Groupon just published its second quarterly earnings report after going public in 2011. The Chicago-based company made $559.3 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2012, up 89% year-over year. Groupon also announced that the total amount of money it collected from customers for Groupons sold (excluding taxes and estimated refunds) increased 103% from $668.2 million in the same quarter last year to $1.35 billion in Q1 2012. Overall, though, Groupon still reported a net loss of $0.02 per share. Non-GAAP earnings, however, showed earnings of $0.02 per share.

The overall consensus among analysts was that Groupon would report about $530 million in revenue and the company itself had predicted revenue somewhere between $510 and $550 million. For the next quarter, Groupon expects revenue to be between $550 and $590 million.

After its IPO, Groupon’s shares famously lost about 50% of their value. Today, the stock is up more than 12% in after-hours trading.

Update: The stock is now up more than 17.76% in after-hours trading. That’s on top of an 18.54% gain throughout the day while the markets were open. That’s the biggest one-day increase in Groupon’s stock price since it went public.

More Highlights From Today’s Report

In its report, Groupon also highlighted that its revenues in North America grew 75% year-over-year “and accelerated sequentially faster than they have since the first quarter of 2011.”

For the first time, Groupon also served more than 100,000 merchants per quarter in Q1. The company also reported that 50% of the offers it ran in the first quarter were with merchants who had previously run on Groupon. These merchants, Groupon also noted, continue to quickly adopt the company’s Groupon Rewards program. More than 30% of eligible merchants in the cities where the company is piloting this program have signed up for it now.

Another interesting number from the report: 30% of transactions in North America were completed on mobile devices in the last quarter. That’s up from 25% in December 2011.

Just as we get news of some consolidation in the local content market in the UK, some news of expansion, too: Qype, the Yelp of Europe (and Yelp’s closest competitor in the region), today announced that the number of places reviewed on its site has reached 860,000, with the number of monthly unique visitors now at 25 million. It claims that this makes it the biggest reviews site in the region, about five times bigger than its closest competitor, the U.S.-based Yelp.

And while companies like Groupon are trying to move beyond the daily deal to become the platform for local commerce, Qype is doubling-down on the concept, expanding its own deals offerings with a free service to attract more local businesses to the concept.

Qype is selling this newest class of daily deals — available from next week in Germany and then rolled out “rapidly to the UK and France — as part of its “Platinum package”. Businesses pay a fee for a premium listing on Qype’s site, and in addition to that they are given the ability to send out a free daily deal through the site’s QypeDeals service. By free, Qype means the business gets to keep all of the revenues for purchased deals — rather than paying Qype a commission on each.

QypeDeals is the product of Qype’s acquisition of Cooledeals a year ago, CEO Ian Brotherston tells me. “This is now the completion of the process of fully integrating that business,” he says.

Over the last year, Qype has moved beyond offering basic user-generated reviews of restaurants, events and other local businesses, and has been growing the number of services it offers to business users. Revenues from advertising on the site has grown by 500 percent in the last year, Brotherston says.

Brotherston says that this move for more monetization is inevitable as reviews businesses like its own and Yelp’s continue to mature.

He also points out that this trend may have been part of the reason behind UpMyStreet getting sold on to Zoopla: “It seems to reflect a view that if you are in the local space now, you need to be monetising,” he says. “I always felt that UpMyStreet had good, interesting data, but was never sure how they made money – whereas Zoopla had a much stronger monetization proposition. Local businesses need to provide great data to consumers within their area; but they need to be real businesses as well.”

As for Qype, the number of paying business customers on its books is now 400,000 and is growing by 10,000 each month, and revenues have grown by 93 percent. Brotherston says that Qype is on track for similar growth this year, too — but the company is not yet profitable, and doesn’t report revenues in actual terms.

There are some other significant numbers that Qype is hitting, however. Qype these days says that it is seeing some 25 million unique visitors monthly to its site. And its mobile business now contributes one-quarter of all its revenues: its mobile apps are now installed on some four million devices — about six times as many as Yelp has in Europe. Mobile is also becoming an important platform for users to contribute to the site, too: some 30 percent of reviews are now written from mobile devices, the company says. Its user-generated reviews are continuing to expand, with a new one posted about every 30 seconds across some 166,000 cities and towns in its database.

