It’s Kind Of A Big Deal: On Friday, April 23rd, Cherry Deals Gives Away 100 $10 Coupons for Treats at Loving Cup!

As citizens of The Foodie Mecca of the west, San Franciscans know exactly how to please their palate and still retain their famously trim figures.  Thankfully, SF is not all about the belly, we have hearts too.  With delicious flavors that inspire your taste buds, and the ethical practice of using local, sustainable and organic desserts, Loving Cup encompasses the very heart, gut and soul of San Francisco.

On Friday at 9Am, Cherry Deals is excited to give away the first 100 of our Cherry Deal coupons for $10 worth of deliciously healthy treats at Loving Cup!  This is a great deal steal to buy for you and a loved one.  Tell your entire office, post it on Facebook and Twitter!  Cherry Deals already brings consumers great deals at 50% or greater discount.  With the chance to win this FREE Cherry Deal, your Friday just got even better!

With local, organic choice selections of frozen yogurt, espresso, smoothies, cupcakes, fresh hot apple cider, and the best rice pudding in SF  Loving Cup will truly put love into your cup.  With our great deals, we put money back in your wallet.  It’s a Win for everybody!

Loving Cup is located on 2356 Polk St, between Green St & Union St. Check out their glowing reviews here.

Cherry Deals, Capitol Records, and Vanguard Records Offer Pre-Release Sales of Kimberly Caldwell’s “Without Regret” Today

Partnership with pop icon, Capitol Records, and Vanguard Records will offer autographed pre-release CDs at 60% discount through March 26.

SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 23, 2010: Peanut Labs’ Cherry Deals, the only social buying club and monetization platform that allows shoppers to buy exclusive deals at discounts over 50%, today announced a pre-release deal on autographed copies of Kimberly Caldwell’s Without Regret.

Kimberly Caldwell is perhaps best known as a second-season contestant on television phenomenon American Idol, and as an entertainment correspondent and host of various television programs. Following the success of two singles, 2008’s “Fear of Flying” and “Gave Yourself Away,” Caldwell’s debut album Without Regret is scheduled to hit stores on April 6. Autographed copies of the CD are available March 23–26 on CherryDeals.com and through the Cherry Deals section of leading online applications, games, and social networks including Facebook. The autographed CD will sell for $20 — a 60% discount off its $50 retail value.

“We’re so excited by Kimberly’s gutsy vocals, passionate performances, and earthy charisma,” said Noman Ali, Peanut Labs’ co-founder. “Now, her fans can get this CD two weeks early at an incredible discount.”

Cherry Deals will use its existing partnerships with over 200 online publishers, games, and social networks to distribute Without Regret to tens of millions of users. The album deal is a chance for music fans to discover the deep discounts available through Cherry Deals’ social buying platform.

Every day, discounts like Caldwell’s are available to users of online applications and social games as a way to earn credits & virtual goods, and to the general public on CherryDeals.com. Cherry Deals subscribers also can share promotions with their family & friends using social tools like Facebook & Twitter. By guaranteeing a large number of new customers & fans as well as attractive deals at discounts that exceed 50%, Peanut Labs’ Cherry Deals creates unbeatable value for both businesses and consumers.

About Cherry Deals

Peanut Labs’ Cherry Deals enables local and national new businesses to reach new customers through its exclusive social buying club by featuring daily deals on exciting things to do, see, eat, and buy in major cities across the U.S. With plans to expand internationally throughout 2010, Cherry Deals already has grown to a base of over 80 million online users.

For more information, visit www.cherrydeals.com, and follow @ cherrydeals on Twitter.

About Peanut Labs

Peanut Labs is a social monetization company that helps publishers maximize their earning potential via virtual goods and currencies offered through a mix of discount deals, market research surveys, global payments, and offers.

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with offices in Seattle and New York, the company currently manages monetization for more than 110 million monthly website visitors. The company has won numerous awards, including the FAST Top 50 2008 ranking and the Advertising Research Foundation’s 2008 Silver Innovation Award. To learn more, visit www.peanutlabs.com.

Contact

For Peanut Labs

Jonathan E Cowperthwait

jonathanc@spiralgroup.com

415-869-8579 x.712

Join Peanut Labs For Speakeasy, 2010′s Biggest GDC Afterparty!

At Peanut Labs, when we’re not hatching game-changing strategies that shakes up the monetization platform, we are busy getting DOWN.  It’s our way of staying sane, ya know?

And part of what keeps us sane is our wonderful partners, clients, colleagues and friends (even the ones who still owe us money, grrr!) whom we have the utmost pleasure to work with and meet through it all. We love to mix business and pleasure, so we want YOU to join us at The Metreon’s City View for the biggest, best, and zaniest GDC after party! Ever.

So whatdyasay, ha?  We wanna see all your beautiful, bright, shiny faces at, quite possibly, one of the speakeasiest parties of the year.  Bring your fedoras and feathers, and hold on tight for a rollicking good time!

Social Times Talks Cherry Deals, Too!

