Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

What’s summer without a little adventure? Edited See winners’ names at the end of the post!

Groupon and ExploreChicago.org (the city’s official tourism site) are giving you the chance to get away for a few days and run amok in our fair city. One winner will enjoy:

- Two tickets on Southwest Airlines to Chicago**

• Two nights at the Fairmont Hotel Chicago (these are swanky digs)
• $250 in Groupon credit to create your custom Groupon weekend and do Chicago like a local

We’ll accept entrants through the form at the end of this blog post through **Thursday, June 17 (sorry, had the wrong date originally!!) and winners will be announced Friday, June 18. Winners will be chosen randomly; enter once per day.

Already have plans to visit Chicago? Check out ExploreChicago.org for a crazy amount of information on street fests, concerts, neighborhoods and everything else we love about our town.

Good luck! Click here to enter on SurveyGizmo

**Trips must be completed before July 31, 2010. Winner and guest must be at least 18 years of age by date of trip. Check out the full rules here.

CONGRATULATIONS to our winners!! - Sarah Mitschke, Raleigh - David Miller, Seattle - Laila Saleem, Washington D.C. - Chris Greenwood, Boston

We’ve emailed you to claim your prize. If any go unclaimed, we’ll be sure to let everyone know and find suitable runners-up. Thanks for entering and keep an eye out for more giveaways soon.

Today we’re introducing a few simple tools for rating your Groupon experiences. After you’ve used a Groupon, you now have the option to award or flag a business. If your experience was exceptionally good, give the business an award and we’ll know to feature them again. If it was a disappointment, flag the business. For everything in between, you don’t have to do a thing – we just want to know when things were especially good or bad.

There’s one more cool thing about Groupon ratings – they’re bidirectional, meaning that merchants can rate you too! If you get an award from a business owner, we’ll reward you with G’s to spend on Groupon. Merchants can also flag the rare troublesome customer, so that we can keep an eye on the bad apples and keep the quality of our community high.

We think these ratings tools will help reinforce the foundation of Groupon’s community – great customers and the best local businesses. Watch the following video to learn more.

If getting a deal on charitable giving seems oxymoronic to you, check out the Groupon we’re running all week for Donors Choose. Thanks to the matching grant provided by a generous philanthropist, you can get a Donors Choose gift certificate for 50% off.

If you’ve never heard of Donors Choose, it’s one of the great success stories in online altruism. Teachers post projects for which they need funding (e.g. “$3,000 needed for microscopes in Mr. Mellon’s 9th grade science class at Sunnyside High School”), and donors fund the projects they want to support. When a project receives enough funds, Donors Choose purchases the materials and delivers them to the classroom.

Considering Groupon’s origin as a group action/fundraising platform called The Point, creative fundraising is in our DNA. So when Charles Best from Donors Choose proposed this idea, we couldn’t wait to give it a try. By combining the ideas of Donors Choose and Groupon, each donor is empowered to effectively win a miniature matching grant – and then choose exactly where she wants her money spent.

Our matching donor has agreed to give up to $500,000, making the fundraising potential of this week’s campaign one million dollars! Hitting that number will take all the help we can get, so please share this Groupon with your friends and family.

This is hardly the first fundraiser to run on Groupon, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting. We love finding creative ways to channel the collective buying power of our customers back into their communities, and are proud to be working with Donors Choose.

Today we’re announcing something really, really big – Groupon is now in Europe via the acquisition of Citydeal, the world’s largest Groupon clone. That means we’re operating in 18 countries, 140 cities, and we have over 900 employees in about a dozen offices across two continents. Not bad for 19 months’ work!

In addition to the US and Canada, you’ll now find Groupon in Germany, the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden, and soon, Norway and Belgium.

What it means

To me, Groupon is one of those beautiful examples of what an early, uncharted, and exciting time this is in the age of the Internet – that such a simple concept could change the face of local commerce almost overnight. Since its launch in Berlin five months ago, Citydeal’s rapid growth across Europe has proven that the Groupon model is truly global – and by coming together, we are establishing Groupon as the company that not only invented, but now universally defines this new model of commerce.

Why we did it this way

We knew that bringing Groupon to Europe wouldn’t be easy. Just adapting Groupon to suit the differences between Miami and Philadelphia is enough of a challenge that we knew we wouldn’t be able to succeed in Europe without amazing entrepreneurs with an intimate understanding of the local cultures.

With that in mind, we started meeting with the horde of European Groupon clones, looking for a team that would do Groupon justice in Europe. Unfortunately, we found them to be very much like the American knockoffs – without the strategic vision or operational chops to do much more than watch us and play Simon Says.

When we met Oliver Samwer – one of the founders of Citydeal – we were prepared for more of the same. Oliver and his two brothers are known for elevating the practice of cloning American business models in Europe into an art form, having successfully founded the German versions of eBay (eBay eventually bought them), Facebook, eHarmony, Zappos, and many more.

But after a few days with Oliver and the rest of the Citydeal management team, we realized that they were among the best operators we’d ever met. It was no wonder they’d become #1 in every one of their countries – in only five months, they’d even become larger than the largest Groupon knockoff in the U.S. It’s absolutely insane how quickly they’ve scaled, with 600 employees working from 80+ European cities, and already saving their customers over $5 million in April alone – their fourth month of operation.