“The reality is that we are becoming a full-service provider for our small to medium businesses,” he says. That is being driven by QypeDeals but also includes other kinds of business promotions on both its web and mobile sites.

Brotherston says that a lot of the interest in its own deals service comes from businesses that tried Groupon or another service but have found it lacking in functionality: businesses, he says, “want to have more control over how, when and what they promote through deals. [Our] approach gives them more control and is more efficient for us.”

Under QypeDeals, businesses can create a single a one-day deal, and can specify details like the number of deals available. The only requirement, Qype says, is a minimum discount of 50 percent. Subsequent deals after the first are not sold on commission, either: businesses are instead charged on a fixed fee basis, Qype says, regardless of how many get sold.

Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason today posted a letter to shareholders with some updated figures on how the company is doing, and a more specific outline of what Groupon plans to do to to move beyond daily deals: ”To become the operating system for local commerce.”

The move is a significant one as Groupon attempts to shore up investor confidence amidst a series of accounting issues, and the fact that some believe interest in the basic service of daily deals is beginning to wane.

It also underscores some of the challenges Groupon still faces as a company. Mason notes that at the moment there are “10 million geo-located subscribers engaging with Groupon every month who have yet to make a purchase.”

“Though the six months since our IPO have been rocky to say the least, the fundamentals of our business have continued to improve,” wrote Mason in the letter.

Mason’s letter today (on Groupon’s blog and also filed with the SEC), is a long one, and here are some of the highlights.

First he took investors through some of its milestone usage figures:

• The company has now sold 170 million Groupons to date and counts 33 million active customers and 250,000 merchants in 48 countries.
• In 2011, $2 billion in business sent to “Main Street” small merchants.
• Also in 2011, 11 new products launched, including a several that take the company away from the daily deals format Groupon Goods, Getaways, Rewards, Now!, and Scheduler.
• 11 acquisitions, including several in the mobile space in the year.

Meanwhile, Mason’s description of the next phase for Groupon is light on the specifics of what it will do, but essentially, the plan is for the the company to integrate those acquisitions and more in an attempt to create a platform for local commerce — which Mason says is a multi-trillion-dollar business.

“Today, Groupon is a marketing tool that connects consumers and merchants. Tomorrow, we aim to move upstream and serve as the entry point for local transactions,” he writes.

Mason notes that there have been several key achievements already in its plan to develop a platform. Among them, he says the company is continuing to hone its personalization algorithm. (His example is the area of SmartDeals in Chicago, which he says have a 50 percent higher purchase rate than emails sent without them — and if that means less offers for vajazzles for me, well then that’s awesome news.)

Mason says that Groupon is now rolling out SmartDeals outside of the U.S., with a broad rollout planned by the end of 2012.

Mobile is another area where Groupon is going large — not just in terms of acquisitions. That’s because apparently, according to Mason, the average Groupon mobile user spends more than 50 percent more than those who are not using mobile.

He notes that last month (April) nearly 30 percent of North American transactions were completed on mobile devices — although that doesn’t seem like much of an improvement than four months ago when it was 25 percent.

Mason doesn’t go into detail on this here, but Groupon has, among other acquisitions, bought companies that bring it closer to the point of sale so we may well see the company offering more services here and trying to be more active in the mobile payments space.

Mason also noted that its non-daily deal service — Groupon Now — has recently passed the 1.5 million items purchased mark. That’s a fair distance still from Amazon and other companies that are more established in straight e-commerce, but it’s a start.

Groupon Rewards, the company’s loyalty program, has now signed up about 30 percent of all eligible daily deal merchants.

And the company’s booking management service, Groupon Scheduler, is in the process of being upgraded, Mason says, with plans to offer “a fully automated yield management system for every local business.”

