Coovents Archive

A couple of new mobile applications launched today that I thought were worth mentioning.

SmartyPig

SmartyPig offers a social savings site and almost reminds me of the Christmas Club accounts at my old bank when I was a little kid. The idea behind SmartyPig is to help you save a little each period to help you get to the goal and purchase the product you are interested in. Say you want to buy a new iPod, you can set it up so SmartyPig takes $15 each week and then the system alerts you when you’ve reached the needed $299 for the iPod. They also pay interest on your account balance and say that the money is FDIC insured. Interestingly they quote the interest rate as just over 3% which is way higher than most offerings today. They also offer bonuses if you buy the item via one of their partners including Amazon and Home Depot.

The mobile application offers the basic monitoring functionality and also the ability to drop in additional monies into your account. The example SmartyPig uses is that you decide to go get a double frap lattee with a shot of mocha. Instead of the double you go for a single and save $3.00 and drop that into your SmartyPig account. I like this concept because it can help you reach your goals quicker and maybe help to change your thinking. The SmartyPig mobile app works on a variety of devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android G1 and the upcoming Palm Pre.

Coovents

We reviewed NYC-based Coovents when they launched. Coovents provides a listing of happy hour locations in NYC which you can access on their website or via their text messaging service. Today they have announced the launch of an iPhone application.

The iPhone application allows you to find based on where you are currently located. This is pretty neat – so imagine you just finished a three-hour meeting with your vc and they decided not to give you the additional $5 million you need to keep going. You want a beverage bad…you whip out your iPhone, load up the Coovents app and find out that right around the corner you can get two-for-one Buds.

Note: I provided Coovents with a couple subscriptions from my startup for a giveaway they ran.

Coovents is a NYC-based startup that attempts to help people find local happy hour locations. Coovents offers a Google Maps integration (seen below) displaying all of the locations they know about that offer a happy hour.

You can either browse the listings via the map and text listing or via a mobile device. The mobile version works via SMS and you can send either a generic request for x number of locations or a specific location request.

Coovents should be able to work with bars to create "specials for Coovents users" which could drive revenue for the company. I’d like to see directions to the locations and perhaps tie into Yelp for user-generated reviews. They might also want to create actual pages for each location to help get some rankings in the search engines. 

My one hope is that they lose the pigeon in the logo!