I’m not sure we should be surprised by the indoor walking maps, although they’re sure to be welcome in malls and large stores. If I recall correctly, when Google showed off its Project Glass demonstration, the simulation showed indoor maps to find a particular area in a store. At least we won’t need to wear the “Google Glasses” to get that functionality now.

Note that these features are limited by geography. Google Offers for Maps is U.S.-only, while the indoor walking directions — a beta — will work in the U.S. and Japan. Here’s a brief look at the Google Offers functionality within Maps; an approach I like better than checking in on Foursquare to get a deal or discount.

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Google Offers will now start aggregating deals from these partners: Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, JuiceInTheCity, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, PlumDistrict, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi. These deals will run alongside Google’s existing offers, which its sales staff will continue to source directly. Google’s goal is cover a range of verticals through its aggregation partners so it can have a wide array of offers that meet the tastes of users. The expanded selection of deals will first appear in San Francisco before expanding to Google Offers’ other markets.

Google Offers is not just trying to aggregate deals, something Bing Deals, Yipit and plenty of others already do. It’s trying to make the process a little smoother by allowing users to purchase and manage all their deals right through Google Offers without having to get directed to another deal site as many other aggregators do. Users can pay for any deal right through Google Offers. Google will also include a 1-800 number on deal vouchers so if there is any dispute with an offer, even one from a partner, consumers can resolve it through Google.

Google Offers is also introducing a new personalization quiz that allows people to pick out the categories they like and dislike and identify where they live, work and hang out. That feature, similar to what Yipit already does, will allow Google Offers to route the right deal to users and avoid flooding them with irrelevant offers. That’s one of the things that kills the enthusiasm for daily deals when you see a bunch of offers that have no value to you.

Google Offers is now up to 17 cities after launching in San Jose, San Diego, Baltimore and Minneapolis earlier this week. Google won’t say what kind of traction it’s getting but the move to aggregation shows that it’s trying to bulk up to better compete with Groupon and others. Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager for Google Offers, told me the updates to Google Offers is designed to help the company become more attractive to consumers and merchants. More deal volume and better personalization along with a more seamless transaction through one provider means consumers can find more relevant deals and also get a better overall experience.

With the Google Offers personalization tools, merchants can also home in on potential customers who are more passionate about certain categories and are better potential repeat visitors. Mangtani said Google also pays merchants 80 percent of their revenue share within  four days and the rest within 90 days.

Google has been looking to upgrade its local deals efforts after getting spurned by Groupon last year. It’s been pretty steady so far in its expansion and hasn’t tried too many innovative ideas. I just used my first Google Offers last week in New York and the experience was similar to using a Groupon. Aggregating deals and adding personalization features are not terribly creative but they show that Google is trying to improve the process. And I like that it’s handling purchasing and dispute resolution in one place. I’d like to see Google arm its merchants with Android devices so they could collect vouchers digitally, which would make life easier for consumers and provide better data to businesses.

At this point, Google Offers is still no Groupon killer, even if that title is now less attractive with the questions mounting around Groupon’s business. But this market for local advertising and customer acquisition for merchants is still a huge opportunity and Google is still one of the best to exploit it. Little by little, it’s trying to get there.

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The lawsuit, filed today in Chicago state court, was reported by Bloomberg and is not yet available online. The suit does not name Google as a defendant and, according to the report, asks for an order preventing sales managers Brian Hanna and Michael Nolan from disclosing secret information that they learned at Groupon.

The report does not state that Groupon is seeking damages, which suggests the goal of the lawsuit is to enforce a no-compete agreement. Such agreements are common in the high-tech industry but are difficult for a company to enforce because American courts dislike contracts that limit labor market mobility. paidContent will provide more details on the lawsuit when it becomes available.

Google’s venture, called Google Offers, went live this summer in a handful of cities, including New York, and is expected to expand to dozens of others. Several other deal-of-the-day clone sites such as Living Social have also emerged to challenge Groupon, which was the darling of the start-up market until a series of questions about its accounting practices delayed its expected IPO. The company has had better news of late and will go forward with a scaled-back IPO in early November.

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That raises questions about how and when Google plans to link up these new commercial operations.

Daily Deal, which already has operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, also has plans to expand to Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, according TNW, which first reported the acquisition.

