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Location-based media company JiWire reports seeing increases in the sharing of and the demand for local deals, like those offered by Groupon, LivingSocial and others, since last quarter. According to data from a recent survey, sharing of deals has increased by 21% and demand is up 20% from Q1 2011.

In addition, only 8% never buy local deals, up from 28% who said they never buy them just a few months ago.

American Express' new digital payments and commerce platform Serve has just announced its first carrier deal since its launch in March of this year. The company's new partnership with U.S. operator Sprint will allow Serve's mobile wallet application to be made available in the Sprint Zone for customers using select Android phones.

Groupon drives disloyalty, says Geoff Lewis, CEO of TopGuest. "Deep discounting is not a sustainable customer retention strategy for the long term," he explains. With his company's new program TopGuest Apex, the goal is to do the opposite of Groupon: instead driving large groups of new customers to a merchant, create personalized loyalty programs that reward customers for repeat visits to their favorite merchants.

Until now, TopGuest's business model involved awarding points (e.g. hotel points and other travel rewards) for checking in at one of the company's 15,000 partner places, mainly hotels and airports. But TopGuest Apex will reward users with points for checking in to their favorite local businesses.

Hilton HHonors points for going to the gym and Starbucks? Exactly.

The recently launched digital payment and commerce platform from American Express known as Serve has just announced a new partnership with Patch, AOL's big bet on hyperlocal news and content. Under the new partnership, Serve will power the Patch Deals platform, which will now offer Patch users deals and discounts, Groupon-style, with local merchants on the American Express network.

The point-of-sale device manufacturer Ingenico has confirmed that it is working with Google on the development of near-field communication services for retailers. The company CEO Philippe Lazare told the French news agency AFP that it was working with Google to help deliver coupons that could be delivered to customers while they're shopping in retail stores.

"Google wants a system where, when you enter a shop or supermarket, for example, you receive a special offer on your phone," explains Lazare. At checkout, customers would be able to touch their phones to the Ingenico POS terminal, which would be able to read the coupon and adjust the bill accordingly.

Visa is launching its own version of the location-based discount, in a move that rivals Facebook Places Deals, Foursquare and other mobile social networks hoping to capitalize on a shopper's physical presence in order to offer them bargains. But in Visa's case, no "checkin" is required. In fact, neither is a smartphone.

Instead, the credit card company is experimenting with SMS text messages containing offers which are sent users who opt-in to the new program. In its initial phase, clothing retailer The Gap is Visa's only partner. Discounts are sent to consumers in predefined zip codes and demographics after qualifying transactions are made with their Visa cards.

Microsoft is joining the coupon craze popularized by sites like Groupon and LivingSocial with the launch of a new service called Bing Deals. The program is not an in-house creation built from scratch, but is being made available through a partnership between Microsoft and The Dealmap, a deal-tracking service that aggregates local deals, coupons and discounts from over 300 different sources and daily deal websites.

Bing Deals will work both on the desktop and mobile (via m.bing.com) and is also heavily integrated into Bing's search engine itself.

Have you ever arrived at your local grocery store only to realize that you had left your trusted stash of carefully clipped and saved coupons at home? That may no longer be an issue with today's launch of geo-targeted mobile grocery coupons that work with mobile application Cellfire's network of 5,000 grocery stores here in the U.S.

Now, instead of browsing through the newspaper for coupons to clip, you can opt to receive a real-time alert on your mobile device of the coupons available to you, as you enter the grocery store itself.

Local search and business review service Yelp is offering a sneak peak today of a new feature it is calling "Yelp Deals".

The new feature will enter Yelp into a growing market of local-deal providers, with companies like Groupon and LivingSocial, by offering deals to what Yelp users spend most of their time looking for - local businesses.

A new mobile marketing survey from Harris Interactive says that the demographic group most interested in receiving mobile advertising is mobile owners with children. This group is interested in receiving opt-in alerts from brands, says the study, and the adults in households with children are also generally more "promotionally active" than others, meaning more likely to take part in marketing promotions like couponing, discounts and daily deals

Those with children under 6-years old were the most receptive to this form of advertising, with 35% in favor of opt-in alerts that arrived via their mobile phone.