of sale inventory data from retailers. Krillion, NearbyNow, Milo and a handful of others have cracked this nut to a certain degree for their own sites as well as partners.

Google’s latest move came at December’s “Search Event.” Buried among many other announcements, VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled find-in-store functionality in mobile searches. As Google sees greater levels of immediacy, buying intent, and conversions in mobile search, it’s a logical place to continue this effort.

Blue Dot Special

Today the feature goes live, taking the form of little blue dots in mobile search results that indicate product inventory and proximity data. Proximity is determined by the MyLocation feature that must be turned on for effectiveness. It also currently only works on iPhones, Android and Palm WebOS (i.e., Palm Pre).

This happens in free-form searches where product names or categories will trigger such results (or searches taking place within the “shopping” tab). It could eventually be much more effective with UPC bar code scans where inferred intent or human error is taken out of the equation. Google has already gone down this road.

Local inventory data and mobile bar code scanning have already come together — in the way of chocolate and peanut butter — with ShopSavvy. But for this to really take off, a bigger addressable market is required in the form of more high-end phones with auto-focus lenses and scanning software.

Meanwhile, back to plain old mobile search, there are still moving parts as mentioned. Getting retail inventory feeds requires direct relationships with retailers. Currently Google covers Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn. More will come, and more will indeed be required for a worthwhile user experience.

Better Search, Better Leads

As you might imagine, Google will employ a self-serve approach. As there is more consumer awareness, retail awareness should likewise grow, and they might show up in meaningful numbers to supply these point of sale feeds. Then comes the challenge of the much bigger and fragmented mid-market and SMB (mom-and-pop) retail segments.

A monetization model will follow. Advertiser adoption here could mirror what Google has done with AdWords. It could likewise end up creating the same reseller market among local sales channels. It would seem that a trackable way to drive foot traffic into physical stores would resonate more with a typical mom-and-pop than would the concept of buying clicks.

If Google can solve this problem, it will be a major boon for the local search and overall product search market, and a major source of revenues. It will also be great for consumers, the mobile market, etc. But one step at a time.

Following the previous post about Facebook’s potential to be a category killer in the quickly budding mobile LBS market, could Google do the same?

Like Facebook, the question comes down to Google’s sheer scale and installed base. It hasn’t done much with Latitude — the closest comparison to the new crop of mobile location-based services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt, etc.

But a new angle has emerged when looking at its latest launch: Buzz. Many have written off Buzz as Google’s latest leap into the social media pool, which in the past has resulted in flops such as Orkut. This was made worse by what many believe to be a false start and unnatural fusion with Gmail.

But the place where Buzz seems to have some potential is in mobile — something we and others began to point out after it launched. The idea is that Buzz updates from friends or even non-friends are appended with automatic (though opt-in) location tags.

TechCrunch expands on the topic in a well-argued piece from MG Siegler (perhaps the world’s foremost Foursquare evangelist). Google’s installed base of Gmail users and a local listings database seem to constitute the intersection where Buzz could really shine.

That’s another key to why Buzz (and check-in services as a whole) works as a location service: with it, Google finally understands that people don’t want to let others know their GPS coordinates. That means nothing to most people. Instead, Buzz lets you select an actual place (like a restaurant, for example), and send that out with your message.

People understand the concept of places, not coordinates. And Google, thanks to its Search and Maps businesses, happens to have databases of more places than probably any other company out there. With Buzz, they’re finally using it.

Read the rest of the post here.

This week so far has seen a few notable news bits from the quickly evolving world of mobile ad networks.

ULocate announced that it will extend its location targeted ad network to a small batch of third-party publishers. Known as WhereAds, they’ll include locally targeted inventory on Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com. The location targeted and presumably more relevant ads are seeing CTRs up to three times greater than comparative mobile ads according to the press release.

