Maybe it’s because it was the Thursday night before the last summer Friday, but man, our Pop-up party was hopping last night. Good thing, too, because as soon as the first ten people checked in on Grouptabs, the bar started offering a free drink and appetizer for every drink and appetizer sold. Let’s just say, the libations were flowing. -

Not a bad way to kick off Labor Day Weekend!

Check out the full gallery at Guest of a Guest and tag yourself!

We’re extending 11th Street Bar’s $2 off everything happy hour.
Sip on a cocktail or enjoy their great selection of draft beers – over a dozen taps from perfectly poured Guinness pints to wonderfully hopped Stone IPAs.

Head over to GroupTabs now to create your account and RSVP for the deal. We’ll see you at 11th Street Bar!

Jump forward to three weeks ago. We’re nearly code complete on v1. We bug our friends with iPhones (3G, 3GS, 4), Blackberries (too many models to count), and Androids (running a few different flavors of the OS) to come play with the app. Out in the real world, two realities quickly emerge: Safari on iOS, and everything else. From getting basic things to work, to UI, to user experience, Android and Blackberry are a mess. Android works flawlessly one moment and the browser renders an absolute mess the next moment. BlackBerry is a bit more consistent – some things always work, and some things never work.

The other reality? iOS. UI elements render exactly the way we want them to. The browser handles all the AJAX crap we’re doing flawlessly. The browser prompts the user for GPS and returns it with the accuracy we want. Add the web-app to your home screen and our icon is downloaded, and automatically glossed up. The next time the user taps the icon, we’ve got the full screen, no browser chrome.

Safari on iOS, 3 or 4, is the best platform for building non-native mobile apps. In our minds there is no question, no qualification.

Perhaps our experience is unique, and relying on geo.js (a great project that isn’t yet at 1.0) is the cause of some of our pains. At the end of the day pulling the phone’s GPS is just one more thing that mobile Safari does flawlessly and the respective Android and Blackberry browsers do terribly.

Granted, we’re working with geolocation and a doing a lot of AJAX, but isn’t that point – to build native-like experiences? To be able to do things that you supposedly can only do natively?

Apple doesn’t deserve the crap they get about the App Store. They can make bizarre decisions. They censor things. They’re vague. Sometimes a public rant spurs them to action; sometimes it doesn’t. Developers live and die by their whims. But at the end of the day, you can go around the app store, because Safari on iOS is an awesome platform for building non-native apps.

So what’s the upshot of all of this, for our start-up? A frenzied series of code sprints to attempt to get native Blackberry and Android apps done in time for our public launch. An iPhone native app will come later.

*GroupTabs allows you to check in for group bar and restaurant deals. You check-in. Your friends check-in. Other GroupTabs members check-in. The deal tips. Everyone gets the deal.

The biggest promise location-based services offer for merchants is that they are going to bring in the pundits en masse. Location companies and brands have been experimenting with rewarding users with discounts and other special offers (like cutting the price of a coffee for the Foursquare “mayor” of a given coffee shop,). Now a new service called GroupTabs is taking on the challenge of turning check-ins into transactions.

GroupTabs describes itself as Groupon meets Foursquare. Meaning that it combines special deals (that Groupon is known for) with the check-in (as made popular by Foursquare). The biggest problem for location-based services these days is that they are rewarding people who already frequent a certain venue, be it a bar or a restaurant.

Head over to VentureBeat to read the entire article.
Don’t have a GroupTabs account? Join now!

The startup definitely has potential, and is launching next month in New York City, with plans for expansion in the near future.  The company seems to be taking things slowly, which is probably smart given the onslaught of new LBS apps and services that are launching everyday it seems.

Head over to Mobile Marketing Watch to read more.

Don’t forget to follow on Twitter: @GroupTabs.