The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today. The odd thing about this launch is that Bing previously offered a very similar feature called Bing Deals since 2011 – a service that now seems… → Read More
More details have emerged about LivingSocial’s new $110 million funding round announced yesterday. In response to a blog post characterizing the raise as an emergency round of debt financing, LivingSocial CEO Tom O’Shaugnessy issued a new memo to employees clearing up some misconceptions about the raise. The key takeaway? Yes, it was a down round, it was not an “emergency debt infusion.” → Read More
6Wunderkinder, the Berlin-based developer of cross-platform productivity app Wunderlist, today announced a step up in its ambitions as a “productivity platform” for a global audience: it has hired American Chad Fowler as its new CTO. Fowler, well known as an expert and leader in Ruby on Rails, had been the SVP for technology at troubled daily deals provider LivingSocial — a… → Read More
StartupStats got wind of news this afternoon that LivingSocial Co-founder Eddie Frederick is stepping down from both his leadership position today, and from his role as a member of the company’s board of directors. We’ve since been able to confirm the news by way of LivingSocial Director of Communications Brendan Lewis.
Frederick co-founded the daily deal giant back in 2007 with CEO Tim… → Read More
LivingSocial is now testing a new food ordering and delivery service as a part of LivingSocial Instant, the company announced this morning. At launch, members in the Washington D.C. area can order food from select area restaurants and have the meals delivered to their home or workplace.
In conjunction with the restaurant delivery service, the company is also launching something called… → Read More
Daily deal outfit LivingSocial has just announced an expansion to 20 additional markets in North America, mainly U.S. cities, plus one town in Ontario, Canada. In some cases, the new cities are getting access to LivingSocial’s core Daily Deals product, while in other cases, the addition brings the company’s family deals service, LivingSocial Families, to the area. → Read More
It may have started with a quiet rollout, but a recent announcement shows that it’s AmazonLocal‘s time to get loud. According to Amazon, their Groupon-esque deals service will start displaying bargains on their Special Offer-oriented Kindles when a new software update goes live in coming weeks.
AmazonLocal, which came about due to Amazon’s partnership with LivingSocial, is currently live in 44… → Read More
In light of reports that the company was canceling its investor roadshow and postponing its IPO, daily deals aggregator Yipit has come up with some positive information regarding to Groupon’s trajectory in August, namely that it had a banner month revenue-wise. The daily deals frontrunner grew 13% during the last month of summer, increasing its revenue to $120.7 million from $106 million in July. → Read More
Yipit, the site that aggregates and recommends daily deals based on users’ locations and interests (and raised $6 million back in June from a host of VCs), released some interesting trend data today on the daily deals space. Overall, July was not a memorable month for the daily deals industry, though there were a few clear winners, including everyone’s favorite deals site, the big kahuna, Groupon. → Read More
Multiple sources in the know have informed us that LivingSocial is close to continuing its international expansion with the impending acquisition of Grupfoni, a leading local ecommerce company in Turkey, as first reported by local tech blog Webrazzi. The deal hasn’t been closed yet, we hear, but LivingSocial is very close to signing off on the transaction.
The deal values Grupfoni at more than… → Read More
When it comes to local commerce, the ultimate prize everyone is going after right now is how to close the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a local merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. If you know who is actually redeeming offers and how much they are spending, you… → Read More
Foursquare this morning announced distribution partnerships with daily deal providers LivingSocial, Gilt City, zozi, BuyWithMe and AT&T. Missing from the list are Groupon, Yelp and Google Offers.
With these deals, Foursquare is attempting to solve two problems: liquidity in deals and its own lack of a revenue model. → Read More
LivingSocial recently issued stock worth $29.4 million in relation to one or more acquisitions, according to two new SEC filings. The filings show that LivingSocial issued equity valued at $24.6 million and $4.8 million on June 21 and June 22nd, respectively.
Just a few days later, LivingSocial announced the acquisitions of international daily deal sites Ensogo (in Thailand and the Philiipines)… → Read More
While the debate as to whether group buying as whole is a viable business model rages on post-Groupon S-1, there’s no doubt that these social deal things keep sprouting up — Yesterday someone introduced themselves to me as the CEO of a Groupon for moms (and yes I thought it was a good idea).
We’ve got Groupons for techies, a Groupon for Jews, what will there be a Groupon for next!? Wait, please… → Read More
Looks like LivingSocial is employing the same strategy for international expansion as its rival Groupon: by acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale.
According to DailySocial, the company has moved to purchase DealKeren (operational in Indonesia), its parent company Ensogo (which offers daily deals in Thailand and the Philippines) as… → Read More
Research firm ForeSee Results put its analysis spotlight on the daily deal industry, concluding that discount distribution services offered by companies such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Google do in fact bring lots of new customers to merchants’ doorsteps.