Next, Jumptap has announced it has launched a self-serve tool for mobile app and Web site publishers to join its ad network. This is very much in line with the strategy previously expressed in talks we’ve had with Jumptap CMO Paran Johar. The idea is to maintain a core business in premium mobile ad placements but also begin to move down the tail with self-serve offerings to smaller publishers and advertisers whose hunger for mobile continues to grow.

Lastly, Todacell has announced it will likewise expand, though its growth comes in the form of $1 million in funding and geographic expansion. The latter will include sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Like uLocate’s strategy above, its publisher partners will be limited to about a dozen, allowing it to focus on a premium and limited crop of inventory. Funding comes from current and former employers of Amdocs.

Location-based services continue to roll out left and right. TechCrunch won’t stop saying this year’s South By Southwest conference will be all about location (except for this contrarian piece by Paul Carr). We mostly agree.

But with all the start-ups crowding the space and rapidly growing, albeit from a small base, Facebook looms as the category killer. With 400 million global users (100 million of them active mobile users), it could have quite an impact when it inevitably “turns on” geolocation for status updates.

There’s been speculation about when it will do this, including here. But today, the first tangible signs were shown in a New York Times Bits post that quotes unnamed sources within Facebook. The venue for the launch will not surprisingly be the annual F8 developer’s conference in April.

The update will involve some form of automatic geotagging for the status updates that have become the main dish of the social network. Like Twitter has done with its API (and today on its own site), this will automatically append status updates with location.

This will be based on GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, IP address, explicit notification (think Foursquare-like check-ins) and/or users’ account information. Like Facebook’s recent regulation of status updates, it will also undoubtedly be governed by users’ opt-in privacy settings.

That last part is critical, and involves one of the reasons Facebook has taken a relatively long time to do this. With a company like Facebook that has all eyes and forms of scrutiny on it (especially being a social network), nearly all moves are met with privacy backlash.

So with new feature rollouts, it’s one step at a time to not rustle too many feathers. And of course location tagging is at the top of the list of privacy advocate seething factors. We’ll see what this eventually entails, but for now you can be sure that when location gets turned on, it will be huge.

The third-party apps and sites that utilize Facebook Connect will plug right into this, and there will be lots of implications for the local space. The Times agrees, stating this will be less of a threat to the Foursquares of the world than to Google’s local efforts — an area Facebook as been eyeing for a while.

One of the people familiar with the project said the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.

Multiplied Media has announced that its flagship Poynt mobile search application is available now for the iPhone. The app so far has planted its stake on the BlackBerry with 2 million users — indeed the top mobile local app for the platform.

New features of the iPhone version include:

– Setting a Location: Poynt will detect your current location to begin a search or you can manually enter an address to use as your search location.

– Map View: Rotate the device to map a single or full set of search results.

– Augmented Reality: From within the map view, users can access a directional view of search results.

– Call Gesture: From a search result, hold the phone to your ear to automatically place a call.

– Address Book Integration: Add frequently accessed listings to your contacts for convenient future lookups.

When we talked to Multiplied CEO Andrew Osis in October, he told us there’s considerable expansion on the horizon. This will include smartphone platforms, geography and content sources. The former clearly pertains to today’s announcement and we’ll see more platform launches soon.

New Ground

Multiplied’s challenge will be replicating its BlackBerry success with a different user base and a decidedly more competitive local app marketplace in Apple’s App Store. To do this it will apply the other growth objective above: more content sources.

The BlackBerry app mostly covered local search categories such as business, people, restaurants and movie information. This is fitting to BlackBerry user demos, but as it expands to other platforms, Osis expressed a need to broaden its appeal to more of an uber local search utility.

This will include categories like gas prices, coupons, retail and other verticals whose use is growing among mobile users. But most notable in the iPhone launch are the features that not only fit its user base, but also the technical capabilities of the device itself (touch screen, etc.).

Chief among these (listed above) is augmented reality. This is becoming more and more of a popular value-add to mobile local apps (see Yelp’s “Monacle”). As we’ve argued, there are lots of moving parts such as local data and device compatibility (iPhone 3GS required in this case), but there is a lot to look forward to.