A friend of mine is working with this new company and she emailed me the info about it. Seeing as it is totally going to be mobile based I thought it would be something great to share with all the readers of TheCellularGuru. The new company is called Leloca and is a new type of deal service different from the regular group buying sites which seems to be growing exponentially every day.

How is this new site different? Well, the way they differentiate themselves (or will when it launches) is by offering location based deals which are only valid once purchased for 45 minutes. The merchant who offers the deal can choose where people will see it based on their phone’s location and it is only available on the mobile platform - no PC access. The deals can be instantly turned on and off by the merchant so if they sell the number of seats or items they were looking to the deal is immediately gone.

It also seems that this is a great way to do the group buying because it doesn’t require any threshold to be reached for the deal to become available and when the customer comes in they aren’t the 80th person to walk in with the same coupon. The customer is going to come in within 45 minutes of buying, and the deal they are getting is for something that otherwise would have gone to waste (like an empty seat in a movie theater).

Merchants in Canada and the USA can sign up today for Leloca and those that sign up during the launch campaign will not be charged the fee that Leloca plans on charging merchants per additional customer (around $1 they tell me) for the entire 2011. The service will be completely free for customers.

The app will be available for consumers in the iPhone App Store and the Android Marketplace this July. No word on whether or when it will be available for BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, Symbian or any others. Also no word as of yet whether it will be available for use via a mobile website but that is being looked into.

What do you think? Merchants, does it sound like something you would use? Potential users, how about you?

For More Info:

Leloca’s website here