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Google itself has not confirmed the purchase directly, but a note on the Daily Deal site from the company’s two founders, brothers Fabian and Ferry Heilemann, indicates that the business will become a part of Google’s existing daily deals effort, Offers:

“What began as a two-person startup less than two years ago has transformed into a trusted platform to connect businesses with consumers,” the write. “By combining our expertise with the Offers team at Google, we hope to expand our efforts to provide even greater deals to consumers.” The site now also redirects all press contacts to {encode=”press@google.com” title=”Google”}.

For the moment, Google Offers is only available in cities in the U.S. That means the purchase of the Daily Deal site could give Google an easy route to ramping up the service in Europe as well. Whether that will mean growing the Daily Deal footprint even further than Heilemanns’ plans for the continent, or buying other local deals sites, remains unclear at the moment.

Google Wallet. Meanwhile, just as the NFC World Congress event is kicking off in France, it looks like Google has started to roll out its new payment service, Google Wallet.

This was announced back in May and initially will work in the U.S. only, on the Nexus S device being sold via Sprint (NYSE: S) and in cooperation with MasterCard.

As with the Daily Deal buy, Google has not confirmed that Wallet is going live, but a report in Tech Crunch over the weekend showed a leaked document alerting retailers that the service would start today, September 19. Now pictures are starting to emerge advertising the service in-store.

That the two news items coincided on the same day also raises questions of how — and when — Google will link up Offers and Wallet: while right now Google’s Offers service can be used directly on an Android phone through the Google Shopper app but the simple, contactless payment services of Wallet has only just gotten off the ground.

Update: Google has officially announced the launch of its Google Wallet payment service today. The service, which uses the Nexus S 4G on the Sprint network, requires users to have a Citi MasterCard credit card and or a top-up from another credit card to the Google Prepaid Card — and they will need to find points of sale that accept PayPass NFC payments. Those who sign up for the service before the end of the year get a $10 credit.

According to a blog post from Osama Bedier, Google’s VP of payments, Visa, Discover and American Express cards and POS readers will be added in “future versions” of the Wallet.

Google Offers will automatically sync to a person’s Google Wallet account.

According to figures from Yipit last week (via Reuters), total revenue from Google Offers fell by 23 percent between August and July; the number of deals on the service went up by 22 percent in that time. Revenue per deal fell 37 percent, as the number of vouchers sold per deal was down by 46 percent.

There is a natural connection between the two kinds of services: In May, when Wallet and Offers were announced by Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of commerce, she described how Wallet would be about more than just payments, and would also be used for loyalty programs, check-ins and other transactions. Meanwhile, the promise of Offers would be about getting them on the go. Google believes that e-commerce rvenues will exceed $1 trillion by 2013, and it wants to make sure it is in on that game.

Google is not the only one working in these areas: on the deals front it is already competing against dominant Groupon, big LivingSocial, and fast-rising Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), among many others. NFC is still nascent although today Orange in France announced that it too would start to roll out the first a fourth device for its commercial NFC service, the Samsung Galaxy S II. (Samsung perhaps the unspoken winner here, with a role in both NFC news announcements today.)

In its last quarterly earnings report, Google noted that it made $6.562 billion from its advertising business, or 96 percent of its total revenues.

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper, put the purchase price between $150 million and $200 million and said DailyDeal is up to 200 employees with €22.8 million ($31.2 million USD) in vouchers sold in the second quarter. The acquisition comes a month after Google bought the U.S. deals aggregator the DealMap for an undisclosed price.

Google has been off to a slow and measured start with its own daily deal product Google Offers. Yipit reported that Google Offers revenue dropped 23 percent in August from July, even though the number of daily deals increased by 22 percent.

The service should get a little more attention with the launch of Google Wallet, which works together with Google Offers to deliver deals to users on their Android phones. Google Offers is still only available in a handful of cities such as New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; Boston; Austin, Texas and Denver. But it’s planning on expanding to several dozen more cities soon.

After losing out on its $6 billion bid for Groupon, it seems like Google is content to buy up smaller Groupon clones and figure out how to make a go of it in the daily deals business. Google still has a lot to learn with its daily deals offering, and with the scrutiny Groupon is facing these days with its IPO, it makes sense for Google to take its time. This is a big bet for the company, one that will ultimately help it tap into the huge market for local advertising. So I doubt it’s done shopping for daily deal companies.

