For anyone who has been accused by a spouse of too much impulse buying, stop reading. Or, read on, and continue your guilty pleasure with someone to blame.
Ping4 Inc. in Nashua takes impulse buying to a whole new level with Ping4Deals-a mobile app that will let major retail and restaurant chains alert people to sales and deals through their smartphones when they get within a certain range of the store.
Once people download the Ping4Deals app, they can choose a radius of up to 25 miles and the types of deals they are interested in from Ping4Deals merchants. When the person is close to a store offering a deal, their smartphone will automatically wake up and provide details, including a list of stores ranked by distance, and directions. People who don't have smartphones but have a mobile device with a browser can access deals from any public Wi-Fi network by typing X.ping4.com.
Merchants can manage promotions from the corporate office or from a local store. For example, if a coffee shop has too many muffins, it can broadcast a special deal. You can run a promo in the morning to promote afternoon snacks to drive business during [slow times], says CEO Jim Bender, who joined the company after an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in NH's Republican Primary in 2010. He was invited by three friends to launch Ping4. Two partners worked with him previously at Logicraft, a Nashua-based network server company.
Ping4Deals' sweet spot is national and international chains with 10,000 or more locations, but it can also be used by smaller retailers. In addition to global retailers, Ping4Deals is being marketed to mall owners as well as hotel chains, gas stations, stadiums and sports arenas.
It is now in trials with large regional companies, and is entering into reseller agreements with two NH companies-Cellular Specialties and Single Digits, both in Manchester-to make the app available to their customers.
Ping4 is offering a free license in 2011 for any global retailer to try it. It will charge retailers $100 to $1,000 per store per year to use the app beginning in 2012. The app is free for the public to download and is available for Apple devices. The company plans to have it on Droid. It is also available for devices with a browser.
With the scale of the customer base Ping4 Inc. is targeting, one chain alone could bring the company $6 million in revenue. If we get five or six chains, we'd already be a $20 to $25 million company, Bender says. Within two years, we plan to have millions of users and dozens of global retailers, Bender says. We want to become ubiquitous.
The company has more than 30 employees, including 20 engineers and nine people for sales and marketing. It is also developing Ping4Fun, a social networking application that allows anyone in a Wi-Fi area to talk to one another, and Ping4Good, which would allow people and the government to communicate during emergencies using Wi-Fi.
For more information, visit www.ping4.com.
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