Say you are out to combine an errand with lunch and your budget is being hit hard by holiday spending. Is there a restaurant nearby, you wonder, offering any coupon deals? And, because there?s more holiday shopping to be done, are there deals on clothing in the area?
Given that situation, would it be helpful to hear about personalized deals in real-time from businesses you are driving by?
Now, Valpak, a direct marketer of coupons, has linked up with the start-up company Roximity to deliver Valpak?s coupon deals directly to a car.
Those Valpak offers can be downloaded by only owners of Ford and Lincoln automobiles that have the Sync AppLink, which covers about one million vehicles, according to Ford. But Roximity is testing its system with Honda and Subaru, Daniel Newman, Roximity co-founder and chief executive, wrote in an e-mail.
Ford?s Sync AppLink, a feature of Sync since 2011, allows certain smartphone apps to communicate with the car and drivers to use voice commands and steering-wheel controls to work the apps, Alan Hall, Ford?s technology communications manager, said in a telephone interview.
Just like Sync, the idea is to let drivers access content from smartphone apps without the need to pick up the phone, take their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, he said.
In August, Ford joined with Roximity so that Ford and Lincoln owners with Sync AppLink could receive alerts to nearby deals and specials while driving. Roximity won Ford?s Sync app developer challenge held in the summer of 2011.
As of Tuesday, Valpak coupons, which usually arrive in the mail, will be available to users. Deals are delivered based on a user?s preferences and their proximity to various retail locations in such categories as restaurants, food and grocery, spa and salon services, bar and club, health and fitness, and women?s and men?s clothing.
Drivers can use the hands-free, interactive voice commands to choose a specific category and then send the deal to their smartphones, which they then present to the business offering it.
While a vehicle is on the move, the driver gets the alerts for the deals only when actively searching for them using voice commands, Mr. Newman said in response to a question about safety and annoyance issues.
When the Roximity app is connected to the Sync AppLink, it cannot alert ? or push deals ? automatically using texts blasts, for example.
?When using the app outside of the car, users can set it to provide automatic push notifications,? Mr. Hall wrote in an e-mail. ?But those will not work inside of the car when connected to AppLink.?
In response to a question about where drivers? attention will be while using these apps, despite having their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, Mr. Hall and Mr. Newman each said it?s no more distracting than many of the other activities drivers engage in, like talking on a mobile phone or to a passenger in the car.
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