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Amazon Local deal service: Soon on mobile

Amazon recently launched their AmazonLocal deals service in a handful of US cities.  The service is a lot like GroupOn and other deals services - users subscribe to deals in a particular area, and receive electronic vouchers in their e-mail inbox each day.  This area has been getting a lot of attention, including the Google Offers service and Google's recent acquisiton of DealMap, leading up to GroupOn's expected IPO.

This new deals service is a natural for Amazon, who is already a top trusted name in consumer on-line purchasing.  Most people do a lot more purchasing through Amazon than through Google or any other big player.

Amazon appears to have big plans for Amazon Local.  They're busy hiring mobile developers for their Amazon Local team, clearly building a mobile app and infrastructure for a phone-based Amazon Local experience.  They're targeting iOS and Android platforms, as well as a mobile web version.  They're using their Amazon Web services system on the server side, and a variety of development technologies including service oriented architectures, Spring, Hibernate, Memcached, RPC, Ruby, Rails, as well as HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

The race is on to see who can bring us deals in a truly usable and effective way.....

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