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Yipit co-founders Vinicious Vacanti and Jim Moran

Groupon is getting hammered in the press in its lead up to an IPO. Facebook is closing its daily deals experiment after four months, and Yelp is reorganizing its deals effort. It’s a tumultuous time in the young daily deals market, but the volatility is just proving to be more opportunity for New York start-up Yipit, a deals aggregator and recommendation service that is growing fast and leveraging its wide knowledge of the industry.

Yipit currently gathers deals from more than 600 daily deal sites and presents the best of them to users based on their pre-selected interests and location. That ensures that users see a good cross-section of deals, but only the ones that matter to them. This addresses the issue of relevance, one of the problems of many daily deals services. Yipit, which got started by in March of last year, ended 2010 with 100,000 users and is up to 250,000 members as of the end of June. Those aren’t Groupon numbers by any stretch, but Yipit has achieved that level of success without any advertising.

Co-founder Vinicius Vacanti, who founded Yipit with Jim Moran after they fled finance jobs, said the boom in daily deals has created a ripe opportunity for companies that can make sense of all the offers, much like Kayak organizes travel information. And with the proliferation of daily deals services, Vacanti says consumers are now getting more skeptical that they’re getting the best offers from any one provider.

“With all this fragmentation of content, consumers like to to go to one place where deals are organized for them and they can know what the best recommended deals are,” he said.

Yipit isn’t the only company to ride the daily deal boom and earn affiliate fees for referring consumers to other daily deal sites. Others like Local Offer Network, Adility, Monster Offers and Analog Analytics also round up deals. And Deal Map, a Yipit competitor, was recently snapped up by Google, which is aggressively expanding its Offers product.

But Yipit is not just a simple aggregator. It’s now using its broad knowledge of the sector to build up a data business, which is actually bringing in the lion’s share of Yipit’s revenue. By tracking the deal metadata, purchase counts, deal categories and what’s selling, Yipit has deep insight into the overall health of the daily deal market. For example, it recently reported that daily deal revenue overall declined by 7 percent in July, and Groupon grew its marketshare to 49 percent.

Yipit started licensing the information in February to other daily deal sites looking for opportunities, and then began pushing out monthly reports in June starting at $495 per edition. Later this month, it’s planning on offering investor reports that covers the worldwide daily deal market.

Vacanti said he expects affiliate fees to eventually return as the main revenue driver, but he said the data business has been a nice surprise and has allowed Yipit to focus on user experience without having to resort to advertising.

“90 percent of what we do is already on the consumer side,” Vacanti says. “It’s just a little more work to package it up and license it up and monetize it.”

From his perch above the larger market, Vacanti has a good perspective on the trends in daily deals. He said he wasn’t surprised by Facebook’s withdrawal, since the company didn’t do a good enough job explaining its daily deals and integrating them into the site. He said the lesson is that companies can’t just tack on daily deals; they need to incorporate it thoughtfully and frame it as a service for consumers, not as advertising. Companies also need to invest in sales people according to Vacanti, because self-serve tools are not enough to extract attractive deals from merchants and businesses.

As for Groupon, he expects the IPO to go off as planned. But he said the biggest challenge is its reliance on the email inbox, which is now swimming with daily offers from other services. That, he believes, is affecting Groupon and other daily deal sites’ conversion rates. ”The key is how to get out of the inbox and get users to the website or the mobile app,” he said.

But while some individual companies may struggle at times, Vacanti said the overall daily deal market is healthy and has room to grow. That will only mean more opportunities for Yipit and other aggregators. Yipit raised $6 million in June from Highland Capital Partners along with existing investors RRE, DFJ Gotham and IA Ventures. It previously raised $1.3 million last year from SV Angel and others. The company is in the process of moving out of its space at General Assembly to a nearby location in the Flat Iron district. Vacanti said the company is focused on the product and isn’t looking at selling like Deal Map. He said there’s still a lot of opportunity in remaining independent in this market.

“It’s still very chaotic in the daily deals market but a lot of opportunities emerge to take advantage of that and that’s what we’re doing,” argues Vacanti.

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