Author tours have never been a guaranteed way to sell books, so many publishers have cut back on them. Togather, a new Brooklyn-based startup, hopes it can reinvent the author tour by guaranteeing that a certain number of books will be sold in advance. Read more at paidContent »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The jump in Groupon’s offering price for its IPO, and the first day’s trading in the stock, says a lot more about the current bubble-style investment climate and an overheated stock market than it does about the potential value of the group-buying company. Read more »
Foodspotting, the app for finding and rating restaurant dishes, is getting in on the daily deals action. It plans to announce Tuesday that it is hooking up with Atlanta-based local deals purveyor Scoutmob to offer 50 percent and 100 percent off coupons for nearby restaurants. Read more »
Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Reports say Groupon has put its hotly awaited IPO on hold. But was it market volatility that pulled the rug out from under the offering, or the repeated missteps by the company and its CEO, combined with growing skepticism about the viability of its business model? Read more »
Exclusive: Group Commerce, a New York City-based company that sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy, said CEO Jonty Kelt. Read more »
Some critics argue that Groupon’s fast-growing business is a financial house of cards and that the company has no viable way of generating profits. Will CEO Andrew Mason be able to prove the doubters wrong, or will Groupon become the new millennium’s version of Pets.com? Read more »
For once, the biggest news in social media and real-time technologies didn’t come from Facebook. Rather, it was Google that, at the end of the second quarter, introduced an innovative collection of technologies, under the Google+ label. Another big headline was the return of digital music: Pandora filed a successful IPO, and Google and Apple unrolled cloud-based music offerings. Meanwhile, other social networks generated valuable lessons about technology and business strategies. LinkedIn went public, while Myspace was sold. And Apple essentially appointed Twitter its mobile social network infrastructure supplier. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Skype, Groupon, Turntable.fm and Amazon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The service provider responsible for Groupon’s daily e-mail deals, suffered a server outage this weekend that looks to have had a staggering effect on Groupon sales in several cities. This seems to play up Groupon’s overall dependence on emails as the primary method of subscriber interaction. Read more »
Groupon’s hotly-awaited initial stock offering will either stand as a beacon of hope to technology and Internet stocks of all kinds, or as a giant warning sign indicating a huge bubble of irrational exuberance. The company’s prospectus contains plenty of evidence for both sides. Read more »
Social commerce involves businesses using online collaborative tools — social networks, real-time feeds and user-generated contributions, for example — in order to sell products and services to consumers. The space is now more dynamic than ever: Hundreds of startups like Groupon, Zynga and CrowdStar have emerged, and it’s also attracting the attention — and cash — of online giants like Google, Amazon and Apple. This report examines the factors propelling the sector’s growth, how it will evolve over the next one to three years and what that means for those companies involved. We also examine factors inhibiting the growth of social commerce, and the likelihood of fragmentation as more local markets emerge. Companies mentioned in this report include Groupon, Foursquare, Gowalla, Playfish and LivingSocial. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Groupon, the social-buying phenomenon that has already raised more than $165 million in financing in the past year, is reportedly looking for another round that could give the company a market value as high as $3 billion, as it tries to continue its aggressive growth plan. Read more »
How do you compete with an 800-pound gorilla like Groupon? If you’re Tippr, you don’t. Instead, you arm websites with the weapons to do that themselves. The Seattle-based startup today launched a white-label platform that gives companies the tools to run their own group-buying campaigns. Read more »