He notes: “Scheduler embodies our intent to provide every mom and pop store with powerful technology solutions that were once reserved for sophisticated corporations with multimillion-dollar budgets.”

“The company has seen revenues grow by 415 percent over 2010 to $1.6 billion in 2011, noted Mason, with its operating margin still showing the company at a loss — but significantly less so than before: it’s now at -14 percent for the full year compared to -134 percent a year ago. In terms of earns per share that loss is down to $0.12 compared to $0.48 a year ago.

Remember when Groupon raised, like, a billion dollars? We certainly do.

Well, it looks like Groupon’s slide over the past month is bringing its last round of venture investors ever closer to breaking even. The stock has rebounded slightly this morning to $11.49, but the number to watch is $7.90.

That’s effectively what several top-tier Silicon Valley venture firms including Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Andreessen Horowitz paid per share when they invested $946 million in Groupon between Dec. 2010 and Jan. 2011. At that point, they bought Series G Preferred Shares for $31.59 each. These later converted into four shares of Class A common stock on Oct. 31 of last year, just a few days before Groupon’s initial public offering on Nov. 4.

All eyes are on May 14, when Groupon will report quarterly earnings for the second time as a publicly traded company. More notably, the end of the lock-up period is coming up soon. That’s the point at which investors will actually be able to sell their stakes in the company. It’s coming up on June 1, after being pushed back from the original date of May 2 because that was too close to their earnings date.

Right now, their stakes in Groupon are up about 45 percent from the price they paid a year and a half ago. It’s the kind of return that would normally sound awesome, but it’s probably not the kind of return late-stage venture investors were hoping for when Groupon looked like an easy win in late 2010 after turning down a $6 billion offer from Google. When Groupon debuted, it shot to $28 on its first day, which would have given investors at least a 3X on their investment. Now it’s down to the kind of margin that a bad earnings report could devour in a heartbeat.

For those who like to keep score, here’s the table of who participated in that round and how much they invested:

It’s worth noting that these shares had preferences or protections, and were senior to several other rounds of preferred shares (meaning these investors had the right to take their money out first before others). But those preferences apply during a “liquidating event” or if the company is dissolved, wound up or liquidated.

Now to be clear, when the lock-up period expires, these investors will merely have the option to sell their shares. They may decide to hold onto them for longer as a bet that this is a short-term stumble and that Groupon will rebound. It would also be silly to lock-in losses at the bottom. The company’s shares took a precipitous slide when Groupon said on March 30 that it had to restate its fourth quarter earnings because of weak accounting controls. The restatement deepened the company’s net loss to $65.4 million from $42.7 million.

For the next report, Groupon has given guidance to expect $510-550 million in first quarter revenue with income from operations coming in at between $15 million to $35 million. That would be up from $295.5 million in revenue and a $117.1 million operating loss from the same time period a year earlier.

There are analysts out there arguing a bull case for Groupon. Goldman Sachs’ research team had a buy recommendation with a 12-month price target of $25 as of April 1. Morgan Stanley analysts say that the company’s relationships with local merchants through its 5,000-person salesforce help make the company’s model defensible. The earnings restatement was “a mild hiccup in Groupon’s compelling long-term story,” Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt wrote in a research note.

So it’s quite possible that this very post marks the point at which all negative news has been priced in. Here’s hoping for Groupon’s sake.

P.S. Do you know which late-stage investors would actually be in the red if they could sell today? The ones that bought Zynga’s Series C Preferred shares in February 2011 at $14.03 a pop. They converted one-for-one into Class B common stock with the company’s IPO. Zynga shares currently trade at $8.72. (Ouch!)

These investors include 11 mutual funds associated with Morgan Stanley plus a token investment from Kleiner Perkins, through the firms’ digital growth fund and another digital growth founders fund. Don’t cry for Kleiner though. Bing Gordon, who sits on Zynga’s board, got the firm into the company years ago. Most of Zynga’s investors are subject to a lock-up that ends around May 28, although some employees will be able to start selling their holdings a week from now around April 30, according to the company’s prospectus.

