Of course, you knew at least a little bit would slip through.

In response to an analyst who asked about the company’s ability to tailor deals to a person’s interests, Mason hinted at new products coming in the first or second quarter.

In addition to being able to get deals based on multiple locations, gender and past buying behaviors, he said, users will be able to vote down deals if they don’t want to receive similar ones again.

So, if you are male, you won’t have to see offers for bikini waxes, or if you are bald, you won’t have to see offers for barber shops.

Mason said, “It allows us to say, ‘Please stop sending me pole-dancing lessons.’ … That’s been a much requested feature.”

Otherwise, Mason quickly and confidently answered inquiries throughout the call.

But he didn’t talk much about future financial expectations, instead emphasizing the company’s merchant services, new investments (such as its mobile products) and new categories (like products and travel).

So far, few details have been shared on the impact of those offerings, including Groupon Now, which is available in 31 U.S. markets and allows customers to purchase deals that can be redeemed in a short time window. Groupon’s travel site has also gotten quite big through the help of its partner Expedia.

Groupon CFO Jason Child explained that all of the investments are really at an early stage, and it’s uncertain how they will be impacted by seasonality or other economic factors.

The strategy remains to invest in the future, Mason said. “The Groupon of five years from now will require investments in technology and innovations. Despite rapid growth, we estimate that we participate in less than 1 percent of all local transactions.”

Still, the forward-looking statements weren’t enough to satisfy investors who were looking for the company to show a small profit.

For the fourth quarter, Groupon reported a net loss of $42.7 million, or 8 cents a share, compared to a net loss of $378.6 million, or $1.08 a share for the same period in 2010.

Mason concluded his first earnings call by saying: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

And then the stock was clobbered in after-hours trading, falling nearly 15 percent, or $3.68 a share, to $20.90.

For the past 14 years, Shatner has been the company’s celebrity spokesperson, and for the past five years he has played the role of the “Priceline Negotiator,” a James Bond-like character who stops at nothing to help people find the best travel deals. The latest ad is a cliff-hanger, with Shatner apparently blown to smithereens aboard a plunging bus after giving the escaping passengers some quick travel booking tips.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company said Shatner will remain under contract, but it’s unclear what will happen to him after his last deal.

Priceline said it decided to kill off the Negotiator character in order to focus on its fixed-price hotel inventory, which is its fastest-growing segment. It will continue to offer its Name Your Own Price hotel service.

The hotel-booking industry is constantly getting more competitive, with several new players, including Kayak, Google and a hotel-backed search service called Room Key.

While Priceline’s future commercials are expected to explore the aftermath of the bus crash, we’ll see if it gets that far. Right after the new ad started airing, the American Bus Association asked Priceline to pull the ad because it “damages the reputation of our industry.” And as for Shatner — well, maybe he transported off the bus just in time, or there was a rift in the time-space continuum, or somehow he managed the kind of escape that kept James T. Kirk going through umpteen shows and movies. Or maybe not.

Priceline’s stock fell 56 cents today to close at $518 a share.

Here’s a look at the new commercial:

But it doesn’t use Facebook or any identifying information. Instead, Expedia surfaces the best deals found by other travelers, anonymously, for flights and hotel rooms, based on your location.

The site will list the best deals for three time periods: tonight, this weekend or next weekend. Customers can search for hotels or flights based on a couple dozen destinations.

For example, this weekend, nights at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers cost $113 and the cheapest flight out of Los Angeles tonight is to Seattle for $252 roundtrip.

The process is similar to other flash sales sites that sell apparel or other items at a discount based on inventory. Many other flash sales sites focus on travel, too, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter. However, there’s one big difference with this service. The deals are being found by other customers searching the site. The service is not being driven by a special sales relationship between Expedia and the suppliers.

That probably means the deals are not unique to Expedia and can be found on other travel aggregation sites, but at the same time, Expedia didn’t have to hire a sales team or build out a lot of infrastructure to support the feature.

“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, VP and GM of Expedia, in a statement.

