The Wiley, Inc.-owned travel guide maker is working with e-publishing platform Inkling to bring full guidebooks to the tablet device. Included in the guides are constant weather updates; day-by-day itineraries; interactive maps and photos overlaid with data; suggested venues, tourist attractions and restaurants; and easy-to-access links to other information within the guides.

Right now there are only seven “Day by Day” digital guides available: Alaska, California, Costa Rica, France, Great Britain, Japan and Spain, with more destinations expected to come. The guides are available through iTunes and Inkling’s Web site, and range in price from $10 to $15.

Many people are already relying on a mobile device for info while traveling, and there are plenty of cheaper or free travel apps available. But many of them are just that — apps, or digital extensions of existing content — whereas Frommer’s is actually recreating the guide as an e-book. For Inkling, which launched in 2009 with the intent to reinvent the textbook, it’s the start-up’s first step outside of the higher education textbook market.

At first glance, the guides on the iPad are pretty gorgeous and could inspire even a fierce workaholic to consider taking time off. However, a few obvious drawbacks to setting aside your paper guide come to mind right away. First, you might not have data service or readily available Wi-Fi where you’re traveling. Aso, carrying around a $600 electronic device and whipping it out on a dodgy street corner to gaze at a map is probably not advisable in some places.

Lastly (cue the soundtrack for nostalgia), there’s something to be said for dead-tree versions of travel books. Like obscure maps, they may just collect dust in some office-like area of your house, but they say you were there. The notes scribbled on their pages are either first impressions you’ve forgotten or then-timely updates (“construction over Cathedral — didn’t see all of it”). Even better, you can hand them down to friends who are interested in journeying to the same place.

Fortunately a lot of the Frommer’s content, though not all, can be downloaded and cached on your iPad in advance. You can also access them from an iPhone or iPod Touch, if you’d rather not carry a tablet with you, and, as Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis points out, the digital versions of the guides, unlike paper, are constantly being updated to include new information.

The app also allows for note-taking next to entries, and users actually have the option to make those notes public to other app users.

Another bonus of being digitally connected, of course, is that the foreign translation for “Where’s the restroom?” is just a few clicks away.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News

According to sources close to the situation, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy will be stepping down from the board of Groupon.

Schultz’s departure will be effective today, but Efrusy — who was critical to the initial funding around the Chicago-based daily deals site — will not be standing for re-election at the company’s annual meeting in June.

The departures are voluntary, but sources said the pair will be replaced by two new directors with significantly more fiscal oversight experience, whom one source characterized as “accounting types.”

(Update: Groupon just posted a press release noting the board departures, with the names of the new board pencil pushers: Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately in Schultz’s place. Full press release below.)

It is a move that is critical, given Groupon’s recent series of missteps around its financial reporting that have hurt both its reputation and, more importantly, its stock.

Interestingly, several sources noted that Schultz almost left the board right before Groupon’s public offering last fall, after several ongoing disputes with its management, but stayed on so as not to scuttle its IPO.

The board of the company has not involved itself as prominently in the accounting messes at the company, but it appears as if they will begin to now.

It must, given Groupon shares have been trading at a low of $11. Its stock has dipped to $10.98 today.

As Tricia Duryee wrote recently about the fall:

At that price, it is now worth just over $7 billion, down 57 percent since the company went public last November and well off the more than $10 billion it was valued at as tech’s hottest start-up of 2011.

Ironically, Groupon’s current market valuation is actually not much more than the $6 billion offered for it by search giant Google in late 2010.

The fall of Groupon has been swift, from the honorific of being the fastest-growing company ever to one that cannot keep control of that runaway growth.

That’s perhaps no surprise.

Perhaps most significantly, Groupon went public in just four years, delivering the biggest tech IPO since Google.

The quicksilver move was typical for it. In just two years’ time, the company ballooned from 37 employees to 9,625 and from serving five markets in the U.S. to 175 in North America alone. And that’s leaving out massive expansion abroad. In the past year, Groupon has acquired roughly 17 companies, including many international copycats.

The company also has entered many new segments, expanding from selling lower-priced and simpler deals on restaurants and spas to more complex and pricey arenas, including travel, physical goods and luxury items.

But Groupon is now learning that its original business does not work across just any segment, especially to more discerning customers of its higher-level and more expensive offerings.

