For the daily deal obsessed on the go, a Groupon mobile app is simply not enough.

Enter The Dealmap, a daily deal aggregator that is launching its iPhone app this evening. Bringing the functionality of its website to the app store, The Dealmap helps users find the best deals in their area, whether they’re from national retailers, local vendors, crowdsourced or daily deals. With roughly 350,000 live deals in the pipeline per day, this app is the largest deal aggregator in the mobile space— at least for now.

The Dealmap is owned and operated by Center’d, a local search and discovery engine that helps users find venues, activities and plan events. Center’d was founded in 2006 by CEO Jennifer Dulski, formerly Yahoo’s VP of local markets and commerce, and CTO Chandu Thota, previously the lead developer of Microsoft Virtual Earth (today known as Bing Maps).

The startup, which has amassed $8.9 million in funding largely from Norwest Venture Partners and Keynote Ventures, didn’t find a runaway hit with its primary service, Center’d.

However, as the daily deal space heats up and aggregators become more important (esp. with Groupon and a sea of clones blanketing the web with discounts), The Dealmap could be their lucky break. The site, which launched in May, has seen decent growth in the last ten weeks.  According to Dulski,  the service now reaches 300,000 users every day through its e-mail list and its 60 Twitter accounts.

On the web, Dealmap offers a simple user interface. You can sign up for notifications with your e-mail address or you can immediately search for local deals by plugging in your zip code. Once you enter your location, the site pulls up a Google map with an approximate 10-mile radius. Deals are flagged according to their category, like health & beauty, restaurants and hotels. For those who are overwhelmed by the options, there’s a bar at the top that highlights several deals.

Here’s a look at my zip code in Palo Alto:

According to Dulski, Dealmap is the largest online repository for daily deals. The service has 150 sources for deal data, 100 of which are daily deal sites, including Groupon. The startup also pulls information from national providers, other online services like Restaurant.com, Foursquare and even users (users are encouraged to submit offers they find online or on the street). Currently, Dealmap makes most of its money from a stable of affiliate partners. While the contracts vary, in a typical transaction a daily deal site will pay Dealmap a small fraction of each transaction driven by the service.

DealMap’s iPhone app showcases most of the site’s functions— with a few additional tweaks to take advantage of the mobile platform. For example, by default, the service will automatically pull offers within a one mile radius of your current location. You can also quickly zoom in and out to expand or reduce the field.

By focusing on the meat of the service, the app is actually a preferable experience based on aesthetics.

The tabs are easy to navigate, you can quickly filter deals by categories like “top deals,” “daily deals,” “restaurants and bars,” “etc.” Furthermore, when you want to submit a deal to earn points, it’s an easier process on the mobile app. When you find an offer, power up the app, it will pull up a list of nearby businesses, tap on the store you’re looking for, take a photo and punch in a brief description of the offer and the expiration date. That may sound like a lot of effort, but the points can be traded for tangible rewards, including gift certificates for affiliate partners.

Clearly, there’s a real need for a comprehensive aggregator like Dealmap— my only frustration with the site and the app is the discovery process and the quality of the deals.

By acting as the funnel for thousands of local and national deals, Dealmap must wrestle with the gigantic challenge of making all the offers accessible and simultaneously pushing the best content to the top. Dulski, who admits it’s a work in progress, says there is an algorithm in place (related to the Center’d platform) that sorts offers based on how trustworthy the source is and the reputation of the local business.

Although largely helpful, I personally found the service occasionally frustrating and at times disappointing. For example, during my Palo Alto search, offers included “A Free iPod Touch” from the Apple Store (of course, you had to click through to learn that it was only free with the purchase of a MacBook) and what seemed to be a ridiculous deal at the Bistro 412: a $25 certificate for just $2 (except the minimum purchase is $50). Oh well, as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true…

Center’d competes with sites like Yelp and CitySearch, but instead of simply offering text reviews, the service scours the web for reviews and descriptions and performs semantic analysis on them, allowing you to perform more detailed searches than you could on other sites.

In my testing I found the app’s manual search mode, which lets you search by keywords, to be pretty hit-or-miss. During one search for “large portions” Center’d pulled up a list of matching restaurants, but the app didn’t do a good job explaining why it thought they had large portions (you’d expect it to display any relevant text in its database, but it didn’t). In fact, when I looked through the details of the top hit for “large portions”, that restaurant’s top keyword was “small plates”. Go figure.

Search leaves something to be desired, but that doesn’t mean the app isn’t worth checking out. Its City Guides functionality, which lets you search using a number of pre-set filters, is actually quite helpful. To use it, you first choose a description of what you’re looking for (options include things like ‘Kid-friendly’, ‘Romantic’, and ‘Outdoors’). Then you choose the type of venue you’re looking for, be it a restaurant, event, shopping or attraction. The app pulls up a list of matches, and for the most part I found these to be pretty accurate — a search for kid-friendly restaurants in Palo Alto pulled up local favorite ‘The Creamery’ as the top result, and the app also made it easy to pull up a list of local bars with outdoor patios.

Aside from the iPhone app, Center’d is seeing strong growth, though its traffic is still pretty modest. Since April the service has doubled its traffic.

Also worth checking out is Yelp’s new iPhone application, which includes deals from local merchants.

Center’d, a local activity guide headed by former Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski, is getting a major upgrade today. Alongside a completely revamped homepage, the site is launching a reworked search engine that it says should outperform the keyword searches found on most other local sites.

Center’d has compiled a database of around 1 million entries for various activities, each of which is categorized into a number of intent-based classifications. To do this, the site has spidered through the web analyzing ‘conversations’ taking place around each entry, taking context into account to determine if a review or comment is positive or negative. It then maps out the results in bar graphs, as seen below. Dulski says that this kind of semantic analysis is better than standard keyword search, and it helps eliminate inaccurate matches – for example it would prevent a review that said “this place is not for kids” from appearing under a query for restaurants “for kids”.