The Web site is very simple to navigate and takes out a lot of the headaches of searching millions of listings. That also means that the selection is limited to around six results for each time period — in other words, not a ton of destinations or hotels to pick from. Cancun was offering six hotel rooms — some for as low as $40 a night — for this weekend. Orlando also listed six hotel rooms, all under $100 a night.

This is not Expedia’s first experiment in the deals space.

Last summer, it launched a partnership with Groupon that sells vouchers for vacations around the world. It said it successfully sold 15,000 travel deals in the first three days of launching that partnership, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the model yet. It also launched a program called ASAP (A Sudden Amazing Price), which lists deals at 9 am PT and is bookable for 12 hours only.

We confirmed his resignation with a spokesperson, but it was first reported by Geekwire’s John Cook this morning.

The spokesperson did not provide a reason for Durchslag’s departure, adding that the role would now be filled by Expedia’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Before Durchslag’s 14-month stint at Expedia, he was the COO at Skype and a corporate VP at Motorola. As seen in the photo on the right, Durchslag attended the  D conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., last June to announce a travel partnership with Groupon before Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed on stage.

Expedia’s stock was trading down about 1 percent, or 40 cents, today to $28.91 a share.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

The company, which was officially spun out of Expedia yesterday, is trading down $1.24, or 4 percent, to $29.01 a share, under the ticker symbol TRIP.

Since Dec. 6, when Expedia shareholders approved the spinoff, the company had been trading temporarily under the symbol TRIPV.

While TripAdvisor’s stock price is lower today, it’s trading higher than Expedia’s, which was up 76 cents, or 2.8 percent, to only $27.61 a share.

The two companies picked a challenging time to conduct a split, with other recent IPOs, like Zynga, also struggling to trade higher. Kayak, a close competitor, has also decided to put its IPO plans on hold, however, that could change if the stocks perform well.

The breakup of Expedia and TripAdvisor creates two distinct companies.

Expedia, based in Bellevue, Wash., will be a travel agency focused on selling airline tickets and hotel and car rentals. TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Mass., will now serve as a travel-reviews site, operating in 27 countries and 19 languages. Without ties to Expedia, it can now solicit the highest referral fees from a number of travel agencies.

Much of the thought process behind the split has to do with what Expedia thinks its business is worth, compared to Wall Street’s valuation, and how much it will be valued on its own.

While Expedia’s travel agency business garners the most attention, it is TripAdvisor that has the bigger growth story.

Now that it is solo, it will be important to watch how its independent valuations evolve.

To celebrate the day, Stephen Kaufer, co-founder and chief executive officer of TripAdvisor, rang Nasdaq’s opening bell this morning — noticeably all by himself, without Expedia executives by his side.

In April, Expedia proposed a plan that would break the business into two public companies.

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals, and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The deal is expected to close on or about Dec. 20, including a one-for-two reverse stock split immediately prior to the spin-off. Expedia will trade under the symbol EXPE and TripAdvisor will trade under TRIP.

Today, the company filed a presentation with the Securities & Exchange Commission detailing Expedia’s standalone growth prospects. The case will be an important one to make given that TripAdvisor is often seen as the more attractive of the two companies.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company plans to present the slides to various investors and analysts over the next two-and-a-half months.

In the presentation, Expedia lists three major growth opportunities: International expansion, especially in Asia; a greater concentration on hotel bookings, which have higher margins than airplane tickets; and new distribution platforms, such as cellphones and tablets.

Expedia is a traditional travel agency that collects fees when an airfare or hotel room is booked. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor, which aggregates user-generated reviews, produces revenue from advertising, as well as fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz.

In the quarter ended in September, TripAdvisor’s revenue jumped by 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Expedia’s revenues rose only 14 percent.

Additionally, the company is breaking up as it faces increasing competition from Google, which has started integrating the technology of ITA, a travel software company it acquired, into its search results.

Expedia’s stock today is trading at $28.65, up 61 cents.

During the Norwalk, Conn.-based company’s third-quarter conference call today, it fielded questions about the impact of Google adding airfare and hotel information to its search results through its acquisition of ITA Software.

