ReadWriteWeb

AT&T has announced ShopAlerts, a new location-based service featuring ads and coupons from major retailers which are sent directly to subscribers' mobile phones. Initially, the service will be available in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco with sponsors including HP, Kmart, JetBlue, SC Johnson, Kibbles 'n Bits, Nature's Recipe and the National Milk Mustache "got milk?" Campaign.

What makes this new, opt-in service unique is that the alerts are only sent to users' devices when they are near a participating store or brand.

It can be the bane of a SysAdmin or software engineer's world: those late night notices that a server's crashed, that a key process is suddenly returning critical errors. Even worse, arguably, is a lack of notifications. Then you get in to work on Monday to find that the person on call "didn't get the message" and things have been broken since 5:01 Friday night.

PagerDuty, a Y-Combinator funded startup, offers a service that collects alerts from your various monitoring tools and makes sure the right person is notified if there's a problem.

As ever more data flows onto the Web, we need tools to track changes in that data and alert us to new data that we're interested in. Examples of data that can be tracked include shopping deals, places, companies, home prices, sports scores, local events, even crime reports! Add to that emerging Internet of Things sources such as sensor data, RFID tags, proximity, and more.

Last week we listed and categorized some of the leading topic-tracking tools on the Web (see also the follow-up post). The tools we listed were geared towards tracking news or media information on the Web. In this post, we look at a leading service that tracks more discrete, faster changing types of data.

Particls, the one-time RSS feed organizer and alerting service, has today launched a new project they're calling "Particls Fountain." Although it's hinted that the service will eventually do much more, today its goal is simple. Particls Fountain will function as a replacement for the long-gone Twitter Track feature that once allowed you to follow topics of interest by keyword.

In the past, we've looked at alerts service like Yotify and Alerts.com, and they each do a decent enough job of being your personalized web scout. But recently, we were introduced to Trackle, a new service in the same genre. At first, we'll admit, our reaction to hearing there was yet another alerts service available was one of apathy - there are already plenty out there, including the old standby, Google Alerts - who needs another? As it turn out, Trackle was the one we were waiting for. After playing around with Trackle, it was clear that this one could be a winner.

From branchnext, the same company that delivered the personal web scout service Yotify (our coverage), there comes a new B2B alerts service called LetMeKnow. As with Yotify, LetMeKnow lets you track any number of changes that happen on the web - from price changes to new blog posts or comments and much more. However, unlike Yotify's consumer-facing service, LetMeKnow is designed for use by web publishers instead.