Off & Away unfurls daily deal service for hotel rooms

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Off & Away has quietly rolled out a new private sale service that allows its users to sign up for daily deals on luxury hotel rooms, earning discounts of as much as 50 percent. The Seattle online travel startup kicked off the new offering on Tuesday, complementing the online hotel auction service that it unveiled… Read More…

Ex-star of ‘The Apprentice’ James Sun takes on Groupon with Pirq

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One of the big problems with daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social is that the offers tend to attract customers at peak business times, causing havoc for small merchants. A new Seattle area upstart by the name of Pirq believes it has solved that nagging issue with a mobile application that allows restaurants… Read More…

IPO filing reveals Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s stake in Groupon

Howard Schultz (Richard Eriksson photo)

Groupon’s growth rate over the past two years has been absolutely insane. Consider this: The daily deal site had just 37 employees and 152,203 subscribers in June 2009. It now boasts 7,107 employees and 83.1 million subscribers. No wonder Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz wanted a piece of the action. After all, that’s a growth rate… Read More…

Fast growing Groupon files for $750 million IPO despite $522 million deficit

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IPO fever continues to spread through the ranks of technology companies. The latest to catch the bug is Groupon, which today announced that it plans to raise up to $750 million through an initial public offering. The filing comes just a few months after the Chicago daily deal site spurned a $6 billion offer from… Read More…

Is Portland the new Peoria? Google Offers arrives at Floyd’s

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For years, marketers wondered how their products or services would play in Peoria. Now, is Portland becoming that marketing hotspot for the digital generation? Google thinks so, choosing the Rose City for the roll out of its new Google Offers daily deal service. “There’s no end to the city’s great restaurants, coffee shops, hot spots… Read More…

Tippr buys DealPop social buying site from WhitePages

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Tippr, the group buying technology company, has acquired the social buying website DealPop from WhitePages. The deal was was announced by the two Seattle-based companies this morning. Tippr says it will strengthen its sales force by bringing DealPop aboard, and also add a technical team experienced in the infrastructure for group-buying technology. Financial terms weren’t… Read More…

Seattle daily deal site Zulily signs big lease for Sodo office building

Zulily's new HQ (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

We’ve been hearing rumors for weeks now about Zulily’s insane growth curve and aspirations for bigger offices. Now, word comes that the company — which features daily deals for baby and kid’s products — has secured a massive chunk of office space in Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood. The company plans to take over 80,000 square feet… Read More…

BigTip: A deal site for the burbs

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We’ve certainly seen a number of daily deal sites trying to emulate the success of Groupon and Living Social. And now, get ready for yet another entrant. BigTip — a new daily deal site founded by former InfoSpace and Yahoo employees — today launched a new offering that’s targeting areas largely forgotten by the big… Read More…

Ex-Yahoo execs create ChoozOn to sift through the daily deal clutter

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Groupon, Living Social and hundreds of other daily deal sites are great … when they offer something of interest. But, more often than not, these sites miss the mark with irrelevant promotions. A new Bellevue startup called ChoozOn thinks it has solved that problem, helping people find compelling offers that are suited just for them…. Read More…

Once a ‘daily deal’ naysayer, TeachStreet’s Dave Schappell gets the fever

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A few months ago, TeachStreet founder Dave Schappell was lamenting the fact that nearly everyone he bumped into asked about his company’s “Groupon strategy.” Schappell didn’t like the hype, but now the Seattle entrepreneur appears to have caught a mild case of deal fever. TeachStreet today plans to announce a new offering, which allows its… Read More…

Groupon, LivingSocial challenged over terms of daily deals

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More and more people have been embracing daily deals, figuring out how to work within the rules and limitations to score sweet discounts from local merchants. The phenomenon has made group discount services one of the hottest sectors online. But have you actually read the fine print on your latest daily deal, and looked up… Read More…

Report: More than 320 daily deal sites operate in the U.S.

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Maybe there actually is some room for all of those Groupon clones.  A new report out from Local Offer Network estimates that Americans will spend a whopping $2.6 billion on daily deals this year, up from $1.1 billion last year. It also finds no shortage of competition for those dollars, with the daily deal aggregation… Read More…

Now there’s an online marketplace for daily deals

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There’s been a lot of activity in the daily deal space in recent weeks. And now Tippr — the Seattle startup — is looking to elevate things a bit with a new offering called PoweredByTippr Marketplace. The idea is that publishers, merchants, resellers and other daily deal participants can post and browse deals, negotiate pricing,… Read More…

Knocking on Groupon’s door: Daily Ticket is no ordinary deal site

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Groupon and Living Social have achieved enormous success, generating tens of millions of subscribers and valuations in the billions. But Seattle entrepreneur Jon Washburn thinks these new daily deal titans are vulnerable. The reason? It’s just incredibly tough to scale the local advertising operations to coordinate and manage deals from the corner dry cleaner or… Read More…

Following in Groupon’s footsteps: A parade of daily deal sites (List)

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The New York Times today reports on the hundreds of daily deal startups that are trying to follow in Groupon’s footsteps. It’s a great story, pinpointing one of the hottest trends in the Internet space right now. It got me wondering about all of the activity right here in Seattle, so I decided to create… Read More…