In fact, it was those newer and potentially more lucrative markets that forced the company recently to revise the company’s fourth-quarter report after returns skyrocketed on luxury items, such as Lasik eye surgery.

The problems forced Groupon to lower revenue in the period by $14.3 million and net income by $22.6 million. It is now reporting a wider net loss of $64.9 million on revenue of $492 million, pushing it further away from its goal of profitability.

The company also disclosed at the time that independent auditors had noted “material weakness” in its financial controls. In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was examining Groupon’s revision. 

With many companies, investors might have shrugged off such accounting issues, but the impact on the stock has been greater since they are only the latest in a string of similar mistakes at Groupon.

In its pre-IPO period, for example, Groupon was forced to restate revenues after counting both its portion of the revenue and the revenue that goes to the merchant together. It also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was, because it did not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers.

Those came after the company retracted a statement by Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon’s co-founder and executive chairman, who told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon would be “wildly profitable.”

At least the wild part was accurate.

Much of the blame for these missteps by Wall Street is being aimed at CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason, the iconoclastic 31-year-old entrepreneur who is largely responsible for defining the company’s culture, as well as Jason Child and Joe Del Preto, the chief financial and accounting officers, respectively.

Child joined the company in December 2010, coming from Amazon, where he held several roles over a 10-year period — including VP of finance, international, and director of investors relations. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Arthur Andersen as a certified public accountant.

Del Preto has been Groupon’s chief accounting officer for the past year and, before that, he was the company’s global controller for three months. Before Groupon, he was controller and VP of finance at Echo Global Logistics and also served as controller at InnerWorkings, the same company where Mason was a computer programmer in his early career.

Mason, of course, is the best known and the person most responsible for establishing the company’s whimsical culture and managing — or mismanaging, depending on how you look at it — Groupon’s hard-charging growth.

It will also be up to him to turn it all around, as the company sinks in both value and investor regard. Since the restatement, Mason has said little about how he intends to do that. In February, when Mason concluded Groupon’s first-ever earnings call, he said: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

It’s not clear fun will be on the agenda at his next outing on Groupon’s first-quarter call in mid-May.

Here is the official press release from Groupon on the board changes:

Groupon Appoints Two Directors to Board Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Robert Bass, Vice Chair of Deloitte

CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Groupon, Inc (http://www.groupon.com) (NASDAQ:GRPN) today announced that Daniel Henry, the chief financial officer of American Express Company and Robert Bass, a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP will join its Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Audit Committee with Audit Chair, Ted Leonsis. Daniel Henry was appointed to the Board on April 26, replacing Howard Schultz, who has stepped down from the Board. Robert Bass will stand for election at the annual stockholder meeting to be held on June 19 following his retirement from Deloitte, replacing Kevin Efrusy, who will not stand for reelection at that time. “With their deep financial, accounting and operational experience, Dan and Bob will provide invaluable expertise to the Board going forward,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon Chairman.

Daniel Henry, 62, has been the Chief Financial Officer of American Express Company since October 2007. Henry is responsible for leading American Express Company’s finance organization and representing American Express to investors, lenders and rating agencies. He has also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of U.S. Consumer, Small Business and Merchant Services and joined American Express as Comptroller in 1990. Prior to joining American Express, Henry was a partner with Ernst & Young.

Robert Bass, 62, has been a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP since 2006, and a partner in Deloitte since 1982. He will retire from Deloitte on June 2, 2012. Bass has specialized in e-commerce, mergers and acquisitions and SEC filings. At Deloitte, Bass is responsible for all services provided to Forstmann Little and its portfolio companies and is the advisory partner for Blackstone, DIRECTV, McKesson, IMG and CSC. He has also previously been the advisory partner for priceline.com, RR Donnelley, Automatic Data Processing, Community Health Systems and Avis Budget. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York and Connecticut State Societies of Certified Public Accountants.

“I’m thrilled to have been a part of Groupon’s development,” said Kevin Efrusy. “The Company is well on its way to becoming the operating system for all local commerce.”

“Howard and Kevin helped guide us on our journey to becoming a public company and I want to thank them and acknowledge their contributions,” said Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.

“During my tenure on the Board, I was impressed by the game-changing opportunities that Groupon has delivered for both merchants and customers on a global scale,” said Howard Schultz. “Groupon has a strong sense of mission and purpose, and as I move on to focus on my other time commitments, I wish them the very best.”

