Tired of location-based apps serving you out of date deals? How many Twitter handles do you follow in hopes of catching current deals at local bars, restaurants and music venues? BarBird aims to take the frustrations out of all of this by aggregating deals local venues are sharing directly from their Twitter handles and mapping them for you — all in one place.
BarBird is taking advantage of the increasing number of businesses leveraging the free and viral marketing opportunity that Twitter presents. Last week the company launched into open beta in fifty cities, including Boston and even six cities outside of the U.S. (Vancouver, Toronto, London, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane). Part of this open beta launch included debut of its iPhone app, helping you decide where there are current deals when you’re out and about trying to figure out where to go.
On BarBird you can view deals around you and even filter by type of deals including happy hour, specials, live music, ladies night, and no cover. Check out the map of current deals in Boston here.
As you can see in the screenshot below, BarBird displays deals on a map alongside a stream of Tweets from venues that you can quickly browse. I’m sitting here watching the Pats v. Jets game, and can see that Myers & Chang is offering $1 oysters and PBRs after the game from 8-10pm and that Formaggio’s is currently offering a Cheese 101 class that I can hit up if things continue to go sour for the Pats.
While the company is based in Seattle, it is excited about receiving feedback from early adopters here in Boston given our great entertainment scene and reputation for being tech savvy. “We think Boston is a very important city to be in,” founder Pierce Lamb told BostInno.
Lamb went on to add, “While I have been pleased with the growth of Boston, I personally hope we can get more Bostonians to add to our dataset there via the ‘add venue’ button.” Taking a look at the available offers and venues, I would agree. As more Bostonians add their favorite venues to BarBird, the app will become more and more valuable and I can definitely see it being one of my go-tos in determining where to go around the city.
As far as their overall vision, the founders shared:
“We want to make sure that just as the girl in Orange County finds a cheap happy hour near her work off of BarBird, the guy in Mumbai can also find the next spot for him and his friends to go off of BarBird. We hope that aside from providing a great entertainment deal-finder for residents within a city, BarBird will also provide travelers with a one-stop service to figure out where to go out in the city they’ve traveled to.”
In 2011 the company plans to shift resources toward product marketing, both through social media and in more traditional means. They are currently doing business development with venue owners, working on a dashboard for these venues to manage and measure how their deals and campaigns do on Twitter. The company also plans to rollout a mobile site and Android version of the service.
You can learn more about BarBird on their About page and blog, and make sure to follow them on Twitter for deals @BarBirdBos.
What do you think of BarBird’s service? How else do you find out about deals in Boston?
