Rearden Commerce wants to be your personal concierge on your mobile phone (our coverage).
Now its got the world's largest travel management company, American Express, encouraging you to use it.
Rearden Commerce, which offers you a way to view and organize travel plans, personal entertainment and more with your phone, has just signed a deal with American Express to become the mobile service of choice for the credit card company's corporate and other travel customers.
Under the deal, the credit card company will actively market the Rearden Commerce service to these customers -- seeing it as a good way to keep their loyalty. The service works on the Blackberry, the smartphone popular among professionals.
The deal is an extension of Rearden Commerce's existing partnership with American Express. Since 2006, AmEx has offered Rearden Commerce's concierge service to its AmEx business travel network -- a deal that includes about 1,500 business customers of American Express. Almost half a million people at these companies used Rearden Commerce's web service to do things like manage their travel.
As of today, these travel customers will also be able to use the mobile version of the service. In addition, American Express' 300 customers among the Fortune 500 companies will also be able to use the service.
Rearden Commerce launched its "mobile personal assistant" version in May, when it started offering the service to other companies directly. It says more than 5,000 employees, including for example some at Thomson Reuters, have downloaded the service to their phone already.
The mobile service synchronizes with Rearden Commerce's main Web-oriented personal assistant service. So you can obtain your travel itinerary with a single click on your Rearden Commerce mobile phone application. The mobile service offers alerts, ways to rebook travel plans, weather forecasts in the locations your traveling to and click-to-call car service. Soon, said Dan Ford, VP of Product Marketing, the company will introduce new features, letting you send details about your travel plans to your friends in an email, with an easy way to include the weather plans along with it. You'll also be able to find restaurants near to you, and make reservations.
American Express is an investor in the company, as is Chase. Chase announced last month it was going to offer Rearden Commerce's personal assistant to some of its consumer card holders.
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