So Airbnb has created an alternative booking service for last-minute travel that it calls Match, where users teach the system their preferences and send out the same booking inquiry to multiple hosts, and Airbnb manages the replies. The company says this process should be about three times faster than making a normal reservation.

Match is designed for last-minute travel, and Airbnb tells me it will recommend the tool to users who are looking to book in five days or less, and those who have had a booking request declined, ignored or cancelled. But as a traveler, I think it sounds like a better system in general. Match can be accessed directly at www.airbnb.com/match.

In a report released today, eMarketer estimates that 16 million Americans will book travel from their mobile devices this year, increasing 33 percent from 12 million in 2011. Even more people — roughly 37.8 million — will use their phones to research travel this year.

It’s no wonder that big online travel agencies, like Priceline and Expedia, are quickly expanding into mobile. One common mobile strategy is to build an app that gives deep discounts to people who book a hotel room from their phone for the same night.

Travelers who may not have access to a computer are an obvious market for hotel information, flights, maps, reviews and other services.

EMarketer said despite mobile’s rapid growth, total spending on online travel is growing more slowly than overall online retail sales. This year, online travel spending is set to increase 11 percent to $120 billion in the U.S.

But clearly all the trends spell bad news for travel agents and physical travel agencies. EMarketer expects a majority of Internet users to research and book via the Web.

Shares of the New York-based company gained $6 to close at $27.06 today after Reuters reported that the company was in the process of hiring a financial adviser after it received takeover interest from private equity firms.

Travelzoo spokeswoman Lisa Moore declined to comment on whether the company was for sale.

Travelzoo is one of the pioneers in the daily deals business. For more than a decade, it has been sending subscribers a weekly email highlighting what it calls the top 20 travel deals.

A list of obvious acquirers for Travelzoo includes Google, which famously failed to buy Groupon for $6 billion. More recently, Google bought travel company ITA Software. Amazon could also be interested as it pushes AmazonLocal, its daily deals business; however, it already owns a percentage of LivingSocial, the second-largest deals company after Groupon.

A host of other companies could also take a look at the deal, including its travel competitors, such as Expedia or Priceline, or several international providers.

Unlike Groupon, which takes a cut of the revenue when a deal is sold, Travelzoo uses an advertising model where companies pay a fee to get in front of its large email audience. More recently, the company shifted gears to enter the local deals space, offering discounts on restaurants and other local services. In those deals, it charges the merchant a percentage of each transaction.

Today, the company’s market value hovers around $300 million, falling way short of Groupon’s $9 billion valuation and making it a prime acquisition target.

The company’s main assets are its sales team and its list of subscribers, but generally, it is not known as a technology leader. The company’s Web site is still fairly basic with a red, white and blue theme and has very few pictures, which the company says is on purpose. Before any acquisition closes, the potential acquirer would want to know how much the two companies’ subscriber bases overlapped.

In 2011, the company reported revenues of $148 million, up from $112 million over the same period during the previous year.

The travel site is launching a new Friend of a Friend feature today, allowing users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their friends’ friends. It’s sort of like playing the Kevin Bacon game, but instead of six degrees of separation, TripAdvisor is only using one.

TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product, Adam Medros, said that by adding connections, visitors are 10 times more likely to see reviews written by people in their network — even in obscure locations, ranging from Istanbul to Duluth, Minn.

“It’s always been a little hit or miss,” Medros said, about the likelihood of a friend having reviewed a hotel in the city you were searching. “Now, we’ve stretched the coverage by going out by one degree.”

The new feature is the latest move by TripAdvisor to make the 60 million reviews on its site more social. The company first got involved in Facebook five years ago, when it launched an app called Cities I’ve Visited, which lets you mark on a map where you’ve traveled.

With the help of that application and other efforts, TripAdvisor is the 18th most popular application on the social network, with 18.5 million monthly visitors, according to AppData.

The announcement today continues to leverage a partnership with Facebook, which gives TripAdvisor permission to personalize their Web experience using data from the social network. Only seven other companies have similar permissions.

To use the new Friend of a Friend feature, visitors to the site must log in using their Facebook account. Once they’ve done that and have conducted a hotel search, a little bubble will highlight that a review was written by a friend or someone a friend knows. In a search under Istanbul, I had no immediate friends who had reviewed hotels, but thanks to my friends’ friends, I had 10 reviews within my expanded network to check out.