Priceline CEO Jeffery Boyd said that, so far, it looks like Google has created “platforms that can be operated as an efficient vehicle for advertisers to get qualified leads.” He added that his company’s approach is “as an advertiser, and to participate as effectively as we can.”

Some companies, including Kayak and Expedia, worried about Google’s market power if it was able to acquire ITA. But Priceline did not object, Boyd said.

“The transaction was approved and we think it’s incumbent upon our industry to find the best ways to integrate and advertise on it, and try to get the wealth of qualified customers that Google is trying to drive toward us,” he said.

The downside: If Google is able to send more qualified leads, it might be able to charge advertisers more.

Priceline beat analyst expectations in the third quarter. Revenue grew 45 percent, to $1.4 billion; net income doubled to $469.5 million, or $9.17 a share, compared to the year-ago period.

But three months later, the Bellevue, Wash.-based online travel agency is questioning the long-term value of those bargain shoppers.

In Expedia’s conference call yesterday discussing its third quarter results, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi admitted sales from the Groupon Getaways partnership were impressive, but questioned the incremental value to the business and whether they were returning to Expedia to book other trips.

“Are they coming back and using Expedia for their other travel needs?” asked Khosrowshahi, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. “Groupon has been a strong partner for us. And I think over time and especially into next year, we’re going to figure out what the best approach is going to be.”

In addition, he said, Expedia is trying out a number of other discounted options. A product called ASAP deals offers good prices on Expedia; there are 48-hour sales on Hotels.com; and on Hotwire, various deals are aggregated in a travel ticker. He also is looking into mobile as a specific channel for deals.

This is not the first time that Groupon has faced questions about the loyalty of its customers. Merchants and restaurant owners regularly struggle to understand whether one-time heavy discounts create long-term relationships with customers.

Groupon Getaways was announced the same day in June that the daily deals giant filed for an initial public offering, which at the time was aiming to raise $750 million. The partnership didn’t go live until the following month.

Now Groupon is out on the road pitching investors and seeking to raise a more modest $540 million.

But shares were down 6.5 percent at $27.20 after hours. Through Thursday’s close, the stock had risen 16 percent so far this year.

The company — which operates its namesake Web site, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com — said gross bookings rose 11 percent in the latest period, while transactions were up 9.4 percent.

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It’s got some serious obstacles.

BuyWithMe is competing with both Groupon and LivingSocial, which have voracious appetites for cash — and frankly, have the market share to come closer to justifying it.

Groupon is close to completing a $540 million IPO and LivingSocial is assumed to be considering raising another private round instead of tapping the public markets.

Reports by DailyDealMedia and BetaBeat pegged BuyWithMe’s layoffs at between 50 and 75 percent of the company’s staff. A year ago, it had 90-plus employees, but its ranks have likely swelled as it made several acquisitions and attempted to expand nationally.

In an official statement last week, CEO Jim Crowley said: “BuyWithMe did have a significant reduction in staffing … We did this so the company is in the best position to continue to serve its merchants and members. As an organization we’re continuing to pursue our business and to support our customers throughout the country.”

In all, the company had raised at least $21 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Matrix Partners at one time.

A year ago, when the company’s CEO Cheryl Rosner, formerly of TicketsNow and Expedia, left after only eight months on the job, its plan was to add more markets, hire more employees and raise more cash.

Since then, it’s done all but one of those three things, meaning its burn rate and expenses increased without additional investments.

In the past six months alone, it purchased six companies, many of them smaller players, as well as some technology, too.

However, as it turns out, investors haven’t been impressed by the company’s artificial growth rates.

A source close to the situation said BuyWithMe hasn’t been able to raise more money, and “they need a lot.” Meanwhile, the insiders don’t want to cough up what’s needed. “They spent as though money was no object to try to compete,” the source said.

It’s not that capital has dried up for all companies competing in the broader daily deals space. In fact, some might consider it downright frothy. Beyond Groupon and LivingSocial, San Francisco-based Bloomspot raised $40 million in capital in August and Group Commerce, a white label provider, raised $10 million in a follow-on round in May. In the broader space, there’s been a coupon craze, with several providers raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few months alone.

But without many points of differentiation, BuyWithMe’s prospects are shrinking.

