Social shopping company LivingSocial this morning announced that it has recruited an experienced chief financial officer, notably mere weeks after Amazon veteran Jason Child was appointed that role at rival Groupon. Funnily enough, Child’s former employer is the company that just pumped $175 million into LivingSocial.
LivingSocial’s fresh CFO is John Bax, a former Wal-Mart executive that most… → Read More
Google wants to be in the online group buying space, badly, and with good reason. The company may have not succeeded in purchasing the current leader in the space, Groupon, which has spurned a $6 billion buy-out offer in a bid to stay independent and shoot for the stars, but it seems determined to get in on the action – through acquisition – regardless.
According a report from the New York Post… → Read More
As Groupon weighs a $5 billion+ acquisition offer from Google and LivingSocial is believed to be about get a $100 Million to $150 million cash infusion from Amazon, it is instructive to look at the difference between the two companies. Hitwise looked at a 81 group-buying sites and came up with the chart above, which shows that Groupon commands 79 percent of U.S. visits to the group buying… → Read More
Tippr, which provides white-label services for group buying, is proposing a new potential technology standard for the group buying industry today, dubbed the “Open Deal Format” or ODF. The company is inviting interested parties, which include group buying service providers, publishers and social networks, to a meeting in Seattle next month.
It will then formally propose the standard to its peers… → Read More
Social commerce startup LivingSocial is expanding to Australia, acquiring a majority stake in the existing leading social shopping site, Jump On It, rather than competing with them head-on. The agreement involves an investment of $5 million by the Washington, DC-based Groupon rival, and Jump On It will be folded into LivingSocial’s branded Daily Deals.
Together with LivingSocial, Jump On It… → Read More
Social shopping site LivingSocial this morning announced the acquisition of Urban Escapes, a social adventure company. Urban Escapes offers trips that promote a “fun and active lifestyle and a chance to escape the day-to-day rat race”.
Coinciding with the acquisition news, LivingSocial has also disclosed how many subscribers it has attracted to date: 10 million. → Read More
It went by largely unnoticed, but directory services provider WhitePages launched a social buying website called DealPop last July, entering a field played by many notable up-and-comers such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Yelp.
Initially, DealPop was only available in Seattle, but the site is expanding to Los Angeles today and to San Francisco in the next two weeks.
The company has bigger plans… → Read More
One of the challenges of running a social commerce site these days is that there is just too much demand, from both local merchants wanting to give out deals and consumers who want to try them. There are only 365 days in a year, and the daily deal format limits each city to 365 deals a year.
Sites like GroupOn and LivingSocial are hitting those limits. GroupOn is expanding its inventory by … → Read More
LivingSocial, the daily deal site that is often referred to as the main competitor to Groupon (see our extensive guide on group-buying sites in the United States and beyond here), is experiencing fast growth.
Rather than launching in one new city on a regular basis, like Groupon tends to do, the company this morning announced that it has added 25 live markets to its roster, nearly doubling the… → Read More
The group buying craze is now officially in overdrive. There are so many group buying sites—Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, SocialBuy—that it is hard to know where to go for the best deals. Enter the DailyD, a new site that just launched today which pulls together all the deals for a city in one site and sends out a daily email as well.
The founders of the DailyD are Matt Coffin and Doug… → Read More
Editor’s note: Group buying sites are growing like mushrooms. In this teardown, guest author Steven Carpenter goes through a detailed teardown of the largest social commerce site, Groupon, and its competitors to see what exactly is going on here.
Much has been written about the rapid growth and success of Chicago-based local daily deal company, Groupon. And it is for good reason. No other… → Read More
LivingSocial, a company that started out as a Facebook developer and is now creating social app across many social networks, raised $5 million in a series A financing that was led by Grotech Ventures. Steve Case also personally invested. (LivingSocial’s CEO and co-founder, Tim O’Shaughnessy, is a former AOLer who also worked for Case at Revolution Health). The startup specializes in… → Read More
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