Betabeat caught up with Ms. Yeoh to ask about plans for DealBurner. 

So CityPockets acquired Dealburner. Does that mean Jason Fertel is a CityPockets employee now?

Yes, he'll be our Director of Engineering--our 5th employee.

When did you start thinking Dealburner might make a good feature for CityPockets?

CityPockets has always had Dealburner in our product roadmap. In fact, the week he launched it, was the week we were supposed to build it! Naveen from Foursquare actually saw my demo for SXSW back in March and when we chatted, he actually hinted at this idea and encouraged us to build on top of their API... so we've had this in mind for a long time now. But we didn't manage to get to it with all the fundraising, relaunching of website, hiring, etc. until now.

Anyway so I thought, hey, why reinvent the wheel and compete against another start-up? I decided to meet up with Jason to see if our visions aligned and if he could potentially be a good fit as an employee at CityPockets... and not just an employee but someone who can help us drive the company forward. After meeting with him, I decided it's worth a shot given that it's so competitive these days to find a talented and good engineer. The fact that Jason had previously built an app and a company was a good enough indication that he has the startuppy spirit that we're looking for.

What's the timeline for integration?

We're working on something major right now but I promise you'll see it soon and we'll let Betabeat know!

Is Jason hoping to bring on his former employees from his original start-up?

Not yet but possibly in the near future. We always need great iPhone developers and mobile is going to be a core strategy for us going forward.

CityPockets and Dealburner both started working out of WeWork Labs. Is this a sign of an emerging WeWork mafia?

Yes, out of the five CityPockets employees now, four were previously WWL tenants (including Jin Kim who sat next to me and was my UI/UX consultant to redesign CityPockets before I hired her to be full time). Jin is now my Director of Product & Design and plays an instrumental role in driving CityPockets' product roadmap. She brings years of experience at PayPal & Ebay and is insanely talented.

Additionally, Scoop St. has come up with something new (new to us, at least--commenters?).

Meet Scoop St. Lottery, a fun way to earn more Scoop St. Bucks by snapping a picture of your receipt after you use your scoop. With Lottery, members now have the chance of winning Scoop St. credit every day - in a randomly drawn lottery announcement - just by sharing a picture of your receipt! Winners will get notified right inside the app. Not only that, but Scoop St. merchants will have the most transparent and vital information on Scoop St. customers in New York City.

We're seeing flash deals, crowd-sourced deals, a giant pool of money to turn customers into a salesforce, white label services so that brands can offer their own deals, and now a lottery as daily dealers try to differentiate themselves from the mob of Groupon clones. Daily dealers also have their own trade media as well as secondary market and aggregators. Eventually the entire economy is going to move into the dealosphere.

Groupon's Andrew Mason and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley at the Digital Life Design Conference. (flickr.com/photos/redpilotmedia)

A day after local mini-start-up Dealburner.com launched to alert users to flash discounts when they check in to a venue via SMS, it turns out Foursquare is rolling out its own instant deals with Groupon, starting in Chicago.

Foursquare announced it would be syndicating deals from Living Social, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, BuyWithMe and Zozi, surfacing them to users in the "explore" tab alongside merchant offers about two months ago--a hot source of revenue for the location-based start-up, which is still giving venue owners free advertising by letting them offer deals at no fee. It's a great deal for Foursquare, which gets a piece of the daily deal pie, and a good deal for advertisers, who are essentially paying for search ads as consumers using the "explore" feature are looking to make a decision about where to go. But Groupon was noticeably missing from the line-up.

Sounds like that was because Groupon's deals, which include real-time discounts as well as discounts redeemable in the future, were a bit more complicated to integrate.

So what does this mean for Dealburner? Founder Jason Fertel never got his meeting with Foursquare yesterday, although he and WeWork Labs co-founder Matt Shampine had an informal dialogue about technical questions. He says this feature from Foursquare is not a threat because Dealburner is aggregating from all deal providers, including the daily deal second market where users resell unused vouchers, and works with Foursquare as well as Facebook Places. And Foursquare is still yet to offer alerts to users when they check in somewhere that has a flash deal on--its partners are more worried about getting people into a venue than sucking up to the customers who are already there. Plus, Dealburner got mega-sign-ups yesterday, he said, and a pick-up from Chris Thompson at aboutFoursquare.

Mr. Fertel, founder of dealburner.com.

Freespeech was serving half a million texts a day. But in a crowded market of group texting apps, some of which have received millions of dollars in funding and hired fancy PR teams, the three-engineer start-up wasn't getting enough traction. About three weeks ago, former financial services coder-turned start-up entrepreneur Jason Fertel decided to throw in the towel. "It was hard to be seen amongst the 20 other applications that did the same thing," he said. "On top of that, with Apple and Google and whoever else about to jump in that ring, it just didn't make sense to continue with it."

Bummer, Mr. Fertel and his team were shooting around some ideas at the keg at WeWork Labs in Soho when WeWork manager Matt Shampine started complaining about he kept checking in to a certain establishment where Fourquare was offering a free margarita, unaware that Scoutmob was offering a more hefty discount of half-off everything.

"It would be awesome if when I check in I get a text with those Scoutmob deals," Mr. Fertel thought. He started building it right away, and a few days later dealburner.com took its first steps on the world wide web, serving up deals instantly to users who check in on Foursquare and Facebook Places.

The service launched formally five days ago, and Mr. Fertel is pumped. Betabeat caught him on the phone this afternoon and he's planning to meet later today with Foursquare, which could benefit from the added incentive to check in as well as the furthering of the concept of instant deals as a marketing mechanism. Foursquare just announced it will be serving deals directly from flash services like LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe, within Foursquare--which makes Dealburner seem like a stop-gap solution or potential competitor, depending on how you look at it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fertel wasn't able to bring along his Freespeech colleagues to the new start-up--yet. But he can imagine adding a lot of functionality to the simple concept of instant deals. In the big city, there's enough inventory to build out a simple real-time map of instant deals, for example. "I'll probably bring them on eventually," he said of his former co-founders. In the meantime, he's going to keep building out the product and scouting a bit for investors on the side. "I like to build," he said. "I like to make products. And I want to continue building this." He sounded pleased.