So what do Zynga and Groupon teach us? For highly hyped consumer tech IPOs, public markets have turned out to be far harsher judges of value than previously thought.

This post is contributed by Ben Jiang, editor of TechNode, a bilingual blog based in China.

Gaopeng, a joint venture between Groupon and Tencent, may be headed for a merger by the end of next month with FTuan, according to reports from local Chinese news agencies. Notably, FTuan is a rival Chinese daily deal service that Groupon’s local partner Tencent invested in. If such a deal happened, it would underscore Tencent’s increasing control over the venture and Groupon’s retreat in the Chinese market. Gaopeng’s constant losses have apparently made Groupon think twice about its China venture.

Groupon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Gaopeng’s Downfall

Here’s the history: Groupon and Tencent set up Gaopeng with $100 million ($50 million from each) in February of last year when there were already countless competitors fighting for the market. At first, upon hearing that Groupon was coming to China, local copycat Groupons were worried that the company’s experience and expertise combined with Tencent’s money and local knowledge would pose a big threat.

However, in this case, one plus one doesn’t equal two.

Gaopeng’s decline in China can be boiled down to a few reasons: a) blind expansion before understanding local market b) hiring too many expat executives who had little knowledge of local markets or couldn’t even directly communicate with local staff because of language barriers and c) failure to acknowledge differing market conditions.

At its peak, the Chinese subsidiary of Groupon boasted a headcount of more than 3,000 and operated in more than 70 cities in China. As of now, it operates in fewer than 20 cities, according to people familiar with the matter. After several rounds of downsizing, even people remaining at the company have found nothing serious to work on, according to an employee who used to work in the Beijing office. It also hired an army of expat executives who were not able to communicate with local salespeople since they hardly speak Mandarin. Now, nearly all the expats have left.

Groupon’s strategy of hiring foreign talent, spending aggressively on marketing and quickly amassing as many users as possible may have worked well in other international markets. According to Groupon’s fourth quarter earnings report, revenues outside of North America made up 63.5 percent of the company’s $492.2 million in revenues.

But it failed in China.

The company believed that its e-mail marketing strategy would work as it did in other markets. But in China, e-mail is far less popular than instant messaging services like Tencent’s QQ, which Chinese consumers use almost everyday. Secondly, there’s weaker customer loyalty here as people always flock to the best deal.

Merge with FTuan

It is probably a smart move for Tencent to merge Gaopeng with FTuan, since the company invested in both of them. It doesn’t make sense for Tencent to retain stakes in three nearly identical businesses. (Yes, you read it right. Along with Gaopeng and FTuan, Tencent also operates a QQ Tuan.)

Local media quoted a Gaopeng staff claiming that Tencent wasn’t happy about Gaopeng’s operation, so its stakes in Gaopeng will be transferred to FTuan and the latter will consolidate Gaopeng and QQ Tuan’s operating.

Some Gaopeng people now worried about their job, a new round of downsizing seems inevitable during the consolidation.

After a frenzy around group buying last year, the once bloated market (which had nearly 6,000 Groupon clones) is cooler. There are still north of 3,000 struggling to make it past the spring. Even with the number of daily deal sites falling by half in less than a year, there are still too many for the market. Realistically, only 5 to 10 can survive.

For those unfamiliar, Setster has been operating in the somewhat unsexy scheduling software space since 2008, with the goal of bringing doctors, lawyers, therapists, stylists, and everyone in between, a platform that makes it easy to manage appointment scheduling. Setster wants to be anywhere service providers make appointments with clients — enterprise or SMB. As the daily deal space has become increasingly crowded over the last two years, local merchants feel pressured to run deals, but for many reasons, they end up overwhelmed by the prospect of managing those deals from start to finish, and the big deals players are failing to help them.

So, Setster has essentially decided to do what LivingSocial, Woot, Gilt, and other big players are either too lazy or distracted to do, today launching an API that allows daily deal providers to offer integrated scheduling packages to local merchants using their platforms. As Setster wrote in its blog post today, daily deal companies are doing an abysmal job of helping merchants close the loop “on the mile of the transaction where [they] have been touching the client.”