It’s worth noting that TripAdvisor does not disclose any personal information about the friend, like their name or picture.

“We’ve always had this interesting challenge, where we have so much content for properties around the world — at some point, that’s helpful, but I’d love to see reviews from people like me,” Medros said.

Of course, there’s no telling if your friend’s friend is like you. “It still requires some weeding out,” Medros acknowledged.

He also said that the company has discussed the value in extending it even further. “It’s a running joke that if you take it out to three degrees, that everyone is a friend of everyone. I think we’ll stick with one degree for now.”

The online travel agency’s app, called Booking.com Tonight, is the latest to tap into the market of procrastinating travelers who begin looking for accommodations only after the plane’s wheels touch down.

Many of Priceline’s direct competitors, including Travelocity and Hotwire, offer same-day hotel bookings online. And perhaps the most comparable service is HotelTonight, an app developed by a venture-backed San Francisco start-up. Expedia also has a service called Last-Minute Deals that taps user-generated content so that customers can share deals they’ve found with each other, not using any identifying information.

From what I can tell, however, Priceline’s app is a replica of its online site, offering the same selection of hotel rooms at the same price — where’s the Negotiator now?

Still, the app could be helpful in a pinch, because it has a large inventory of rooms, covering 165 countries. The app also lets you search for rooms based on your location and other filters, such as price, star rating or most popular.

In comparison, the HotelTonight app offers a more boutique experience. It features inventory in only a couple dozen U.S. cities and doesn’t have a huge selection of rooms. In a review, my colleague Katherine Boehret found deals at significant cost savings, including a luxury stay at Langham in Boston’s financial district for $199 rather than $275.

One downside of HotelTonight is that you can’t search for nearby rooms until the afternoon, but if you’ve waited until the day of your stay, then I suppose you can wait a little longer.

Earlier today, Priceline’s stock hit a new 52-week high of $775 a share before pulling back to $753.41. Over the past few years, the stock has soared based on strong international growth.

Rover is an alternative to dog kennels, much like how Airbnb offers an alternative to staying in hotels.

In addition to announcing the funding today, the Seattle company is also rolling out nationwide, after supporting only a handful of test markets.

Airbnb raised a blockbuster $112 million second round of funding last July from well-known Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz. In comparison, Rover has raised a much more modest round, and has nine employees. Investors in the round include Madrona Venture Group of Seattle, which led the round, CrunchFund, and other angels.

On the business side, there’s a big scale difference between the dog- and vacation-rental businesses. Despite the differences in scale, however, Rover’s CEO Aaron Easterly said the market opportunity is massive.

Easterly, who most recently worked at Microsoft in its advertising business, estimates the formal commercial dog-boarding market is worth up to $6.5 billion annually, and said that there’s a much larger informal market of people who rely on friends and family to take care of their pooches. He says that together the two are worth closer to $35 billion to $60 billion. That’s a lot of biscuits and squeaky toys.

The decision about where to leave your dog when you’re away from home is an emotional one, Easterly noted.

People want to make sure that their dogs are happy, and not just locked up in a kennel. On Rover, people can review homeowners’ profiles, so they can get a sense of how the owners would treat their dogs. Additionally, Easterly said, it’s common for the two sides to meet before a stay is booked.

Last week, I visited the company in their downtown Seattle offices with my dog, Fletch, to see just how much Rover drinks from the dog bowl.

Sure enough, my hyperactive mutt was allowed full access to the office, finding a variety of toys, from tennis balls to stuffed animals. The other four-legged residents welcomed him into their domain, although Easterly’s four-pound Pomeranian Caramel (a.k.a. Chief Rover), was wise to stay out of the way. A developer even offered to take a break to give Fletch a walk around the block.

Since launching in Seattle in November 2011, Rover.com has grown to over 10,000 active members in hundreds of cities across the country. It charges between 5 percent and 15 percent for the service, depending on a homeowner’s track record, including reviews and response times.

It has already dealt with some issues that Airbnb struggled with early on, like offering round-the-clock support and guarantees. Today, Rover is rolling out a Barkline (providing 24-hour customer service) nationwide to handle any emergencies. Rover also offers a satisfaction guarantee that covers the dog, its owner and the host, in case any problems arise.