The company has often been considered the third-largest player in the space behind Groupon and LivingSocial, but now others are elbowing in, such as Travelzoo, Google and Amazon.

BuyWithMe’s best chances are to find a buyer.

It has a sizable — and valuable — email list, some technology assets and a recently rolled-out loyalty program. And, there are definitely still companies looking to enter the space.

A study by the 451 Group’s M&A KnowledgeBase found that as of August, mergers and acquisitions in the daily deal and coupon space were up 700 percent year over year to 35 from only five in the same period in 2010. Since then, dozens of others have been made.

The buyers aren’t always what you expect them to be, either. While some providers, like BuyWithMe and CrowdSavings, are adding markets through the acquisitions of one-off daily deals sites, other buyers are large marketing firms. For instance, Stamford, Conn.-based Affinion Group, a marketing and customer-engagement agency, paid $30 million for Eversave in July. ReachLocal, a search-engine marketing company for small and medium-size businesses, purchased DealOn Media for $10 million.

With the launch of the travel vertical, the members-only flash sales site treads more heavily into the territory of others who have been working on travel packages and other experiences for much longer.

Several other daily deals and flash sales sites have already gotten into the business of offering travel packages, including Groupon’s partnership with Expedia and Gilt Groupe’s high-end, exclusive vacations on its own Jetsetter.com.

The company’s new Lot18 Experiences will offer a twist, focusing exclusively on wine and gourmet food-themed excursions, from vineyard tours to dinners at well-known restaurants.

New York-based Lot18, which has raised roughly $13 million from investors, including the founders of Amazon-owned Diapers.com, has 550,000 members and has sold more than 500,000 bottles of wine.

The capital was expected to be used for launching new verticals; the launch of Lot18 Experiences coincides with the company’s one-year anniversary.

When it goes live today, travel packages will include a seven-week trip to several of the world’s major wine regions (Bordeaux, Napa, Mendoza, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Germany and Portugal). On a smaller scale, there will be one-night-only offers, such as food and wine pairing dinners at Auberge du Soleil in Napa and Le Bernardin in New York.

It will also launch soon in Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities, through a network of partner sites to be announced later.

In addition to wine and experiences, the site offers gourmet food products, such as olive oil, chocolate, caviar, coffee and more.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer, said the current market is too volatile and is not meeting the company’s expectations.

“We are going to file when the market conditions are favorable to IPOs,” he said.

In the meantime, Birge said, Kayak is committed to keeping its filing up to date with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so if the conditions change, the company will be able to move quickly.

“It gives us the flexibility to respond to market conditions,” he said.

Kayak, which filed 11 months ago to raise at least $50 million, is one of roughly 200 companies that make up one of the biggest IPO backlogs in the past five years.

Two other high-profile examples are Groupon, the daily deals site that wants to raise $750 million, and Zynga, the social games maker that is seeking $1 billion in additional funding.

Kara Swisher reported last week that despite copious amounts of negative press, Groupon has no plans to back down from going public. Likewise, according to our sources, Zynga’s IPO remains on track.

Birge was not able to elaborate on the company’s plans or whether it was seeking alternate exits, like a sale or staying private and raising more cash. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company updated its filing recently to suggest it was looking at other alternatives as an IPO became less likely.

But unlike Groupon or Zynga, which filed this summer to go public, Kayak has had nearly a year to pull the trigger, which predates much of the market volatility, raising the question of why it has taken Kayak so long.

Birge said even if the market conditions are right, the SEC must sign off on the offering in order to go public.

Perhaps the market will be more favorable once there are more comparable companies with positive valuations. Already there are a number of other public competitors, including Priceline, Orbitz and Expedia.

One big public event coming up will be Expedia’s spin off of TripAdvisor, which will create two separately traded entities. In that scenario, Expedia’s results would no longer also include TripAdvisor’s advertising business, and Expedia alone could more closely resemble Kayak’s business.

As a result, Greystripe, a mobile ad network purchased by ValueClick in April, says that it has seen travel-related mobile ad campaigns increase by nearly 50 percent over the past year.

