Groupon’s Mason on Strategy, Investment and (Finally) a Way to Stop Those Pole-Dancing Offers

Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason is known for his sense of humor, but during the company’s first earnings call today, it was all business … pretty much.
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Behind the Scenes at Groupon’s Tech Headquarters as It Prepares to Report First Public Earnings

Groupon is slowly building out its technology prowess in Palo Alto, Calif., 2,000 miles away from its headquarters — one acquisition at a time.
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Visa Places Bet on New Approach to Payments With Rare Investment in TrialPay

Visa, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and others are pouring $40 million into TrialPay, which helps companies like Facebook, Gap and Fandango increase sales through the use of incentives.
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Japan’s Rakuten Set to Challenge Amazon With Help From Kobo

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor? It may be a Japanese-based company you’ve never heard of.
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Google’s Head of Consumer Payments, Vikas Gupta, Resigns

Vikas Gupta joined Google 18 months ago after it acquired Jambool, the virtual goods payment platform where he was a founder and CEO.
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Online Commerce Trend: More Spending, Smaller Purchases

The average checkout size is shrinking, even though more people spent more money online. Why? Here are three reasons.
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Greylock’s Reid Hoffman Invests in Swedish Social Gifting Company

Stockholm-based Wrapp, which was founded by former executives from Spotify, Groupon and other companies, has just received a $5 million gift from Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners.
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News Byte

Intuit’s GoPayment Mobile Credit-Card Reader Beats Square’s into Canada

Intuit will soon launch its mobile credit-card reader in Canada, beating the well-funded-and-recognized Square to the market. Both companies distribute devices that allow small-scale merchants to accept credit cards on a cellphone or tablet; so far, Square only operates in the U.S. Intuit, the publicly held company that sells other small-business resources, such as QuickBooks, said its GoPayment device will be available in Canada early this year; it plans to push into other international markets in the future.

10 of the Days Before Christmas Hit $1 Billion in Online Spending

For the second straight year, Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of the year, hitting $1.25 billion in the U.S.
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Visa Names Its New PayPal-Like Digital Wallet Service “V.me”

The brand that consumers will see when Visa’s digital wallet launches early next year won’t be the Visa logo.
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