But there are other requests that come up that are more cookie-cutter in nature.

In the video below, Easterly explains how one of the most important topics to dog owners is where their dog will sleep. Out of the 11 dogs he’s hosted, he said the biggest request was for the guest dog to stay in his bed — and sometimes under the covers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120327/expedias-corporate-division-travels-abroad-with-purchase-of-via/ http://allthingsd.com/20120327/expedias-corporate-division-travels-abroad-with-purchase-of-via/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:54:57 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=190398 Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia continues to expand internationally, this time acquiring VIA Travel, one of the largest travel management companies in the Nordic countries. The company will join Expedia’s Egencia division, which helps companies of all sizes book business trips. Terms were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120327/expedias-corporate-division-travels-abroad-with-purchase-of-via/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120321/travel-start-up-canaryhop-gets-celebrity-endorsement-from-snls-andy-samberg-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120321/travel-start-up-canaryhop-gets-celebrity-endorsement-from-snls-andy-samberg-video/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:00:55 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=188554 SNL’s Andy Samberg may look a lot like Mark Zuckerberg — and act like him, too — but does that mean he’s qualified to start a tech company?

The comedian, who played the Facebook CEO on “Saturday Night Live” and even appeared at Facebook’s developer conference, has co-founded the new travel start-up CanaryHop.

The Los Angeles-based company is creating a marketplace where travelers can look for tours from well-established vendors or any individual professing to have a skill and looking to make a few bucks.

CanaryHop officially launched yesterday.

The site explains that a “Canary” is “a tour guide, a local, someone with a special talent, a person who is passionate about their community, an expert at something, or a teacher.” For example, it could be a professional chess player willing to give lessons, someone who runs a surf camp, or simply a foodie who knows the best restaurants in Chinatown.

Meanwhile, a “Hopper” is a traveler.

Still don’t get it?

Samberg does his best to act out how it works in a funny and pretty entertaining video. In it, he wakes up not knowing where he is, but for some reason has a bunch of new talents, like being able to speak French, throw knives and charm snakes. Unfortunately, you’ll have to visit the site here in order to see it.

Instead, here’s Samberg impersonating Zuckerberg on SNL, right after the release of “The Social Network”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120321/travel-start-up-canaryhop-gets-celebrity-endorsement-from-snls-andy-samberg-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120320/jonathan-shambroom-joins-zozi-as-coo-seeking-new-adventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120320/jonathan-shambroom-joins-zozi-as-coo-seeking-new-adventures/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:59:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=187881 Zozi, which ditched its roots as a daily deals company to focus on selling vacations and other adventures, has appointed Jonathan Shambroom to the role of COO. Previously, Shambroom was chief product officer at Ning, which was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and purchased by Glam Media last year. Zozi announced record growth in 2011 with a 700 percent increase in revenues, but was mum on specific revenue figures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120320/jonathan-shambroom-joins-zozi-as-coo-seeking-new-adventures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120208/groupons-mason-on-strategy-investment-and-finally-a-way-to-stop-those-pole-dancing-offers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120208/groupons-mason-on-strategy-investment-and-finally-a-way-to-stop-those-pole-dancing-offers/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:56:54 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=172806 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.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120208/groupons-mason-on-strategy-investment-and-finally-a-way-to-stop-those-pole-dancing-offers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120208/behind-the-scenes-at-groupons-tech-headquarters-as-it-prepares-to-report-earnings/ http://allthingsd.com/20120208/behind-the-scenes-at-groupons-tech-headquarters-as-it-prepares-to-report-earnings/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:33 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=172207

In a three-story building in Palo Alto, Calif. — formerly occupied by Danger, the developer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick — Groupon has been trying to build out a Silicon Valley technology center, one acquisition at a time.

The pursuit was kicked off two years ago with the purchase of mobile app development shop Mob.ly. Mihir Shah, the company’s CEO, started recruiting for the social buying company, and then became the Groupon’s VP of mobile.

Since then, there has been a hodgepodge of acquisitions, including Campfire, which builds chat, calendar and media-sharing tools, as well as Zappedy, which makes a platform for merchants to redeem Internet-based offers more easily.

Last week, it continued with Adku, a low-profile San Francisco start-up that helps e-commerce retailers fine-tune their recommendation engines using external factors, such as whether it is hot or cold outside.