Setster believes (and they aren’t alone) that there a few fundamental flaws to the daily deal ecosystem established by the LivingSocials and Groupons, including the fact that deal providers should be enable service booking immediately after customers buy a promotion, for the simple reason that, the more time customers are given to close the loop (book), the less likely they are to actually use the merchant’s service.

Merchants also need a way to optimize their calendars so that they can book deal customers during off-peak hours. The very nature of deal customers makes them less profitable clients for merchants, so merchants need a way to fit deal clippers into their calendar in such a way as to prevent them from displacing regular, full-paying customers during peak business hours.

Furthermore, promotions and deals require further data entry into calendars, managing reminders, cancellations, and rescheduling for merchants, so giving them a way to manage the influx of new business by automating the booking process within their calendars is imperative. And, lastly, as Setster points out, merchants want more granular feedback on the success of their deal and promotional campaigns, like booked appointments, up-sells, additional revenues, etc. Not just one-dimensional sales analytics.

Ironically, as much grief as Groupon gets and is vilified, they were way ahead of the game in this regard. After buying OpenCal in December, Groupon turned it into Scheduler, a service that makes it easy for merchants to quickly close the loop between offer, booking, and scheduling — which it began rolling out to SMBs last month.

With Scheduler, Groupon solved the mismanagement problem for its customers, giving merchants a free way to accept booking 24/7, add a “Book Now” button to their websites, and made it available to all merchants looking for online booking, whether offering Groupon deals or not. Plus, Scheduler offers client lists and business dashboards, which show realtime stats on total appointments, new customers, allow them to track redemption and view the percentage of bookable time filled.

Again, as Setster points out, this represented serious innovation for the industry, and is unusual in the sense that, for once, it came from the top, rather than from a scrappy startup. However, Groupon is basically alone in offering this kind of functionality, as the other big deal players basically stand around and pick their noses.

For those deal providers who can’t afford (or have forgotten) to buy their own OpenCal, Setster’s API provide an affordable (pricing info here), comprehensive, white label solution for daily deal companies. The company’s API is open and designed for use by any deal provider, across marketing channels, allowing them to integrate the scheduling solution both on their own websites as well as their merchant sites.

Deal providers can add booking features inside mobile apps, directories, daily deal, group, and promotional coupons, so that end users can book directly from those offerings. By adding a booking feature inside mobile apps, directories, daily deal, group and promotional coupons, your end users now book directly from your offering. After buying, customers are immediately directed to schedule an appointment, which are pre-set by merchants with the times they want to accept deal customers and the service providers they want to use for the particular deal.

Daily deal sites can re-sell the service through their own white label options, even offering it for free to their merchants as incentive to adopt or through available wholesale prices. Setster believes that its solution allows deal providers to offer easy scheduling options and increase the likelihood that vouchers are redeemed, converting sales for their merchants into repeat customers and up-selling more services.

The big daily deal players aren’t doing all they can to close the loop between merchants and their buyers. Daily deal sites seem to forget that merchants are really what they’re selling, and it’s their job to give them all the tools they need to encourage repeat business. The happier merchants are, the more they use deals and promotions, the more revenue deal providers see as a result. Setster has given every daily deal site not named Groupon the ability to offer full-service scheduling, booking, and performance measurement tools. It’s not clear if local marketing companies, cough, daily deal companies, are listening, but it seems Setster’s APIs could have big implications for the space.

What do you think?

For more on Setster, visit them at home here. Developers can download the Industry API white paper and sign up for private beta here.

Daily deals site Groupon today issued a pretty significant revision of the financial results it previously reported for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2011.

According to the company, it actually made $14.3 million less in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2011 than it previously reported — $492.2 million, compared to the previously stated $506.5 million. It also spent more in operating expenses than it previously said it did — resulting in its Q4 operating income and net income being $30 million and $22.6 million less, respectively, than the company initially said it was.

How did this mixup occur? Groupon said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the revisions “are primarily related to an increase to the Company’s refund reserve accrual to reflect a shift in the Company’s fourth quarter deal mix and higher price point offers, which have higher refund rates.” (Full disclosure: I’m not sure what that means.)

