Recent Stories with tag social

In the beginning there was Mercata and the promise of discounts from group buying. And there was also ActBig, Zwirl, and C-Tribe. And the market liketh them not. Mercata was laid low in 2001, although its intellectual property would live on.

Today, a new generation of group and social buying sites have sprung up: Groupon, Living Social. And, since it's the Internet, a second (or third) generation. Seattle is home to Tippr, Wrazz, and DealPop. Chicago has YouSwoop. Buywithme is expanding. Whither Groop Swoop, SwoopOff, SocialBuy? One can only wonder.

The largest have millions of subscribers, across the country; the bulk are just starting out, and working a geographic niche furiously, advertising themselves as the way to connect with your city. The shared, cloying cuteness of Internet naming conventions aside, the clock is also ticking for all these second-generation companies as they try to define themselves for customers.

TechFlash already sat down with Tippr for a differentiation chat: They see themselves as a collaborative, deal-delivering platform, less tied to brand recognition than Groupon. We knocked on DealPop's door to see what they were all about.

[Full disclosure: DealPop is a SunBreak advertiser and you should probably subscribe to their email alert service right now. Upper right-hand corner there. Do it.]

Right away what sets DealPop apart is that their downtown Seattle offices are the home of WhitePages.com. Alex Algard founded WhitePages in 1996 in his Stanford dorm room, stealing a march on Baby Bells and their printed phone books everywhere, and today the company has 200 million personal listings and 15 million businesses, with over 20 million monthly unique users. They're now incorporating Twitter and Facebook results into their people searches. They have a top 10 iPhone app.... (more)