In a study, it found that the overwhelming majority of iPad owners, or 91 percent, used their device for a travel-related activity. The data was collected from Greystripe’s 971 users on a network of iPhone (including the iPod touch), Android and iPad devices during June.

Specifically, it found that 47 percent of iPad users booked hotel rooms, which seems to coincide with the boom of applications catering to this activity.

I’ve written in the past about how travel companies are flooding the mobile app stores, including Expedia, Kayak, Priceline and even start-ups, like HotelTonight, which will find you a room the night you need it. What’s more, InterContinental Hotels Group, the massive hotel chain that includes Holiday Inn, told me it recorded $10 million in mobile revenues in April, jumping from only $1 million in the same period a year earlier.

Following closely after hotels, Greystripe said 37 percent of iPad owners used the tablet to book a flight; 28 percent have used it to make a restaurant reservation; and 24 percent have used it to rent a car.

Although Greystripe found that applications were not required, in fact, 69 percent of iPad users were more likely to use the mobile Web compared to 49 percent of iPhone and Android users.

Later today, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will appear at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee for hearings on whether Google is a search bully or not.

Schmidt, according to written testimony obtained by the Politico blog, will be trotting out the company’s longtime argument that its competitors are “only one click away” from taking Google down.

And, in what can only be described as a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding furthering of that meme, Schmidt will apparently claim that Microsoft’s much tinier Bing search service could catch and pass Google by next year.

Reads the testimony, according to Politico: “Microsoft’s Bing launched in June 2009 and has grown so rapidly that some commentators have speculated that it could overtake Google as early as 2012.”

Say what? Say ridonkulous! The Facebook worry, I get, but costing-Microsoft-a-billion-a-quarter Bing?

That’s because in the most recent market-share report from comScore, Google had 64.8 percent of the total, with Yahoo at 16.3 percent and Bing at 14.7 percent. Even combining the pair — who are currently in a search partnership — they still have less than half the share that Google has.

In any case, although the Google-as-imminently-threatened concept displays a lot of gumption, it’ll be interesting watching Schmidt try to sell it.

And also to see Google’s critics call foul.

After Schmidt appears, there will be a second panel, featuring Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Nextag; and Tom Barnett, spokesman for FairSearch.org and counsel to Expedia.

Stoppelman, who almost sold his online reviews company to Google in late 2009, has since become a vocal detractor of the search giant’s methods.

In his testimony as well as exhibits, all posted below, Stoppelman paints a more dire picture of Google:

“When one company controls the market, it ultimately controls consumer choice. If competition really were just ‘one click away’ as Google suggests, why have they invested so heavily to be the default choice on web browsers and mobile phones? Clearly they are not taking any chances.”

Stay tuned for my liveblog at 11 am PT, as well as other AllThingsD coverage of the hearings.

9.21.11 Verbal Testimony _10am final_

9.21.11 Written Testimony _clean_

9.21.11 Exhibits

In a preview of Wednesday’s Senate antitrust hearing on whether Google abuses its dominance on the Web, representatives of the sites — which help people search for information on consumer goods, local businesses and airline flights — said in interviews this week that Google has increasingly sought to drive people who use its search engine to its own specialized sites that compete with theirs.

One of the companies, Nextag, is going even further. Chief Executive Jeff Katz said Google also prevents his company’s site from bidding on the prominent ads that show up next to search results for products such as running shoes. Instead, he said, because Google sees his company as a threat, Nextag can only bid to appear in text ads lower down on the results page, limiting its exposure to consumers.

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You can probably guess what it is: A search engine that helps you sort through flight information and fares. It’s not exactly going to knock your socks off, but it’s an indicator of things to come. Google has said in the past that it thinks there’s still room for innovation in the travel search and booking market.

One thing I noticed is that you can already see flight information showing up in regular Google search queries highlighted by a tiny blue airplane in the results.

Google produced a video showing the service in action, which I’ve embedded below.

Expedia announced today as part of its second-quarter earnings that customers bought 15,000 travel deals within three days of it launching an exclusive partnership with Groupon.