None of the teams have been extremely big or expensive, but Groupon insists that they already are having a major impact on the company.

That may be hard to believe in a company of more than 10,000 employees, most of which are salespeople who are not working on technology.

But Adku’s co-founder Carlos Whitt, who is joining the company along with five others from his team, said the entrepreneurial vibe in the building is “ridiculously exciting.”

“The opportunity, the innovation and entrepreneurs are all there,” he said. “It’s a good intersection.”

Still, Groupon has not been able to attract every entrepreneur it pursues. It had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups, such as Gowalla. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, was won by Google.

No matter, according to Mob.ly’s Shah, who said Groupon is actively evolving beyond a daily deals service into a company that builds a set of key marketing tools for local merchants that increases sales, cuts costs and boosts productivity.

Some of the early tools include online calendars to make it easy for spas or gyms to book appointments online, and rewards programs that allow merchants to identify loyal customers who return and spend a lot of money.

Groupon also recently revamped its merchant center, where its customers can manage their daily deals and other programs in an online dashboard.

Shah said the idea is to create a marketing suite that makes small businesses more efficient and productive.

“We never want to stand still and be a big company,” he said.

But the big question is whether those tools will be sticky enough to keep merchants coming back to offer new deals, which is where Groupon gets all of its revenue from. That’s because most of the new tools are expected to be given away for free and not generate any additional income — at least for now.

It will also have to be enough to keep away other close competitors, such as LivingSocial, Google and Amazon.

The ability to spur innovation and keep ahead of rivals will be on the minds of analysts when Groupon reports its first financial results as a publicly held company this afternoon.

Wall Street is expecting the company to report three cents per share profit on revenue of $475 million in its fourth quarter earnings, according to Thomson Reuters.

That’s up from $430 million in revenues in the third quarter and will be Groupon’s first profitable quarter in nearly two years

In particular, analysts will be listening for updates on some of the company’s core programs, such as Groupon Now, which is its mobile product that allows consumers to purchase deals minutes or hours before redeeming them based on their location. Other metrics may be shared regarding loyalty and retention programs.

This is also Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s first big chance to speak to the investment community since the end of the company’s quiet period (which he wasn’t really good at keeping, anyway).

Groupon’s stock increased nearly three percent yesterday to close at $24.19, which is just above its IPO price of $20 a share.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120208/behind-the-scenes-at-groupons-tech-headquarters-as-it-prepares-to-report-earnings/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120130/kayaks-web-site-gets-its-influence-from-mobile-for-its-latest-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20120130/kayaks-web-site-gets-its-influence-from-mobile-for-its-latest-design/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:02:20 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=168531 Travel comparison site Kayak.com has redesigned its Web site so it looks like its mobile app — not the other way around.

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120130/kayaks-web-site-gets-its-influence-from-mobile-for-its-latest-design/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/travelzoos-stock-tumbles-after-q4-results-disappoint/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/travelzoos-stock-tumbles-after-q4-results-disappoint/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:37:33 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=167857 Travelzoo’s stock is down almost 10 percent, or $3 a share, in late trading after its fourth-quarter revenues disappointed analysts.

The New York-based company, which sells travel deals and daily deals via email and from its Web site, said fourth-quarter revenues totaled $35.2 million, falling below analyst expectations of $38.7 million.

However, Travelzoo did manage to return a healthy profit of 40 cents a share, exceeding estimates of 35 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, which conducted a survey of analysts.

The company is Groupon’s closest publicly held competitor, other than Google or Amazon, which don’t break out results from daily deals. Groupon was also trading lower today, falling about 3 percent, or 59 cents, to $19.49 a share. Groupon will report fourth-quarter earnings in two weeks on Feb. 8.

In a statement, CEO Chris Loughlin said despite a slower period for travel advertising in the fourth quarter, revenues in that period grew faster year over year than in any quarter in four years.

A majority of its revenues are still coming from travel. For instance, in 2011, Travelzoo reported that 57.8 percent of deals sold were for travel and only 26.7 percent came from local discounts. Search revenues coming from comparison shopping sites such as SuperSearch and Fly.com made up for the remainder.

Still, it is local that is growing the fastest. In North America, local deals grew 196 percent year over year.

The company ended the period with 21.5 million subscribers in North America and Europe, up 14 percent from the end of 2010.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/travelzoos-stock-tumbles-after-q4-results-disappoint/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/airbnbs-skyrocketing-growth-includes-four-million-nights-booked-in-2011/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/airbnbs-skyrocketing-growth-includes-four-million-nights-booked-in-2011/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:00:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=167648

Travelers have used Airbnb to book a total of five million guest nights in the past four years, staying in spare bedrooms and empty homes around the world.

Even more impressive is that a majority of those bookings — four million — occurred in 2011 alone, according to the San Francisco vacation-rentals company.

Today, the start-up provided a number of metrics for how the company performed last year, and in the months since it raised $112 million, which valued the company at more than $1 billion.

The one figure Airbnb neglected to provide, however, was the number of renters who have applied to receive a $50,000 Host Guarantee, which would reimburse them for the cost of property damage, theft or vandalism.

In August, the company initiated a number of security features, including the guarantee, after a host had a particularly horrible experience with guests who ransacked her apartment and stole her identity.

A spokesperson said Airbnb doesn’t disclose the number of claims that have been submitted, but said that the overall number is much lower than it originally anticipated. “We think this is a testament to the quality and caliber of our community,” she added.

In today’s release, Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, said that reaching five million bookings demonstrates the demand for people all over the world to monetize extra space in their homes.

The closest comparison to Airbnb is likely Austin, Texas-based HomeAway, which reports results because it is a public company, even though it focuses more on renting people’s vacation homes, not their primary residences.

HomeAway did not have a comparable figure for homes rented, but it did say the vacation property market is growing quickly. In a 2010 survey it commissioned from Radius Global Market Research, it found that there were more than six million vacation properties in the U.S. and Europe that are rented for a fee to travelers for at least two weeks of every year.

According to the same survey, these vacation rentals generated more than $85 billion of annual rental income in 2010, or nearly $14,000 per property.

HomeAway’s marketplace includes more than 500,000 paid listings of vacation rentals in more than 145 countries worldwide.

In comparison, Airbnb says it lists more than 100,000 properties in 192 countries. Instead of charging for listings, it collects 3 percent of each reservation, and guests are charged 6 to 12 percent of the booking fee.

Here are some of Airbnb’s other numbers:

• More than 75 percent of all reservations in 2011 were international, with either the guest, host, or both located outside the U.S.
• The number of available listings increased 166 percent in 2011, and 70 percent of all listings are now located outside the U.S.
• In 2011, Airbnb added 24-hour customer support in 16 languages through email, live chat, and seven global toll-free phone numbers.
• The company launched 40 features in 2011 to bulk up trust and safety.
• Airbnb has offices in San Francisco, Hamburg, Berlin, and London, with new offices opening in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Milan, Moscow, Paris and São Paulo, Brazil.

And if you’re more of a visual learner, here’s the story in a graphic almost big enough to rent out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/airbnbs-skyrocketing-growth-includes-four-million-nights-booked-in-2011/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/zozi-gets-cozy-with-celebrities-to-separate-itself-from-the-groupon-clones/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/zozi-gets-cozy-with-celebrities-to-separate-itself-from-the-groupon-clones/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:00:42 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=166717 After slogging it out for two years in the daily deals business, and facing competition from Groupon and hundreds of clones, Zozi believes it has started to find its niche.

Rather than focusing on extreme discounts, the San Francisco company has decided to offer extreme adventures.

Today, it is launching Zozi Guru, which sells high-end adventures taught and organized by professional athletes.

For example, you can go skiing with Olympic gold-medal skier Jonny Moseley, or go running with barefoot runner Eric Orton, or learn to kayak with Tao Berman, a three-time world-record holder for extreme whitewater kayaking.

Unlike typical daily deals, these offers are full price, and the merchants and celebrities involved will surely make money, which is in steep contrast to lots of sites that blast emails out to a list of subscribers on a daily basis.

“We don’t want to be a deals site. You won’t hear us use the word ‘deal.’ It’s all about experiences. We try to offer the best prices, but it’s about the adventure and exploration component,” said TJ Sassani, Zozi’s CEO and founder.

That hasn’t always been the case for Zozi.