Not surprisingly, Wall Street was none too happy about the news. Groupon issued the revision on Friday afternoon after trading stopped for the week, but at the moment (2:45 PM Pacific Time) the company’s stock price is down 6.4 percent in after-hours trading. The company’s stock price as of market close today was $18.38, which was already well below the $20 share price of its initial public offering back in October.

Groupon’s accounting practices have raised many eyebrows in the tech and business worlds, particularly in the run-up to its stock market debut last fall, so this is not a completely unexpected situation. Going forward, though, the company vows that it has its financial house in order. Groupon’s CFO Jason Child said in a press release today: “We remain confident in the fundamentals of our business, as our performance continues to highlight the value that we provide to customers and merchants.”

FeeFighters, a three-year old comparison shopping site for credit card processors, is announcing today it has been acquired by Groupon. The Chicago-based startup, which provides businesses with a way to find the best merchant account provider for their needs, has also been offering businesses other tools such as its new payment gateway called Samurai.

FeeFighters says that the acquisition will not impact any major changes to its product line, and that most of the team will be transitioned to Groupon.

In a company blog post, FeeFighters CEO Sean Harper writes:

Our goals have always been to help small businesses run more efficiently, and by teaming up with Groupon, a pioneer in local e-commerce, we are able to execute on that goal even better than we were as an independent company.

He notes that the Samurai gateway and the FeeFighters and Samurai brands will all continue on as before, post-acquisition.

Groupon has been on a shopping spree lately, buying up a number of startups, including Kima Labs, Hyperpublic, Adku, and others in recent weeks.

With the FeeFighters acquisition, the focus is clearly on gaining technology aimed to help Groupon’s merchant partners, an area which the company has been diving into more deeply lately, with this month’s launch of the Groupon Scheduler booking service, another product that came out of an acquisition (OpenCal), as an example.

FeeFighters (formerly TransFS) is backed by $1.6 million in venture funding, which includes investments from Excelerate Labs, Hyde Park Angels, 500 Startups, Sandbox Industries, OCA Venture Partners, and Arizona Bay Technology.

As of its January round, FeeFighters stated it had saved customers $30,000,000 in processing fees, with a typical user saving 40% in fees. The company had been planning to expand its current payments business product to other business financial services (including payroll processing and employee health insurance plans).

Since its big IPO last year, Groupon has been picking up the pace of international expansion. Today, for example, we were tipped an email written by Groupon Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason to Groupon employees, which announced some big changes to international management, specifically in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and Latin America.

Regardless of the fact that Groupon scooped up at least six startups since November (including Mertado, Adku, Campfire Labs, Hyperpublic, Kima Labs, and Uptake), taking a look at Groupon’s first earnings report as a public company, one will find that the company lost $350 million in 2011 — not because of marketing or M&A spend — but because of its “very aggressive international expansion” efforts.

In his email to employees, dated February 29th, the Groupon CEO revealed that the company announced a new organizational structure for EMEA this past December, “promoting seven of [its] best country Managing Directors to International VPs, overseeing different regions of EMEA, and reporting directly into Marc Samwer, our head of International.”

This international management is becoming increasingly important to Groupon, as 7,000 of its 10,000 employees are now stationed outside of the U.S., and the chain of command leads directly up the ladder to Marc Samwer. At the annual DLD confab in Munich, David Kirkpatrick asked the Groupon CEO about the supposed “problem” of giving two of the Samwer brothers so much control over the way the expands internationally, to which the CEO replied:

The Samwer brothers have a reputation for cloning, and before I started a company myself, maybe I would have looked down on it, too. You need to realize that execution is the hard part, the idea is easy.

The Samwers are the best operators I’ve ever seen in my life. We’re super lucky to have them. We couldn’t have done it without their help.

Nonetheless, Groupon struggled with its entrance into China and as a result, there has been a lot of attention from investors and analysts paid to the discrepancy between its business in the U.S. and abroad. But, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Conference last month, Mason attributed this to the fact that the company is “farther along technologically” in the U.S. than it is abroad.

