One of the biggest successes in recent years in internet commerce has been the rise of group buying sites, and notably Groupon. But does the company’s first results after its flotation, which disappointed the City, show that the formula is flagging?
 
Groupon has just announced its first results as a public company; it floated on the US Nasdaq stock exchange in November, buoyed up by a lightening start and subsequent growth, and just before reports on flaws in the group buying concept got a …

Groupon Reports Financial Trouble After Hyped Up Launch Last Year

The fast-growing Internet business firm Groupon, which went public just in November 2011, yesterday was reportedly still struggling with its first quarter performance reporting, admitting that it is revising upward its earlier report on operations covering its first three months of operation.
In a report from Portland, Oregon, the Associated Press said Groupon was adding $22.6 million to its first-quarter loss figure announced …

File-storage rock star start-up Dropbox has unveiled today new features for its web-based platform. The company has been on a tearing run over the past two years and the growth does not seem to be halting. In fact, in a recent study done, the company ranked as the most highly funded tech company in 2011, far out-stripping companies such as Facebook and Groupon. The new features are actually a much easier UI and the user experience becomes simplified.
User Interface
The first thing you …

Yelp! last week began trading on the stock market and as if to bring back old memories, Wall Street has shown less then voracious appetite for the stock that slipped 14% on the second day of trading. Yelp! has had an interesting past with the story of its inception being one of turned down offers and unassailable self belief.
Reminiscing on the conception and birth of the company, co-founder and chief executive officer of Yelp Inc. Jeremy Stoppelman will be looking backwards at the …

Google Drive is nearing launch, according to some leaked images from a user who claimed they had seen the application pop up in their account. The cloud data service has been in the rumour mills for quite a while now with many mauling over what exactly Google will be launching.
This has been even more puzzling owing to the fact that Google Docs, Google’s document management application already functions very much as a cloud drive because it allows users to upload and share document, …

The wheels are turning at Groupon and new revenue streams are being sought with a vengeance. The latest deal to come through from Groupon is Groupon VIP,  a new service that the group buying site is currently testing that will offer users a number of exclusive features for $30 a year.
The company announced this in a letter sent out to a select number of its users where CEO Andrew Mason broke the news. Calling it their newest innovation, the CEO proceeded to break the service down into three …

Groupon have announced that they sustained a loss over the financial year ending December 2011. The earning calls, made by Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and CFO Jason Childs, indicated that over the last quarter, Groupon had incurred a loss of $43 million even though overall revenues shot up by an impressive 194% from $172.2 million in 2010 to current levels of $506.5 million over the last year.
This revenue increase is attributable to the fact that Groupon has been working hard to diversify its …

Groupon has continued on its buying spree of fledgling social buying and e-commerce outfits with its latest acquisition being e-commerce startup Adku. Started one and a half years back by ex-Google employees who had branched out to set up their own startup, Adku uses a unique algorithmic method to craft shopping experiences in a so-called data-driven model.
This model is fairly new and this may be a big reason why Groupon have swallowed the bait. It’s however also interesting to note that …

Daily deals giant Groupon has been off radar for a while now after its largely successful IPO last year. The company has been quietly working around its dwindling daily deals business as it tries to find firmer ground from which to work from. In the run up to the IPO, there were many sceptics who said Groupon had no sound business model and this has been proved somewhat true although not in a manner that anyone would have expected.

Groupon have instead of looking to pivot entirely have …

Frugalo, a new app launched this week by two former Digg employees, aims to take the headaches out of using daily deal websites. Frugalo, founded in June 2011 and operated by Michael Cieri and Scott Reynolds, is backed by funding from AngelPad.
 

Frugalo helps users manage their daily deals.

The Frugalo app links with your Facebook account so all of your Facebook friends become your Frugalo friends, and connects with your Gmail account in order to import all of your purchases from Daily …