Peanut Labs Media Introduces Cherry Deals Discounts

Posted by Neil Vidyarthi on February 18th, 2010 1:10 PM

Peanut Labs Media is announcing Cherry Deals Daily Discounts, where social gamers can earn virtual currencies by purchasing local goods and services at discounts of 50% and up.  The idea is a great evolution of the offers and tasks service that Peanut Labs has offered for years, and the relevance of the offers mean that the service is good for all parts of the social games virtual goods value chain.  Retailers’ product offers are shown to users who have a higher likelihood of purchasing, users are presented with huge discounts, and the game makers themselves facilitate a higher number of virtual good transactions.

The service is  updated with new deals daily, and by using players’ IP addresses, the deals are targeted to players in specific areas.  Peanut Labs has 200 publishers who are working with them on Cherry Deals, so there will be a variety of games that display the new deals, and a lot of users.  Peanut Labs will be sure to let us know about the success of the program in the months to come.

Some examples of Cherry Deals daily discounts include $40 worth of groceries at a national grocery store chain for $20, $14 movie tickets for $7, and a $200 health club membership for $99. In each example, users receive the discount and virtual currency immediately, and the game publisher receives payment from Peanut Labs.  If you were perceiving a similarity between this and Groupon, the similarity ends here, as there is no minimum required signup by a group to actually claim the prize and coupon. Another similar service is LivingSocial daily deals, where a big element is that if a deal consumer gets three other people to take the deal, the first consumer gets it free.  The intelligent move by Peanut Labs is to bring this entire model to the social gaming world, which makes its service quite different.

The press release discusses the merchants who will be participating in the program:

The Cherry Deals program culminates an effort by Peanut Labs Media to secure participation from over 2,500 local merchants in major metropolitan areas, as well as nationwide discounts for users elsewhere in the United States. Nationwide partners include Zoe Clutch and Crazy Dog T-Shirts. Local examples include ROBB Salon and Dry Clean Express in Los Angeles and Z Cioccolato and Mission Minis in San Francisco. A team of Peanut Labs Media representatives directly secures each deal.

Some of the bigger names to sign up with Cherry Deals are RockYou, who will be integrating Cherry  Deals into its Monetization Platform products, and TheBroth, who will be integrating the service into their games.

Inside Facebook Talks Cherry Deals

Peanut Labs Brings Local Coupons to Virtual Goods Monetization with Cherry Deals

February 16th, 2010

By Eric Eldon

Peanut Labs is best known for providing surveys and offers to social application developers and other companies that use virtual currencies. But the San Francisco company will be launching a new service later this week that moves it into a new market. It will begin running local advertising coupons within its offers, letting people earn discounts on food, merchandise and other local real-life goods while also earning virtual currency to use within their favorite games.

The service, launching later this week on apps from RockYou and TheBroth, will show users local ads based on their IP addresses. To gain the offer, a user clicks and goes to a separate page — under a new brand, called Cherry Deals — purchases the item at the discount, then receives the currency. The sample discounts today come from businesses including a cupcake company, a hand-bag maker and a tax firm.

As with many other discounted online deals, Cherry Deals typically expire in a day or so, meaning users who see a deal they like will need to act fast.

Peanut Labs cofounder Ali Moiz tells us that the company has so far been business-facing, plugging its monetization services in with other monetization companies and developers; the Cherry Deals brand is what it is now pushing to consumers

The way these deals works is not new, conceptually. Peanut Labs had a staff of 20 salespeople hitting the streets of 6 cities over the past 5 months, negotiating deep group discounts at local businesses and guaranteeing the low rates in exchange for bringing each client lots of customers. This is similar to how offline coupon book companies have offered discounts for decades; the same group-discount mechanism is how big European e-commerce companies like vente-privee.com, and US ones like Gilt Groupe. Companies that offer online group discounts for local businesses include Groupon and LivingSocial, both of whom are also active on Facebook.

But for Peanut Labs, this is about providing another way to monetize virtual currency through its existing service, rather than trying to take on other types of coupon companies. The 200 other companies that it works with will be getting Cherry Deals in the next week or so, Moiz says, from online gaming sites to dating to blogs. In his view, this is about raising the quality of offer-driven monetization for developers — some users may be finding value in its surveys and offers, but it’s likely that more of them will appreciate getting big discounts at local places they might be shopping at anyway.

While Moiz isn’t sharing any details about revenue potential, he says the percentage payout to developers will be the same as what it already has with surveys and offers. However, he adds, these coupons can be four times as lucrative as current offers. The first cities to get the service include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York, with expansion to Canada and the United Kingdom coming later this year.

Zooming out, Moiz says his company is working on 3 to 4 more new ways of monetizing virtual currency, beyond surveys, offers and the new local coupons. This is part of an industry trend. We’re seeing a wide variety of virtual goods monetization companies exploring new ways of bringing in more money, from big-brand offers to pre-paid cards to online work.

