The venture capital arm of Verizon, Verizon Ventures, has invested $400,000 in CardStar. The Boston-based CardStar makes a mobile app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry that lets users store all of their membership cards in one digital repository.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the investment is part of Verizon’s continued interest in mobile commerce, an interest that also extends to the carrier working with AT&T and T-Mobile in a separate initiative around mobile payments.
CardStar hopes to capitalize on the intersection of traditional loyalty, reward and club programs with mobile technology, a hot trend of late that will only become more relevant with time. Users can replace their physical club cards with a digital replica and potentially receive merchant-provided extras for doing so. The application also integrates with Fousquare for convenient in-store checkins.
“The carriers have long been looking at the mobile wallet idea, especially mobile payments … But mobile payment is not here yet. So, what else is in someone’s wallet? A lot of different cards, and the common thread is loyalty cards,” CEO Andy Miller explained to the Journal.
With Verizon’s investment, CardStar has raised a total of $1.4 million in funds. CardStar is also said to have been downloaded more than 1.4 million times and have 700,000 users.
[img credit: shanecurcuru]
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