Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

That's the plan, says CEO Andrew Mason.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Google's Drive Leaks Continue . It now looks that when Google's cloud storage app Google drive arrives it'll come with a capacity bigger than an earlier rumored 2GB storage capacity, instead offering 5GB for your documents

The Groupon hangover is setting in, and providers and retailers alike are looking for a Bloody Mary. Would you buy a $5-for-$10-at-Lioni-Italian-Heroes coupon from this man? Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wants to know.

The Groupon hangover is setting in, and providers and retailers alike are looking for a Bloody Mary.

The Groupon hangover is setting in, and providers and retailers alike are looking for a Bloody Mary. Would you buy a $5-for-$10-at-Lioni-Italian-Heroes coupon from this man

The Groupon CEO talks about competing with Google, selling his stock, and his designs on mobile coupons.

Mark Zuckerberg isnt the only entrepreneur good at making bank.

The startup Womply recently brought us Groupon-like "effortless offers." Today it launches Loyalty Cloud, hoping to slice through the messy customer-loyalty market with the "simplest loyalty program ever for local merchants." Last month a new startup, Womply , launched to bring "effortless offers" schemes to local merchants--coming with an impressive pedigree because it's co-founder Brandt Squires was formerly GM and Head of Sales at LivingSocial . Just weeks later, Womply has an additional offering--Loyalty Cloud--that promises the same sort of effortless experience but for customer loyalty schemes, rather than Groupon -style "special offers." According to the new sitei, it's simplicity rests on the fact that, "Merchants create offers that reward customers for repeat visits and Womply handles everything else, from marketing and remitting offers to customers, to providing analysis and insight on the amount of revenue generated as a result." To this end, Womply's new Loyalty Cloud is trying to be a complete one-stop shop for local business loyalty schemes: Simpler even than stamping a rubber stamp on a collector card, and providing deep customer analytics that would be tricky to get any other way. It manages this by being seamless from a customer and merchant point of view, with the transaction happening "in the cloud" via "Womply's high-tech platform that enables the company to spot credit and debit card transactions at participating merchants and to push cash credits to customer payment cards." The whole thing is designed to be merchant-centric, rather than focussing on the deals or the end-user customers.

It's going to be a wild ride on Friday when Groupon launches into the public markets. Here are three things to keep in mind as you watch the price race up and down.

It's been a rocky road to going public for Groupon, which has faced scrutiny from investors, analysts, and the SEC leading up to its October 24 IPO road show. Scott Sweet , the senior managing partner of IPO Boutique, a Tampa-based firm that advises companies on the road to going public, says that in his 39 years of analyzing initial public offerings, he's never seen anything like this.

Did the new numbers in Groupon's pre-IPO filing leave you ready to write off the daily deals company? Maybe you should take a second look

Two summers ago Groupon had 37 employees. Now it has just under 10,000. There's rapid growth, and then there's Groupon.

oBaz is short for online bazaar, and like that famously fluid market environment, it's all about haggling to get what you want.

LivingSocial has acquired popular pan-Arab coupon site GoNabit for an undisclosed sum, which is good news for local startups and quite bad news for Groupon's struggling Middle East operations. LivingSocial announced the acquisition of pan-Arab deals site GoNabit for an undisclosed sum today

A new analysis shows that the race between online discount services Groupon, Living Social, and others is less about what they're offering or even how they're offering it and more about where they're prospecting.