Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2012, Grouper has been on a mission to help busy, overworked young people get away from the glow of computer screens and out into the real world to meet new people. To do that, the startup sends its members on “Groupers,” which are essentially blind, group dates between two groups of friends, designed to take the awkwardness out of one-on-one dating. → Read More
On-demand car service Uber is teaming up with online social club Grouper, the companies announced this weekend. With a new program and promotional event called #UberGrouper, users can sign up for an exclusive deal in their city allowing them to use Uber as their luxury tranportation of choice on their Grouper meetups. To kick off the launch, Uber is giving away round-trip Uber rides, free drinks… → Read More
Great design and developer talent is, as so many know, hard to come by. So online social club Grouper is launching what it calls a “Hackation” in which it plans to offer select developers a free, week-long trip to New York City. On this week-long trip, thanks to partnerships with Airbnb and Hipmunk, developers and designers will get the opportunity to visit NYC (which means free airfare from… → Read More
There are a lot of dating sites out there and the world doesn’t really need another one. That’s why the young, New York-based startup, Grouper, calls itself an “online social club” even though its members go on “Groupers” (i.e. dates) and sometimes even end up in relationships. In fact, founder and CEO Michael Waxman met his current girlfriend on a Grouper. Instead, the site doesn’t promise to… → Read More
Groupon is determined to launch daily deal sites in markets all over the world, as we’ve seen in the past. This morning, the social commerce company announced that it has acquired SoSasta (India), Grouper (Israel) and Twangoo (South Africa). Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
SoSasta has only been around for about three months, but already offers daily deals in 11 Indian cities, according to… → Read More
Grouper’s completely scrapping their old site and being reborn as Crackle. The new site aims to discover the top online video talent for their parent company, Sony, by offering producers the chance at fame and fortune. All the old Grouper accounts will be transferred to Crackle. The new property will be a destination video site, consisting of 12 branded channels for different show concepts… → Read More
This morning Grouper sent social search engine Searchles a C&D letter and, of course, it was published to the web. Here’s Searchles’ response. Grouper doesn’t like Grouper videos being streamed on the site’s new Searchles TV product. Grouper’s main complaint deals with the re-skinning of the the videos in the Searchles player, which removes their branding and… → Read More
Grouper, which won the acquisition lottery last year and is now part of Sony, is beginning to take down user videos with copyrighted content. The Grouper blog post discussing the policy says music from Universal is being taken down starting immediately (see our coverage of the Universal lawsuit against Grouper). Grouper is using Audible Magic’s sniffing software to find the offending videos… → Read More
On the day of the Google/YouTube acquisition, YouTube announced a licensing deal with Universal Music. Apparently, Grouper and Bolt.com didn’t get the memo. Universal Music has come out swinging in their first online video-related lawsuit against two of the lesser-known online video sharing websites, Bolt.com and Sony’s recent acquisition, Grouper. The lawsuit takes aim at the… → Read More
Grouper, the video sharing site Sony bought in August for $65 million, is announcing a partnership this morning with mass market video camera company Pure Digital. Starting in November, Pure Digital camcorders will ship with software to enable automatic video upload to Grouper or two-step upload to Google Video. This is one of a number of new distribution partnerships that constitute an important… → Read More
Sony Pictures is announcing the acquisition of online video startup Grouper tonight, Tuesday, at midnight EST. The acquisition price, confirmed by Grouper, was $65 million in cash. Our previous coverage of Grouper is here. Sausalito, California based Grouper has built three key technologies: an online video sharing site, a desktop video editor and most importantly a closed (non-bittorent) P2P… → Read More
Grouper, a video sharing site we’ve covered a number of times before, has launched a very cool new feature that could disrupt the crowded world of online video sharing. Viewers can now add their own video comments to Grouper videos and the comments can be watched inside the same embedded player. In just a few weeks the embedded players themselves will be able to record the video comments… → Read More
As I’ve written many times before, the online video space is getting fairly….ahem…crowded (more). One company in the space, Grouper, is dealing with the competitive heat through humor (in an intelligent way – by using their product as the host). An internal Grouper email was sent out to all employees today that said “Grouper Street Fighter. Description: It’s… → Read More
As I continue my journey to find the flickr of videos, I may have found the (near) perfect product – version 2 of Grouper which launches tonight. Grouper is only available for windows and requires a download. But it’s worth it. The product is currently free and allows unlimited uploads of photos and video. Each piece of content can be shared with the public, kept private or shared just… → Read More
I’ve been tracking a number of sites that offer flickr-like services for video. I’ve taken a look at as many of these services that I could find. The most well known is YouTube, which we profiled in August and which recently raised venture money from Sequoia. But there are at least eight others worth looking at as well. In addition to YouTube, these are CastPost, ClipShack… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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