First off if you are wondering about the name, it is because the site was originally intended to be a great deals/coupons for physical products site. This was what I self Proposed as my Final Year Project.

“Title: NEARDEALS - Local Coupon & Deals Search via Mobile Interface

A location based service for searching coupons and deals nearby to a current or pre-determined location.

Local Coupons provides an easy way to search for coupons and great deals. Coupon inventory and deals are indexed from the internet, socially contributed by users or sponsored by merchants.

Coupons and restaurants can be socially reviewed and rated by users via their phone or web interface.”

After thinking it through, I realise that location is actually not the hard part. The hard part is getting the data. Like a blog, a site without fresh content is next to useless. So I decide to get data the easiest way possible and that is by linking to content instead. Given that I am also interested in Location based Services since my first startup(Tagxe.com, a taxi ridesharing site, which closed because we couldn’t hit critical mass), I decided that I wanted to help surface content that was closer and more relevant to the user.

The immediate problem that I could see was that on a social news voting site, everyone saw the aggregate wisdom of the crowd. This could be good but if you ever tried posting a Singapore-focused article on Digg, it will nvr get to the front page. So neardeals is trying to counter that by providing many views for many people. Right now it is still location based view which means depending on where you are, you see a different set of news stories. In the future, I would expect everyone to see a different set of stories depending on his demographic, interest,location etc.

It is still very early beta  for neardeals so i welcome any feedback for the future development of neardeals.com.