Commerce

Amazon snapped up the voice startup Yap two months ago, a new filing revealed.

The Atlantic today reported the purchase, which took place in September but wasn't formally announced at the time, from a filing with the SEC (PDF).

Amazon is not named in the document, but the Atlantic tracked the address of the "surviving company" back to a building in Seattle that's owned by Amazon.

Yap came onto the scene in 2007 with technology that could transcribe voice commands into text. The service was originally aimed at teens who did a lot of texting, and … Read more

Daily-deals provider Groupon has gone public at last, and its shares soared from the start.

In the opening minutes, Groupon was trading up to $29.20, a 46 percent gain on its opening price of $20 per share.

Groupon closed out its first day on the market up 30 percent to $26.11.

Investors and Groupon watchers who had been awaiting the long-anticipated initial public offering had to wait a little extra time this morning. Groupon, which trades under the ticker symbol GRPN, didn't debut till an hour or so after the start of trading on the Nasdaq.

The … Read more

The mobile ordering site went live recently for The Melt's chain of grilled cheese restaurants. The best feature of the app (and The Melt in general): you can add bacon to any sandwich for free. Although since the grilled cheese sandwiches themselves are $5.75, "free" is a bit of a stretch. But still, hey, sort of free bacon!

In the interest of research (and lunch), I checked out the new mobile site and the in-store follow-through at a nearby Melt location. What I found was a bug in the system (presumably a temporary problem), but also … Read more

Philip Rosedale, the founder (and still chairman) of the company that made Second Life, is back with a new company in the hot consumer-to-consumer commerce space that TaskRabbit and Gigwalk are making popular. Coffee and Power is his creation. It is a little different from the other entries in this space, but conceptually not too far afield.

Coffee and Power is designed to be a marketplace for doing, "small, fast jobs," Rosedale says. He's proud that the service was built using itself (for the sake of this story, please ignore the chicken-and-egg problem). There are about 88,… Read more

Daily-deals provider BuyWithMe has been sold off to Gilt Groupe, BetaBeat is reporting.

According to the blog, neither party divulged the terms of the acquisition. The companies expect to combine forces on November 1. Gilt expects to layoff some BuyWithMe sales staff and provide them with one week's pay as a severance, BetaBeat's sources say.

Unfortunately for BuyWithMe, layoffs have become commonplace at the company. Just last week, the company laid off over half of its staff, or about 100 people, due to its continued inability to compete effectively against Groupon and LivingSocial. According to BetaBeat, sales staff … Read more

Will Facebook be more profitable than Amazon this year? TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington thinks so.

Arrington, writing on his new blog, Uncrunched, cited a source who said that Facebook generated $1.6 billion in revenue during the first half of 2011 and an operating income of $800 million. Assuming that same profit margin carries through the year, Arrington says, Facebook could tally an operating income of $2 billion this year.

It gets better, Arrington says. During the first half of the year, Arrington points out that Amazon posted an operating income figure of $523 million, which Facebook easily overshadowed. And … Read more

Daily-deals provider Groupon could raise as much as $540 million when it goes public, the company revealed today in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to the filing, Groupon plans to offer 30 million shares of Class A common stock for between $16 and $18 apiece. If it goes public at $18, it could raise the $540 million. Also, if the company sells through its 30 million shares, it can opt to sell another 4.5 million shares to increase the amount it raises to a maximum of $621 million.

Groupon's new filing stands in stark contrast … Read more

CouponCabin is cashing on the consumer's need to save a few bucks whether shopping online or at the corner supermarket.

The online coupon company just raised $54 million in venture funding, according to a story in AllThingsD.

CouponCabin offers coupons that people can use directly online to buy products from such retailers as Dell, RadioShack, Best Buy, Target, Sears, and Kmart. It also provides coupons that can be printed and redeemed at local department stores, restaurants, and other nearby merchants.

To further boost business, the company plans to use the new venture capital to build up its growing consumer … Read more

To date, daily-deal sites have relied primarily on e-mail to reach bargain hunters. Now LivingSocial has inked a deal with Clear Channel to broadcast those deals to a much larger audience.

The companies said today that LivingSocial will provide its discount offers to listeners of more than 500 Clear Channel radio stations in 90 cities around the U.S. starting October 24. All told, LivingSocial's deals will be showcased to as many as 80 million listeners each week, Clear Channel said.

Several times throughout the day, on-air personalities at Clear Channel stations will announce the day's local deal … Read more