It started off as a daily deals site, selling international trips in 2008. But Sassani said the opportunity wasn’t as big as the company had hoped, and Zozi shifted to local adventures. Intially, it used the Groupon model to grow membership, but now that it has some scale, it is shifting to full price.

Typical offers on the site range from bungee-jumping sessions to kiteboarding lessons, but Sassani said the business won’t ever reach Groupon’s scale. He said he definitely doesn’t aspire to have an initial public offering; however, he does believe that it could be a $1 billion to $2 billion opportunity.

So far, Zozi has signed up close to one million subscribers and is in 20 cities, up from only one market in 2010. It has just started moving into Canada, and other locations are coming soon.

“Groupon is much more like Wal-Mart, where they offer low-cost, low-quality items to discount seekers,” Sassani said. “But our average purchase price ($60) is more than double Groupon’s, and we target someone who would shop at REI. It’s a sophisticated customer, who is less price-sensitive.”

To help with the rollout of Zozi Guru, the company raised a small undisclosed inside round with investors last week. Previously, it had raised $10 million from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Launch Capital, ZIG Capital and others.

This week, Zozi is launching the new service with six celebrity athletes, but Sassani said the company has signed deals with 20 to 30 people, who will do a combination of 100 programs over the next year.

Sticking with its goal of offering premium experiences, the programs start at $1,000, and can go as high as $10,000, depending on the celebrity’s status and the event, which could include luxurious accommodations — one example might be a five-night visit to Hawaii, where you would learn how to surf from a professional, and stay at the Four Seasons.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/zozi-gets-cozy-with-celebrities-to-separate-itself-from-the-groupon-clones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120123/youre-dead-jim-priceline-kills-off-shatners-negotiator/ http://allthingsd.com/20120123/youre-dead-jim-priceline-kills-off-shatners-negotiator/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:11:19 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=166587 Priceline is retiring William Shatner’s role as the Negotiator as it moves to turn consumer attention to its fixed-price hotel inventory.

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:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120123/youre-dead-jim-priceline-kills-off-shatners-negotiator/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120119/online-travel-agencies-pounce-on-obamas-plan-to-encourage-tourism/ http://allthingsd.com/20120119/online-travel-agencies-pounce-on-obamas-plan-to-encourage-tourism/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:16:08 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=165612 President Obama outlined a plan today that would encourage more tourists to visit the U.S. — an announcement welcomed by online travel agencies. The plan includes deploying more consuls, reducing visa-processing times and revising the list of countries whose citizens don’t need visas.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120119/online-travel-agencies-pounce-on-obamas-plan-to-encourage-tourism/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120119/expedia-tries-out-new-last-minute-deals-site-relying-on-user-generated-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20120119/expedia-tries-out-new-last-minute-deals-site-relying-on-user-generated-data/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:58:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=165418 Expedia has launched a new service today called Last-Minute Deals that lets customers share the best deals with each other.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120119/expedia-tries-out-new-last-minute-deals-site-relying-on-user-generated-data/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120115/homeaway-packs-a-more-subtle-message-in-new-ad-campaign/ http://allthingsd.com/20120115/homeaway-packs-a-more-subtle-message-in-new-ad-campaign/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:00:13 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=163804 HomeAway hopes its new commercial, airing during today’s Golden Globes broadcast, will make its Super Bowl blunder a thing of the past.

The new campaign — set to the tune of “Let’s Stay Together,” by Al Green — is much more tame than last year’s ad. The 30-second spot focuses on creating family memories around campfires, swimming holes and hiking trails; memories that often can be made in or near homes — not in hotels.

HomeAway, which operates vacation-rentals marketplaces, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com, went out on a limb for its Super Bowl commercial last year. If the point was to generate buzz before filing for its initial public offering, it was a success.

But the Austin, Texas-based company ended up having to yank the ad after drawing criticism over a particularly disturbing image: In the commercial, a doll — which was obviously not a child — was thrown against a wall to demonstrate how cramped hotel rooms can be, compared to more spacious rental houses.

The updated — and more subtle — campaign will air in select markets during NBC’s broadcast of the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Following its debut, the spot will air on the Travel Channel, the Food Network, HGTV and other special promotions, including the Grammy Awards on Feb. 12, the Academy Awards on Feb. 26 and the “Survivor” finale.

Second time’s the charm?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120115/homeaway-packs-a-more-subtle-message-in-new-ad-campaign/feed/ 0