Cell phone coupons, websites proliferate

By Jerri Stroud

Starting next month, St. Louis cell phone users can get a free Hardees Chili Cheese Thickburger or breakfast burrito when they buy another and redeem a coupon on their phones.

The offer is the first by a fast-food restaurant on a service called Cellfire, developed by Brent Dusing, an entrepreneur from Missouri who grew up in Poplar Bluff and Springfield. To get the free items, customers show the coupon image on their phones to cashiers.

Cellfire is among a growing number of applications that use the data capabilities built into the phone. They range from music, games and mobile television to programs that use Global Positioning System navigation to find the closest gas station with the cheapest gas.

Dusing said Cellfire builds on the idea that a cell phone is like a tiny computer that people carry wherever they go. Customers who opt in to Cellfire download an application and receive offers based on their location or interests.

"Our thinking was along the lines of, 'People like to save money, but they don't like to carry around pieces of paper,'" he said. Cellfire allows customers to opt in to offers they'd like to use that are available nearby.

In a similar vein, Yellowpages.com, an AT&T company, just launched a "send-to-mobile" feature that allows customers to look up businesses on its website and send their numbers to a cell phone for use on the go. The numbers are sent as text messages that customers can scroll through as needed.

Google, Yahoo and MySpace have launched mobile versions of their websites. To keep up, some mobile Web companies have launched Internet versions of applications developed for phones.

Lee Hancock, chief executive of Go2 of Irvine, Calif., said his company has been providing directions, local listings and other information through cell phones for years, but now will have an Internet presence.

More than a million people use Go2 every month to find restaurants, apartments, movie theaters, stores and even golf courses, Hancock said. Go2 sites like Go2Golf get about 20 million page views per month.

Go2 services on phones are free because they're supported by advertisers, who pay to get priority for their listings. Hancock said customers don't seem to mind the ads if they're getting the information they're seeking.

AlphaTrade.com, based on Vancouver, British Columbia, an online supplier of stock quotes, recently began a daily mobile phone contest for predicting the closing of the Dow Jones industrial average, said Penny Perfect, the company's president.

Customers send a text message with their guess every day before 1 p.m. Each guess costs 99 cents, and entrants have a chance to win $2,000.

Perfect said the point of the game is to stimulate interest in the stock market. "We're all about making [the financial business] more interesting and more fun," she said.