DuckDuck Deal Blog

Josh Fraser, co-founder of EventVue, has joined the DuckDuck Deal team in the capacity of Technical Advisor. In this role Josh will advise the company on potentialities of DuckDuck 2.0 (iPhone/Android applications) as well as business development opportunities with other players in the real-time, geolocation spaces.

Josh was most recently cofounder of EventVue, a 2007 TechStars company. Before Eventvue, Josh founded Curio Solutions – a web design firm – after graduating from Clemson University with a degree in Computer Science.

We are enormously lucky to have someone of Josh’s caliber in an Advisor role as we position ourselves for substantial growth. His counsel will be invaluable as we round out the technical side of the company. And perhaps given his alma mater we’ve finally found someone in Boulder willing to bet against the Duke men’s basketball team

Our goal at DuckDuck is to give people as many opportunities as possible to see the deals available - including in our DuckDuck apps, our website, on Twitter, and on Facebook To further this goal, we are piloting a program in Boulder where we send one email with one or two deals out each day.

Is that like Groupon? Not really.  Yes, you are getting an email about deals, but the DuckDuck Daily Email tells you about a deal happening today.  For example, today's email featured 2 for 1 slices from Abo's on the Hill from 11 am to 3 pm today. So you're not buying a gift certificate to use some time in the next year, but instead we hope the DuckDuck Daily gives you an idea of how you might be able to save some dough that same day. If you're interested in getting emails, please submit your email here. Currently, we are only doing daily emails in Boulder.

We've been fortunate to have a couple articles featuring DuckDuck come out.  Most recently we were featured in a business profile in the Daily Camera (found here).

The Rocky Mountain Collegian also recently had an article about the DuckDuck action going down in Fort Collins (found here)

The Frugalista - a Colorado Daily columnist who focuses on ways to save - also gave us a nice little shout out here.

DuckDuck is now offering over 25 deals per day in Boulder. While the early morning is still sometimes a little light on DuckDuck , come 11 am when your stomach starts growling for lunch, you’ll see a wide variety of deals whether you’re looking to grab pizza, a sandwich or sushi. The bounty continues straight through happy hour and dinner into late night drink specials. Throughout the day we also have mix non-food and beverage related deals. We expect this number will continue to grow giving you even more flexibility in how you want to save money.

If you were am early DuckDuck user (thank you!), you may have noticed that almost all the deals were food and drink related. Here at DuckDuck were about filling immediate needs and since we all eat at least a couple time a day, food and drink deals are likely to always predominate. But we are branching out to other businesses.

Recently we have added several service providers – chiropractors, masseuses, stylists, and salons – to DuckDuck in Boulder. These providers are willing to offer some great discounts from $35 chiropractic adjustments to 40% of cut and color for new clients. These discounts are the perfect low-risk time to try a new hairstylist or get your first massage. Don’t stop checking DuckDuck when you want to get your eat or drink on but also check in if your looking to give yourself a little pampering.

We are excited that DuckDuck is now available on the Android.  Just like the iPhone App, our Android App is free.  We used MokiNetworks to do the conversion for us. They did a great job delivering on time and to expectations and we would recommend them to anyone looking to do a similar conversion.  They got a solid first version within two weeks and wrapped up the entire project with in three weeks.

Most of the heavy lifting for DuckDuck is on the server side, which made the conversion relatively simpler, but we were still impressed with the turnaround time.  Our Android app offers the same functionality as our iPhone app – with the exception of push notification.   The “equivalent” of iPhone push on the current Android is polling, but this would have required more time and cost that we decided to forego in our current version.

A couple screen shots of the new app are included below.