Using this database, the site can also generate city guides for users with a variety of different criteria (for example, you could generate a guide for San Francisco with romance in mind, or you could create one that would take you through the city on the cheap). The site is launching with support for twelve cities intitially, with plans to ramp up to more in the near future. Dulski says that these guides are mostly-automated (which will help it scale), though there is some editor control involved.

Center’d emerged about a year ago from the ashes of Fatdoor, a social network for neighbors. Until now its primary focus has been to serve as a local search engine and event planning site, and now it’s adding a new goal to that list: helping people figure out what to do with their day. Dulski says that many people have been coming to the site to find something to do, without anything in particular in mind. As with the city guides, users can select from a variety of criteria like ‘cheap’ or ‘for kids’, and ask the site to generate a list of possible activities.

In the next few weeks Center’d will also be deploying its suggestion engine to the iPhone, with a mobile application that will allow users to generate a day-long itinerary based on the amount of money they’re able to spend and the type of activities they’d like to persue.

If Yahoo Local were a standalone startup, it might look like Center’d. Partly that is because CEO Jennifer Dulski used to be the general manager in charge of Yahoo Local. Center’d, which publicly launches today, is a mixture of an event-planning/invitation site and a highly targeted local search engine, with a little social networking thrown in.

The entire site is set up to do two things: plan and explore. You import your email contacts, put in your zip code, and off you go. There is a calendar view for local events, and a map view for local destinations.

The company started out as FatDoor, a failed social network for neighbors. It took the $5.5 million it raised last October from Norwest Venture Partners and Keynote Ventures, and rebooted as Center’d. The chief technology officer is Chandu Thota, previously the lead developer on Microsoft Virtual Earth. I reviewed the site last April:

Center’d is both a local search engine and an event-planning application. You can search places for restaurants, hotels, schools, museums, stores, etc., and the results appear on a Google map. There is also a calendar view. Once you connect with friends on the system their events pop up in your searches. And you can also create your own events and get your friends to help decide the details. For instance, things like the location and date can be voted on. Want to have a party by the sea? Ask your invited guests if they’d rather go to Stimson Beach or Montaro Beach, and if next Sunday is better than this Saturday. You can also assign tasks for them to sign up for: bring lobsters, bring wine, bring volleyball.

The site is perfectly serviceable and looks like it will do a decent job with both event planning and local search. The interface is heavy on Ajax, with the screen telescoping open as you go through the options. It is very similar to Pingg in that regard, except it is much more limited in what it can do. But Center’d is also not doing anything appreciably different from many other startups on the event-planning side, including Pingg, Socializr, and MyPunchbowl. It does have the local search piece, but so does Yelp, Yahoo, and Google.

Still, when you are starting out with FatDoor, anything is an improvement.

Since then, the site has been improved. Places can be saved and commented on. And it lets you connect to people through places, such as schools, stores, or museums. Social + local. Isn’t that the original definition of community?

While the site is dead, the company behind it that raised $7 million in venture capital—$5.5 million of which it collected just last November from Keynote Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners—is not. It is rebooting as Center’d, an event planning and neighborhood search site that is still in stealth mode. But don’t worry, I snuck in and took pictures (see below).

Fatdoor’s CEO Jennifer Dulski (a former Yahoo exec) and CTO Chandu Thota (a former Microsoft engineer) are still running Center’d. In the “about” page, they acknowledge that “Center’d evolved from a concept (formerly called Fatdoor) that aimed to bring neighbors together in an online community environment.” They also lay out what they hope to accomplish with Center’d:

At Center’d, we’ve been thinking about how to solve the challenges that exist in making plans. From the smallest get together, where you just can’t decide on where to eat . . . to the large fundraisers and school activities that require signups and hundreds of emails and weeks of meticulous planning . . ..

Hear us out. We can give you the tools you need to easily organize people, places, and times. Using the latest space-age technology, we have concocted features such as:

• Polling tools: Enable your guests to take some of the burden of coming to consensus on the place and time to meet.
• Task Management and Volunteer Sign-up: Now you can easily get the team you need to do the stuff you need.
• Connection management and calendar sharing: Now that you are suddenly so organized, and ready to pull off the perfect girls’ night out/summer camp/grandparents day/birthday party/first date/last date, let’s make sure those who are important to you can view your calendars. But not everyone, and not every event. We can keep a secret.
• Explore neighborhoods: We’ll even help you out with finding other places and events. How would you like a view of your world filtered by the recommendations of people you trust? How would you like to be at the center, and have the people, places, and plans you care about revolve around you, just waiting to be experienced? We like that idea. In fact, we like it so much, we built it.

Center’d is both a local search engine and an event-planning application. You can search places for restaurants, hotels, schools, museums, stores, etc., and the results appear on a Google map. There is also a calendar view. Once you connect with friends on the system their events pop up in your searches. And you can also create your own events and get your friends to help decide the details. For instance, things like the location and date can be voted on. Want to have a party by the sea? Ask your invited guests if they’d rather go to Stimson Beach or Montaro Beach, and if next Sunday is better than this Saturday. You can also assign tasks for them to sign up for: bring lobsters, bring wine, bring volleyball.

The site is perfectly serviceable and looks like it will do a decent job with both event planning and local search. The interface is heavy on Ajax, with the screen telescoping open as you go through the options. It is very similar to Pingg in that regard, except it is much more limited in what it can do. But Center’d is also not doing anything appreciably different from many other startups on the event-planning side, including Pingg, Socializr, and MyPunchbowl. It does have the local search piece, but so does Yelp, Yahoo, and Google.

Still, when you are starting out with FatDoor, anything is an improvement.