Culturally, we saw the same qualities in the Citydeal team that we have at Groupon. Hardworking and scrappy, blindingly fast executors, refreshingly blunt, no appetite for petty politics, and passionate about pioneering a new model of commerce while wowing every last consumer and merchant they touched.

For those reasons, we think Groupon and Citydeal are a great match.

What happens now

It’ll take months for us to fully integrate Citydeal onto the Groupon platform, but they will adopt our name and design very soon. Until we’re fully integrated, you’ll need a separate account to buy Groupons in, say, Paris and Wichita.

For those of you who are already Citydeal consumers and merchants, welcome to Groupon! We have some amazing things planned over the next several months, but we’d also love to hear what you’d like us to do to make Groupon better – send us your thoughts!

Armed with nothing but a paper suit made of Groupons, some miscellaneous gadgets and a sleep apnea machine, Josh Stevens began his year of living off Groupons today.

read more »

Congratulations to Taija R., this month’s Groupon Photo Contest winner! We had no choice but to acknowledge the most artistic and highbrow entry we received.

Taija says:

“This is us cashing in our Groupon at Salvador Molly’s in Portland, OR with our Salvador Dali mustaches! We loved the silly atmosphere of the restaurant and the fun-loving attitude of the waiter who took our picture.”

read more »

CHICAGO, IL —Groupon has announced the opening of an office in Silicon Valley to gain better access to the Bay Area’s technology talent, with a focus on Groupon’s mobile- and business-intelligence practices.

The core of Groupon’s mobile team comes through the acquisition of mob.ly, a mobile-development firm led by former Yahoo! Senior Director of Product Management Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner, former Director of Engineering at Carrier IQ. Groupon’s business-intelligence practice will be led by Chief Data Officer Mark Johnson, formerly Vice President of Software Engineering at Netflix.

“Now there is no excuse to not work for us,” said Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason. “And Chicago is still super cool. Did you know that we have the world’s largest water-filtration plant? Great city, can’t understand why people wouldn’t want to move here, but whatever—now we’re in the Valley too.”

To celebrate the grand opening of its new location, Groupon is offering a free medium coffee to all visitors this Tuesday, May 11. Said Mason, “Unlike our competitors, or those who would be / will be our competitors if we were in / when we enter the coffee business, we do not require you to bring your own cup.” Simply arrive at 524 Ramona Street in Palo Alto or the Penthouse at 211 Sutter Street in San Francisco between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and knock on the door to claim your free medium coffee.

Groupon is hiring. Visit http://www.groupon.com/jobs for more.

About Groupon

Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, eat, see, and buy in major cities across the United States and in Canada, with plans to be in 100 cities in the United States, Canada, and Europe by the end of 2010. Groupon uses collective buying power to offer unbeatable prices and provide a win-win for businesses and consumers.

About Formerly Mob.ly

Mob.ly launched Goodrec, the mobile recommendation service, in September 2008. They have built mobile applications for several leading brands, such as OpenTable and Yahoo!

CONTACT: Julie Anne Mossler / 312-242-2033
/ julie@groupon.com

Our goal at Groupon is pretty simple: to help you discover and try cool new things in your city. Beginning today, we’re going to reward you for it. “G” is a Groupon reward point. Earn G’s when you use Groupon to explore your city, and spend them on the coolest stuff in town. It’s our way of thanking you for being awesome.

This morning we sent out 10,000 invitations to the beta version of Groupon’s Rewards program — and gave each person the ability to invite 5 friends.  Over the next few months, we’ll continue to invite more and more customers to the program.

Here’s the Gist.

Earning G’s is easy and using them is semi-euphoric.

• G’s = reward points awarded to Groupon Reward members
• Earn G’s automatically by using Groupon
• Spend your G’s on the very best stuff in your city

Lots of Ways to Get G’s.

Earn G’s by getting Groupons, checking out the deal each day, and more. We’re constantly adding more ways to earn G’s to the list.

Two Ways to Use your G’s.

You know those frequent flier programs that make you earn a gabazillion miles for a free flight on a puddle-jumper? Or those punch-cards that you always misplace 2 holes short of a complementary baguette? We want to be better than that. Here’s what you get for your G’s:

click to see fullsize

• LocalRewards: At anytime, no matter how many G’s you have, you can exchange them for discounts in our LocalRewards marketplace, which is packed with the very best things to do in your city. The more G’s you have, the lower your prices fall. It’s that simple.
  
  (if there isn’t a LocalRewards marketplace near you, then there will be soon.)
• Daily Deal: Earn enough G’s, and you’ll automatically get the Daily Deal for free. You don’t have to do anything differently. If you have enough G’s to get the deal, we’ll drop your price to $0.00 at checkout.

G-oodies and parties.

As a Rewards member, you’ll also have access to G-oodies and invitation-only parties in your city. We’re not exactly sure what these parties will be like, but our goal is to recreate your 7th grade formal.

Becoming a Rewards member.

10,000 Groupon customers are now able to invite you and four other friends to the Rewards program. We’ll continue to invite more and more customers in the coming months. In the meantime, ask your friends if they’ve got G’s. We’ll also be sending a few random invitations each day to people who use “#GrouponG” on Twitter.

G’s are in beta, so we hunger for your feedback. Send any questions or comments to the rewards team.