The partnership went live on July 11, offering a dozen or so travel discounts that let people book hotel rooms and airfare at half the cost for destinations around the world. The two companies announced the partnership in June at the D Conference, before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason appeared on stage.

On the company’s conference call, it added that when the partnership launched, it offered roughly 25 deals, almost all of which sold out.

So far, it said the deals that have performed the best are for big tourist destinations in the U.S., like Las Vegas. The ones that have had a harder time are foreign destinations that require booking an international flight.

Another interesting detail the Bellevue, Wash.-based travel site revealed today was that collectively its mobile applications are downloaded an average of 36 times every minute, which is an increase of about 20 percent compared to the first quarter.

In March, the company unveiled its new mobile strategy, which included launching standalone hotel-booking applications. Expedia now has a variety of apps on both iPhone and Android for multiple brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Hotwire’s Travel-Ticker.

In the second quarter, Expedia reported a profit of $140.4 million on revenues of $1 billion. In the same period a year ago, it recorded a profit of $114.3 million on revenues of $834 million.

The company said higher revenues were driven by a 21 percent increase in hotel room nights year over year, and 27 percent increase in advertising and media revenue from its TripAdvisor division.

As previously announced, Expedia intends on spinning off its TripAdvisor business into a separate publicly traded company. It has filed the preliminary proxy statement required to complete the transaction, but has not announced when shareholders will vote on the spin-off.

The company’s stock jumped $2.26 a share, or 7.8 percent in after-hours trading to close at $31.25, regaining ground after falling 77 cents a share during regular hours.

The partnership was originally announced at the D Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., right before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason appeared on stage. In a video, I interview Mason and Scott Durchslag, Expedia’s president, which is at the bottom of this post.

So far, there’s about a dozen discounts being offered on Groupon, from domestic trips to Denver to more tropical vacations in Tahiti. The deals maintain the same style as the daily deal vouchers we have all started to become accustomed to.

For example, for $79, you can buy a one-night weekday stay for two at the Pointe Hotel in Cavendish, Vt., representing a 53 percent savings. A one-night stay in a luxury mineral spa resort in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan costs $130 (Canadian), which is 54 percent off. On the upper end is a $1,000 voucher — it costs $500 — that can be applied toward a Tahitian vacation package or toward airfare, hotel or tours once you arrive at the destination.

Together, Groupon and Expedia are entering a crowded market, ranging from Groupon’s next-nearest competitor LivingSocial’s own branded Escapes business to other companies, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter and even Overstock.com.

One of the value propositions that the two are offering is making the fine print as straightforward as possible. For example, once a customer purchases a voucher, they will be able to redeem it over the next year based on availability, and that they’ll do their best to avoid the dreaded blackout travel dates.

Most of the offers on the site expire in the next six or seven days.

Despite only being posted for a short time, the Tahiti vacation already has one customer confused. In a comment, a customer asks: “I would like to buy this for myself and my wife. Can I buy 2 and she buy 2 from her account and we use it towards our package ??? since ur allowed to use 2 per person … the other question is, if I am interested in 3-4 nights vacation, how much would the arifare would be around Nov 2011.”

Maybe it’s still not as easy to understand as they thought?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110711/first-travel-deals-go-live-as-groupon-and-expedia-partnership-takes-off/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110711/tripadvisor-buys-once-popular-facebook-app-where-ive-been/ http://allthingsd.com/20110711/tripadvisor-buys-once-popular-facebook-app-where-ive-been/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:44:13 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=96234 TripAdvisor, which is planning to spin off from Expedia in the not too distant future, has acquired Where I’ve Been, the once-popular Facebook application that allows users to pinpoint on a map where they’ve traveled and where they want to go.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Where I’ve Been, based in Chicago, was caught up in the craze when third-party applications first made it onto the social networking platform and spread like wildfire across people’s walls.

At its peak, it had 116,328 daily active users and nearly 1.6 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Its traffic has since fallen to 3,000 daily users and 70,000 monthly users.

TripAdvisor, which focuses on user-generated reviews and recommendations for accommodations around the world, said the company was founded by Michael Dalesandro and Craig Ulliott, and that the product team will join its company.