TechCrunch Talks Cherry Deals

by Leena Rao on Feb 16, 2010

We recently wrote about 8Coupons and Yipit, which both aggregate Groupon-like deals. Today, Peanut Labs is launching a different twists to the crowdsourced local deal; the startup is allowing users to earn virtual currencies by buying local goods and services at huge discounts, called Cherry Deals.

So when playing a game on Facebook, a user will see the option of earning points for the game is they buy a Groupon-like deal. Cherry Deals uses your IP address to figure out where you are, and then serves up both national and local deals. Once you click on a deal, you can pay with your credit card within Facebook and you will receive the virtual currency in your gaming account. Cherry Deals will also serve as a standalone Facebook app. For now all the deals are U.S. based but Cherry Deals plans to expand to the U.K. and Canada by the end of this year.

The interface looks and feels just like Groupon, except that it is placed within Facebook. Ali Moiz, co-founder of Peanut Labs, says that they “felt no need to reinvent the wheel” in terms of design and the model. And Peanut Labs has already struck a few major deals for games to include the offers. Cherry Deals will be included in Facebook games produced by RockYou and TheBroth.

Cherry Deals is a solid idea because of a few reasons. First, the Groupon-model allows for higher margins than simply referring customers to retailers. Second, game publishers and developers already have a base of users that will be viewing the deals, so Peanut Labs doesn’t have to worry about recruiting traffc to its deals. That being said, we’ve seen the popularity of the collective buying deals on the web so it should be interesting to see how Cherry Deals performs with consumers on Facebook.

Disclosure: My husband, Suneel Gupta, is an employee of Groupon.

Venture Beat talks Cherry Deals!

Virtual goods, whether you’re buying raspberries for your Farmville or any number of equivalent purchases, are a gigantic and growing source of revenue for companies trying to make money on Facebook and other social gaming sites.

Taking full advantage, Peanut Labs Media, a company helping social and massively multiplayer game companies monetize, just launched Cherry Deals, to make buying virtual goods a little easier and a little more rewarding. Peanut Labs combines a few elements of Groupon, shades of Foursquare, and a big heap of social gaming to create a way for the worlds of virtual and physical goods to meet, in a way that benefits all parties.

It works like this: Every day, within games from the 200 publishers Peanut Labs is partnering with, players will be given a deal in a local store or service — Cherry Deals uses your IP to figure out where you are, and tailors the deals locally. The deals all offer more than 50% off of something, whether it’s cupcakes or a massage or something else entirely. Like Groupon, you can buy the coupon on the day it’s available, and then use it whenever you want.

Cherry Deals has a standalone Facebook application, which seems to compete pretty directly with Groupon, but its integration within social games is what makes it special. Gamers can buy the deal from directly within the game they’re playing. And in addition to getting the real-world coupon, gamers automatically receive virtual game credits as part of the transaction, which can be used to buy virtual goods in the game itself.

For users, this means that their money is working double, getting them both a great deal at a local store and the virtual good they’d be buying anyway. For publishers and advertisers, the possibilities are even better: publishers get higher margins and more revenue, taking a cut of every coupon sold, while local companies get to put their product in front of huge numbers of social gamers. Peanut Labs claims its partners have 80 million players between them, with over 50 million transactions happening each month, which is a huge audience for any company wanting to offer a deal.

Groupon has proven to be a huge player in the local space, and Cherry Deals, without changing a lot about the model, wants to take advantage. Offering the “daily deals you can use whenever” has been great for Groupon and great for the businesses that participate. By integrating the same idea into Facebook and into social gaming, Peanut Labs could be in a position to bring the model to a whole new group of people, giving virtual goods some real-world value. Not to mention the progress it might make in getting gamers like me to go outside once in a while.

Cherry Deals is US-only for now, but Peanut Labs plans to extend it internationally soon. The company is located in San Francisco and raised $3.2 million in funding in 2008.

Life With a Cherry On Top

Imagine if you will, a simpler time. It’s the 1950’s. American servicemen have returned home from the wars and are settling into a world of pastel colored homes with appliances and cars to match. Families are reunited and babies are born, lots of babies. So many babies, the phrase “baby boomers” is coined.

This is a time steeped in tradition, yet change and excitement blows in the breeze. Rock ‘n Roll is born, delighting teenagers and horrifying parents everywhere. A family that a few short years ago congregated to listen to the radio, now gathers in front of the newly invented television while eating dinner on TV trays.

During this time people aren’t buying things to change them, trade them, or dispose of them. A respect for permanence and commitment is the zeitgeist of the era. Goods and services are expected to be high quality and in pristine condition. In the unlikely event that something breaks, a fix-it shop is not far away. Vacuum cleaners, televisions, or even toasters are repaired, not thrown out, when they break.

The word “cherry,” which we used in the ‘50’s to describe anything that was beautiful and of high caliber, epitomizes this spirit. It’s no accident that we chose “cherry” to describe the amazing deals we are offering to buyers.

Cherry Deals partners solely with preeminent businesses to offer consumers superior values reminiscent of a simpler time. With our commitment and yours, together we will pave the road to long-lasting relationships with your customers.

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