In its latest social spending salvo, American Express has launched a mobile offer engine, a “spend graph”  for U.S. cardmembers that recommends and ranks local merchant offers real-time based on spending history and location.

“We developed our mobile offer engine with three key points of differentiation in mind: relevance, convenience and value,” stated Josh Silverman, president of the U.S. Consumer Services Group at American Express. 

Piloted via the "My Offers" feature on the American Express iPhone app, local offer recommendations will be concentrated in Los Angeles and New York City with an overlay of nationwide merchants such as Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts.  

“My Offers” leverages the Smart Offer technology that powers the company's card sync programs with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare connecting merchants and Cardmembers.

"In an increasingly crowded marketplace, where consumers are bombarded with daily deals, we saw an opportunity to help our Cardmembers save time as well as money by curating meaningful offers for them," added Silverman.

Users can download or update the iPhone app to see "Offers Available for You," along with a dashboard that shows offers added to their card, expiration dates, and savings delivered via a statement credit within three to five days. The brand has also enhanced its Go Social entry tool for SMB’s.Continue reading...

Long associated with engagement and wedding rings, diamonds may be a girl's best friend. But De Beers, the brand name most closely associated with the coveted stone, aims to make diamonds a retailer's best friend too, with its new iPhone/iPad app.

The De Beers Bridal App allows consumers to review a complete collection of wedding day jewelry, choose an engagement ring and matching wedding band, view videos to get expert information on how to choose diamonds, and go behind the scenes of De Beers' diamond selection, design, and craftsmanship. Leveraging the power of social media, the app encourages the consumer to select their favorites and share them with friends. The consumer can also sign up to receive emails from De Beers.

In a nice touch that will keep retailers happy, the app also offers up the retail locations closest to the user who sell De Beers jewelry and enables the consumer to make an appointment as well as locate the retailer on a map. While the consumer can "arrange a viewing" on the De Beers website, store locations are limited to a few major retailers in key cities.Continue reading...

As the Windows team blog puts it, "Nothing takes the fun out of a foreign vacation faster than an afternoon spent deciphering street signs or pointing randomly at menus." That's why Microsoft has released a new version of Bing's free Translator app for Windows Phone, one that you just point at the foreign-language text on (say) a menu or sign, scan the text and get a translation overlaid on the image in your preferred language, all thanks to augmented reality.

The pitch: "Now you can point your phone camera at printed text—street sign, dinner menu, train schedule, newspaper headline—and the app will translate it. If (you) wanted to ask a stranger for directions to the Eiffel Tower, (you)could also just speak into the phone in English—and wait a moment for the French." It's like “automatic subtitles for everyday life,” as Bing puts it. So should Siri worry?Continue reading...

“Waiting for a mate to pay you back? Let the boy sort it out for you,” is a humorous push by Barclays for Pingit, the person-to-person mobile service for sending and receiving money for free, to anyone with a UK current account and UK mobile phone number.

The TV commercial, promoting the Barclays Facebook-hosted Pingit app, features a menacing child aggressively asking an adult office worker to repay a pizza debt using the Pingit app. The promotion lets users send custom versions of the video to friends who owe them money, encouraging them to settle via Pingit.Continue reading...

The timeRAZOR app was a big hit at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin last month as the self-branded answer to the classic SXSWi syndrome of FOMO (acronym alert: "fear of missing out"). The geo-social app, with its "never-miss-out platform" is described as “the final solution to browsing, locating, and attending events for users on a nationwide platform.”

Today (apparently) being Beauty Day (happy Beauty Day!), L’Oreal Vichy, DUANEreade and timeRAZOR are teaming up with Vichy beauty advisors at ten Duane Reade drugstores in Manhattan to offer one-on-one skin analysis.

"The Distillery," timeRAZOR’s event selection engine, aggregates over 300,000 events daily, geo-tags them, then customizes the data by user preference. Leveraging people’s attraction to “exclusive” experiences, the app offers specials and limited-quantity promotions that can be used or cashed in from a user’s location.Continue reading...

It’s nothing new to order pizza on the phone, online or via an app, but now there’s the ultimate 'pizza emergency button.' A pizza-lover’s dream come true, just push a magnet on your fridge to have your custom pizza ordered and delivered to your door.

It only works in Dubai, alas, where Red Tomato Pizza has designed a tech-savvy fridge magnet, which uses a Bluetooth chip connected to your smartphone to transmit a preprogrammed pizza order directly to the restaurant.

If you choose a different pie, the app lets you swap your regular sausage and pepperoni with onions for whatever suits your palette that moment. Orders received get an SMS confirmation. Talk about a slice of heaven. [via PSFK]

For Harry Potter fans, King's Cross is where one boards the train for Hogwarts at "Platform 9 3⁄4."

For The Guardian's new media mavens, it's the setting for King’s Cross, London – Streetstories, an immersive app featuring an audio guide about the historic area which automatically activates sounds, music and stories relevant to your GPS location.

The free mobile app, available for iPhone and Android devices, launches with ten stories, while Streetstories Extra (available on iOS) has more than 70 stories and two hours of audio material downloadable via Wi-Fi.Continue reading...

The United States Postal Service is in the midst of massive layoffs and soul-searching about its future, as it looks to cut 35,000 jobs as a way of dealing with its $18.2 billion annual loss, but it's still trying to innovate in a digital era when hand-delivered mail seems quaint.

The U.S. Postal Service has just launched a new mobile application for iPhone users that lets the device's camera scan barcodes on shipping labels for "quick, easy and convenient tracking of their packages and other mail. The application stores the label numbers so customers can easily recheck the status of their shipments. The scanner function is available on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2."Continue reading...