Calgary’s Poynt flies on “Mobile Groupon” Buzz

Many Canadians are already familiar with Poynt, the location based app from the eponymous Calgary tech company, which was known formerly to investors as Multiplied Media Corp.

Poynt is a free local search service that has proven useful to nearly five million people worldwide in finding a restaurant, gas station or movie theater. But for the company’s investors the success of the app has, to date, delivered little in the way of revenue to the bottom line. The company is currently enlisting 15,000 new users a day for the service, which comes preloaded on Blackberrys and is a top download on Apple’s App Store. As an app, Poynt as been a runaway success. As an investment? Not so much. Poynt’s most recently reported quarter, Q3 2010, which ended September 30th was typical of recent reports; it showed the company posting a loss of over $2.6 million on scant revenues of $236,000.

But shares of Poynt (TSXV:PYN) are rocketing today, trading over 23 million shares at press time and sending the stock up nearly 30%. The reason? Investors bullish on Poynt think the patent the company announced recently, for “delivering location-based offers and coupons to mobile smart phones based on GPS location and user profile..” puts them in the same space as Groupon, the meteoric Chicago based company that began by offering half price coupons for pizzas in October 2008, and is now set to become the fastest company ever to reach a billion dollars in revenue.

While delivering a coupon for pizza may not seem like the most cutting edge of technologies, delivering targeted advertising to smart phones using context specific consumer profiles and GPS location is something that Poynt knows a lot about. The most recent patent, which is actually the company’s third, claimed priority before the year 2000. The build out of users for the free Poynt app, which might have seemed a pointless exercise to shareholders examining the company’s trouble balance sheet last year, might now seem a masterstroke as Poynt has a built in barrier to entry to couple with their newly awarded patent. Poynt CEO Andrew Osis said he expects”…Poynt will have a rapidly growing audience of new and existing users that will benefit from location-specific advertising and coupons.”

Last Thursday, Poynt completed the acquisition of of the local advertising publishing platform assets of go2 Media. Those assets include “…certain key technologies and contracts to allow Poynt to publish mobile advertising to third party publishers.”

Below: Andrew Osis speaks with bNet about Poynt: