Groupon

Concern among investors that the once-booming daily deals business has cooled are playing out in the market, with the stock price for industry leader Groupon continuing to slide last week. Though District-based LivingSocial has faced less scrutiny as a private company, analysts say that Groupon's woes have a direct impact on perceptions of the company's value when it inevitably goes public or looks to raise more capital. "In order to change that view, LivingSocial would have to show significant profitability and a...

NEW YORK — Former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is diving into several new ventures, including indulging his inner rock star with an album of "motivational business music. " Mason said Thursday on his blog that he recently spent a week in Los Angeles and recorded a collection of seven songs called "Hardly Workin'. " Mason said he wants to present business wisdom to younger people and that the songs will help them understand ideas that are critical to becoming productive and...

Multiple sources tell us that Groupon , the surging Chicago-based startup, was valued at $250 million when they closed their recent $30 million venture round with Accel Partners and previous investors. In that post we wrote that "the company is going gangbusters," but apparently that's a bit of an understatement. Post round, the value of the company is at least $280 million. Groupon offers users deep discounts on products and services from local businesses. A minimum number of users must sign up for a deal before it activates,...

Several desks in Venga's single-suite headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW have yet to be filled. If the company's current trajectory holds, they may serve as a sign of growth to come. Co-founder Winston Bao Lord said the nine-person company is looking to bulk up its sales staff — adding as many as one or two employees a month — to its office in D.C. and other cities around the country where Venga is selling software that allows restaurants to track patrons' dining habits. It's a substantive change for a company...

Groupon burst onto the public markets Friday as the Chicago-based discount purveyor capped its initial public offering with a strong showing in its first day of trading . If the company can sustain that momentum it could bode well for the investors who got in on the ground floor before it became an international brand. Washington business mogul Ted Leonsis and local partners at New Enterprise Associates were among its first backers. The company initially sold the shares at $20 each, for a market value of...

We live in a Golden Age of Coupons. Every morning when I open my e-mail, I see offers from Gilt City, Daily Candy, Living Social and Groupon scattered among news briefings and actual correspondence. I signed up for these missives because I love a good deal, but, for the most part, I delete them unread; I can't forget my mother's folk wisdom: You can go broke buying wholesale. I guess not everyone's mother told them that: Groupon, the best known of the Internet-discount services, was valued at $30 billion in its June IPO....

The Washington foodie market is shaping up as a battleground in the online space as coupon giant Groupon agrees to be the main sponsor behind this October's Taste of DC food festival. The Chicago deal purveyor snagged the sponsorship in the back yard of rival LivingSocial and Venga , the D.C. online restaurant site that launched last month. The move was orchestrated by District entrepreneur and former " The Apprentice " contestant Steuart Martens , who is chief executive of the Taste of DC, and his...

Like many married couples, Howie and Rachel Schaffer know they should go out more. Go out go out, just the two of them. They even set a goal, pledging to arrange at least one date night a month soon after their second son was born four years ago. Ha ha. "It's just really hard to make it happen," said Rachel, 42, a massage therapist in Takoma Park. The one-a-month goal was routinely ignored in the face of jam-packed family routines, babysitters who are both expensive and elusive and the...

We first covered Wahanda , a social network for people who use spas and other ?wellness? products, way, way back in 2008 but they've been busy. After raising £1.5 million to become the 'Amazon of wellness' it's now built the world's biggest vertical database of health and beauty spas via their Yelp-like social network. Wahanda now has 10,000 venues listed globally (4,600 in the UK alone), while main competitor, the US-based SpaFinder has just over 6,000. Wahanda soft launched in the US in October...

LivingSocial, the District-based Web site that distributes daily deals for restaurants, spas and retail outlets, added $400 million to its coffers last week as investors continued to funnel money into the fast-growing company. The latest funding round comes as the company continues to vie for market share with industry leader Groupon, based in Chicago, and broadens its deals to include real-time discounts and weekend getaways. Investors said the latest round values LivingSocial at $3...

Washington mogul Ted Leonsis was named co-chief executive of Groupon, the troubled daily-deals Web site that fired its chief executive and founder Thursday after a string of disappointments culminated in a big earnings miss this week. Leonsis, a major investor in Chicago-based Groupon , joins another investor, executive chairman Eric Lefkofsky, as co-chief executive, replacing the company's controversial founder, Andrew Mason. Mason, 32, issued a non-traditional letter following the action, in which he at first said he...

Honesty and authenticity are so profoundly lacking in today's leaders that it really is a thrill when a frank memo appears, like the one that freshly ousted Groupon CEO Andrew Mason penned Thursday evening. You can read his departure letter in full below. Remember Carol Bartz's blunt note to Yahoo employees? ("I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. ") Or when Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith publicly quit his job in the form...

Following a dismal earnings projection, Groupon announced that it has replaced co-founder Andrew Mason as the company's chief executive officer. Executive chairman and Mason's co-founder Eric Lefkofsky and vice chairman Ted Leonsis will serve as co-CEOs while Groupon searches for a new top executive. (Leonsis is the majority owner of the Washington Capitals, Wizards and Mystics sports teams.) Groupon did not say what Mason's next move will be, but thanked him for his time with the company in a Thursday release.

District-based daily-deal company LivingSocial has received a much-needed $110 million cash infusion from its investors, according to a memo the company sent to employees Wednesday. "This investment is a tremendous vote of confidence in our business from the people who know us best, our current board members and investors," LivingSocial chief executive Tim O'Shaughnessy said in the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post. They "have reviewed our plans for 2013, and they are enthusiastic enough...

Groupon left a little barb against the 0-12 Washington Wizards in its daily deal description Wednesday for a $69 ticket package. Originally, the text compared the team's season to a dam failure. Will Sommer at Washington City Paper caught Groupon's creative copy and posted to his City Desk blog on Wednesday. "Watching an athlete succeed is supremely satisfying, though curiously, so is watching a dam fail. Feel the rush with this GrouponLive deal to see the Washington Wizards hit the hardwood at the...

LivingSocial posted a net loss of $566 million for the third quarter after it wrote down the value of several daily deal firms it acquired last year. The D.C.-based online deal purveyor spent millions of dollars from investors buying like-minded companies in foreign countries last year, and it is unclear whether the acquisitions can regain their value. Overall, LivingSocial recorded about $124 million in revenue during the quarter, a 10 percent decline from the $138 million it pulled...

Several desks in Venga's single-suite headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW have yet to be filled. If the company's current trajectory holds, they may serve as a sign of growth to come. Co-founder Winston Bao Lord said the nine-person company is looking to bulk up its sales staff — adding as many as one or two employees a month — to its office in D.C. and other cities around the country where Venga is selling software that allows restaurants to track patrons' dining habits. It's a substantive change for a company...

Tons of people are using coupons these days. But a friend recently alerted me to a unique take on the coupon concept: the groupon. In November, Chicago resident Andrew Mason persuaded merchants there to offer a discount if Mason guaranteed them a certain number of customers. The customers buy a "groupon" to get that discounted service. For instance, they might spend $20 for a $50 groupon, meaning each buyer saves $30. Mason has since launched Groupon sites for Boston, New York and San Francisco.

The daily deal is not so hot these days, something Groupon is well aware of. That's why it continues to expand into new areas like products sales with Groupon Goods and merchant services with Groupon Payments and Rewards . The latest sign of its move away from daily deals is Groupon's purchase Monday of discount restaurant reservation service Savored for an undisclosed sum. New York City-based Savored is structured quite differently...

Who: Patty Morrissey, manager of Groupon Grassroots Company : Groupon Charitable giving highlights: The company raised $4.2 million through 1,000 fundraising campaigns. Tell me about the company's corporate philanthropy. We apply that same model that has been successful for small businesses to local causes. The same driver that would make someone try a new local restaurant over a national chain, those same mechanisms are in place for driving people to...