According to ForeSee, 38 percent of the people purchasing daily deals were already frequent customers of the merchant in question (which… → Read More
In my post about Groupon’s potential for collapse, I talked about the possibility of merchant fraud. Because Groupon pays merchants everything within 60 days, they are exposed to the possibility of fraud or the merchant going out of business. Other deal providers pay even faster. LivingSocial pays out everything in about 15 days. Google Offers pays out 80% in about four days.
Nobody knows how… → Read More
Daily deal providers like Groupon and LivingSocial may be violating several key aspects of consumer protection law.
I’ve been looking into issues like gift cards, bankruptcy, sales tax, and alcohol regulations. These might all sound esoteric and not really worthy of discussion, but the outcomes can significantly affect the value proposition to the consumer, merchant and the deal provider. For… → Read More
In the wake of Groupon’s IPO filing, it’s worth looking at the fundamentals of the offer. Growth numbers to date have been phenomenal. But is it a business that can last?
We love daily deals for a simple reason: the deals have been outstanding. If revenue growth in the first Internet bubble was about selling a dollar for 50 cents, growth in the daily deals business has been about getting other… → Read More
Whoops.
Looks like The New York Times has a little embargo breaking situation on their hands. (Which we love — chaos!) They’ve just put up a story with the URL: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/latest-rival-to-groupon-livingsocial-facebook-embargo-till-midnight/ (bolding mine). That page is obviously no longer found, but it was live for a bit. And it is a big one: Facebook’s… → Read More
There’s nothing like full disclosure during the negotiating process in an acquisition deal. LivingSocial acquired SocialMedia for just $3 million in stock, we reported earlier today. As part of the negotiating process they disclosed key financial information to SocialMedia to help that company understand the value of the stock they were receiving in the deal. That information is now in my… → Read More
Fast growing daily deal service LivingSocial, which just raised $400 million, has acquired long suffering social advertising network SocialMedia, we’ve confirmed. The price was just $3 million, all in LivingSocial stock. Unfortunately, the company had raised around $10 million from Charles River Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Naval Ravikant and Jeff Clavier.
SocialMedia’s biggest asset today is… → Read More
Fortune’s Dan Primack reports that the LivingSocial management and investors have pocketed about half of the $400 million in new VC money they raised at the beginning of the month, citing this SEC filing.
This cashing out early thing is not without precedent, in fact leader in the daily deals space Groupon pulled a similar endeavor during its DST round last April and in January, where it took… → Read More
Reports of daily deals site LivingSocial being in talks to raise around $500 million in Series E are now backed up by LivingSocial’s amended and restated Certificate of Incorporation filed on March 31st and unearthed today by the VCExperts blog. The form shows that Hungry Machine Inc, the holding company for LivingSocial, has filed an intent to raise up to $565 million in Series E financing, with… → Read More
The group buying industry has sprung out of nowhere over the past two years. A new report (embedded below) by daily deal aggregator Local Offer Network puts the U.S. gross revenues across the industry at $1.1 billion last year, and estimates gross revenues will grow 138 percent to $2.7 billion in 2011. Groupon alone, according to other sources, is expected to bring in between $3 billion and $4… → Read More
In what appears to be mostly about the talent of its founding team, LivingSocial has moved to acquire Ruby on Rails consultancy outfit InfoEther.
The social ecommerce giant, which has raised $232 million in venture capital to date and has been getting nearly as acquisitive as its rival Groupon lately, says InfoEther’s agility and expertise will enhance its ability to innovate more… → Read More
Living Social has been offering $10 off any $20 Amazon purchase since 5am this morning and it’s been a boon huge for the company, which Amazon has invested in. Now the deal has just crossed over the one million mark, with 12 hours to go. LivingSocial tells us that there are currently 99.4K vouchers being sold each hour, 2k vouchers sold each minute and 85 vouchers being sold each second.Already… → Read More
Today is going to be a big day for daily deal site LivingSocial. It is offering $10 off any $20 purchase on Amazon.com, and it’s already sold more than $2 million worth of the coupons in the first two hours of the deal. There are about 22 hours left to go. Some people are already noting that this 50 percent deal will “blow away” Groupon’s Gap deal, which resulted in $11 million worth of coupons… → Read More
Social commerce startup LivingSocial this morning announced that it has acquired a majority stake in Europe’s Let’s Bonus (which sounds an awful lot like “let’s bone us”, but I digress). The partnership brings LivingSocial operations to a total of ten countries, with the addition of Let’s Bonus’ Spain, Italy, Portugal, Argentina and Mexico presences.
Terms of the deal were not… → Read More
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