In all, 10 million people have created color-coded travel maps to mark off traveling to around half a billion places.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110711/tripadvisor-buys-once-popular-facebook-app-where-ive-been/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110709/groupon-updates-privacy-rules-including-on-mobile-tracking-and-sharing-of-personal-information/ http://allthingsd.com/20110709/groupon-updates-privacy-rules-including-on-mobile-tracking-and-sharing-of-personal-information/#comments Sun, 10 Jul 2011 06:33:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=96006

Groupon sent out emails to its users this weekend, about changes it has made to its privacy statement and terms of use.

Among the most notable changes is more information about the Chicago-based social buying start-up’s collection and use of mobile location information.

Said Groupon:

“In short, if you use a Groupon mobile app and you allow sharing through your device, Groupon may collect geo-location information from the device and use it for marketing deals to you (and for other purposes listed in the “How Groupon Uses Personal Information” section of the Updated Privacy Statement).”

In other words, if you let them, in order to improve the experience and make the Groupon Now app more useful, you’re being tracked.

This, of course, has been a dicey issue of late, most recently related to Apple and Google smartphones and what information they collect and retain.

In addition, with a pending IPO, Groupon is under all kinds of scrutiny and any big changes will be closely studied.

In addition, in its email to customers (see below in its entirety), the company said that it had broadened the definition of personal information to include your interests and habits and also that it may share that personal information with partners in new offering areas, such as travel deals with Expedia.

Groupon said it was also trying to improve readability of its consumer information and give greater transparency to its customers.

Here is the whole Groupon memo about the changes:

Wondering about Changes to the Groupon Privacy Statement?

We want to tell you a little more about some material changes we just made to the July 22, 2010 version of the Groupon Privacy Statement (the “Old Privacy Statement”) to create the new Groupon Privacy Statement (the “Updated Privacy Statement”).

In general, all of the changes to the Updated Privacy Statement were made to improve readability, provide greater transparency about our information handling practices, address some new types of relationships Groupon is forging and new technologies Groupon is using or may use, and to let you know about the privacy choices you have. Read on.

* Groupon continues to be a proud member of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. The Updated Privacy Statement contains a reference to the most current version of the TRUSTe Program Rules and includes some additional statements required by those Program Rules. As a TRUSTe Privacy Seal holder, Groupon is committed to complying with the Program Rules as applicable to its online privacy program.

* The Updated Privacy Statement replaces the phrase “Personally Identifiable Information” with “Personal Information” to improve readability and accuracy. (More on this below.)

* The Updated Privacy Statement clarifies that Personal Information is any information that could be used to identify, locate or contact an individual. This definition is broader than the definition in the Old Privacy Statement, which limited the concept of personally identifiable information to identification information in the context of certain defined identification activities. (Whew!) The broader definition in the Updated Privacy Statement reflects our dedication to protecting privacy in all areas of our business.

* The Updated Privacy Statement includes a definition of Personal Information and explains the types of Personal Information collected, used and disclosed by Groupon, namely “Contact Information,” “Relationship Information,” “Transaction Information,” “Financial Account Information,” and “Mobile Location Information.” These definitions provide more meaningful definition about the types of information we collect and how we classify information internally.

* The Updated Privacy Statement has shortened the section that goes on about how we use and disclose non-identifiable information. This change was made to improve readability so we could focus more on talking about what we do with Personal Information.

* The Updated Privacy Statement contains information on Groupon’s collection and use of Mobile Location Information. In short, if you use a Groupon mobile app and you allow sharing through your device, Groupon may collect geo-location information from the device and use it for marketing deals to you (and for other purposes listed in the “How Groupon Uses Personal Information” section of the Updated Privacy Statement).

* The Updated Privacy Statement presents Groupon’s disclosures of Personal Information in a more detailed and transparent fashion. The new “When and Why Groupon Discloses Personal Information” section of the Updated Privacy Statement details the circumstances when Personal Information is shared with third parties in a comprehensive, bulleted-list format. This section reinforces Groupon’s commitment to protect privacy by generally limiting disclosures of Personal Information to our affiliates and services providers and to those merchants and business partners with whom our users interact.

* The Updated Privacy Statement omits the section in the Old Privacy Statement regarding disclosures of Personal Information to Google for remarketing purposes. Groupon does not provide Personal Information to Google for remarketing.

The Old Privacy Statement’s section on “Data Tracking” has been replaced with an expanded section on “Cookies and Related Technologies” to provide greater transparency around data collection technologies. This section contains information about all of the ways that we collect information using automated technologies, including cookies, pixel tags, web beacons, browser analysis tools, and web logs. The section is designed to educate readers about the types of data collected by each technology as well as how the data is used by Groupon. The Updated Privacy Statement clarifies that if automatically-collected data is associated with Personal Information, it is protected by the Updated Privacy Statement. This section also provides information about third party advertising relationships in a more readable form and includes a new paragraph regarding our relationship with Omniture.

* The Updated Privacy Statement contains an expanded section on user choice. The “Your Choices” section in the Updated Privacy Statement provides readers with information on many different types of privacy choices that they can make, along with instructions for exercising the choice. This section also consolidates information on choices that was distributed throughout the Old Privacy Statement and contains a new link to the TRUSTe preferences page.

* The Updated Privacy Statement’s section on “Security of Personal Information” has been streamlined to more-simply state our commitment to maintaining a reasonable information security program with expected administrative, technical and physical controls.

* The Old Privacy Statement’s section “Updating and Correcting Personal Information” has been replaced with a new section “Accessing and Correcting Personal Information.” This section has been revised to improve readability and clarify the processes by which users can access, update and delete their Personal Information. This section of the Updated Privacy Statement also contains a new paragraph regarding data retention. This paragraph was added for clarity and to comply with the TRUSTe Program Rules.

* The Updated Privacy Statement contains a new section giving “Notice to Residents of Countries Outside of the United States of America.” This section educates international users about the fact that Groupon is based in the U.S. so Personal Information may be transferred to the U.S. for processing.

* The “Miscellaneous Privacy Issues” section in the Old Privacy Statement has been deleted and the content it contains has been included in more appropriate, descriptive sections elsewhere in the policy. Also, we omitted the section discussing children’s information because Groupon is not designed for children and the Groupon deals are not offered to individuals under the age of majority in their states of residence. See our Terms of Use.

* The Updated Privacy Statement introduces a new contact mechanism for privacy-related inquiries: privacy@groupon.com. While general customer service questions should still be directed to support@groupon.com, the new address provides a way for us to respond to questions that our users have specifically about the privacy of their Personal Information.

And here is the email sent to users, titled “Updates to Privacy Statement and Terms of Use”:

We wanted to let you know that we’ve updated both our Privacy Statement and our Terms of Use. These new terms, which affect all Groupon users, accommodate our new products and services that allow us to offer you more relevant deals.

If you don’t feel like wading through long legal documents, here’s a summary of the notable changes, in plain English:

We’ve clarified that Groupon Now! and our other mobile apps may collect geo-location data. This lets us present you offers that are close by. See Sections 1 and 5 of the Privacy Statement.

We’ve broadened the definition of “personal information” to include your interests and habits, and provided additional details about how we collect and use your information. We’ve done this so that we can better understand what types of offers you’ll find valuable. See Section 1 of the Privacy Statement.

You may know that we’ve started working with partners to offer Groupon users new deal categories — for example, travel deals with Expedia. Our new privacy statement explains that we may share your personal information with these partners if you subscribe to special communications or buy deals in these new deal categories. See Section 4 of the Privacy Statement.

We’ve updated our Terms of Use to help you understand the expiration policies for different vouchers, including Groupon NOW! vouchers. This explains, for example, that if you don’t use a Groupon NOW! voucher within 30 days we’ll refund the purchase amount. See Section 7 of the Terms of Use.

We also clarified our expectations to ensure that our customers and visitors use the services on our website in a way that keeps the experience good for everyone. For example, we’ve prohibited abusive practices like opening multiple accounts, submitting false information and other practices that we think detract from everyone’s experience with us. See Section 5 of the Terms of Use.

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