However, the CEO was optimistic that this is beginning to change, partly because of Groupon’s plans to roll out deal personalization overseas, among other things. Furthermore, on Friday, the Office of Fair Trading (the U.K.’s version of the Federal Trade Commission) cracked down on Groupon Britain for what it considered “widespread breaches of consumer protection regulations,” including the way in which Groupon’s British arm is dealing with reference pricing, advertising, refunds, promoting unfair terms, and the diligence of its interactions with merchants. (More from GigaOm here.)

In response, Groupon announced that it would be making the changes that the Office of Fair Trading suggested, including to pricing and and advertising, and Groupon Communications Director Julie Mossler said that the company had actually been in the process of making those changes before the government’s ruling came down.

While there are clearly issues with meeting regulations in the U.K. (and perhaps management issues), Groupon believes in the potential of its overseas businesses and the strength of leadership. Such that Mason said in his email to Groupon employees (dated the 28th of February) that it is applying the same structure the company has used in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa — the one led by the Samwer brothers — to Latin America.

This includes a number of executive-level changes among its international ranks, including hiring Patrick Schmidt as VP of Latin America. Schmidt is formerly co-CEO (and co-founder) of Groupon Australia/New Zealand.

According to Mason:

Patrick has proven his leadership by helping to guide Groupon from an Australian latecomer to the market leader, overcoming domain squatters along the way. Before joining Groupon, Patrick spent 10 years in advertising and consulting in Europe, Asia and the U.S. We’re excited to have his help growing Latin America.

In addition to hiring Schmidt as VP of Latin America, Mason announced that Miguel Queimado will become CEO of Groupon Brazil, where he will report to Schmidt. Queimado has been living in Portugal, where he has worked for the last three and a half years for McKinsey, leading projects in Portugal and Angola.

Of course, this means that the founders of both Groupon Latin America, and Groupon Brazil, specifically, are out and will be taking new positions within the company. Oskar Hjertonsson, the founder of Groupon Latin America and Florian Otto, the Founder and CEO of Groupon Brazil, will be helping to lead the new transition to new leadership over the next several months, Mason said. Then Hjertonsson will be serving Groupon “in a to-be-determined role from his new home in San Francisco, and Otto will join the global corporate development team.”

In light of The Next Web’s report that the third largest Groupon competitor in Brazil, Peixe Urbano, acquired its second largest, Groupalia, Groupon will be getting some more heated competition going forward from its merged competitors. Both trailed Groupon in traction in LatAm, according to comScore, but not by much, and the merger significantly strengthens the company’s position in the region.

Groupon has already spent a great deal trying to push its model in international markets, and Mason’s talk at the Goldman Sachs Conference implied that just based on the size of its brand in the U.S., it shouldn’t be too difficult to snatch up market share abroad. But with its stumbling in China, issues in the U.K., and growing competition in Latin America, it falls on its new leaders to make sure the rising international expenditures aren’t for naught.

After purchasing OpenCal, the makers of an automated online appointment scheduling app, back in September of last year for an undisclosed amount, Groupon quickly went about incorporating the technology. Before long, the company had announced Groupon Scheduler, a service designed to make it easy for both customers and merchants to quickly close the loop between offer, booking, and scheduling. As Groupon looks to build its perceived and actual value for merchants, the OpenCal acquisition, and subsequent launch of Scheduler, made a lot of sense.

Since then, the company has been pretty quiet about Scheduler, but that changed today, as Groupon announced a free beta version of Scheduler, available to all SMBs in the U.S. and Canada.

Groupon claims that Scheduler now represents one of the most “intuitive and complete free products of its kind,” and while that’s not exactly true, as there are plenty of intuitive, cheap online scheduling solutions out there, combined with the Groupon brand clout, and its already existing suite of marketing tools, this is a good deal for small businesses. Merchants now have a free means by which they can accept online bookings (24/7), the ability to add a “Book Now” button to their website, along with easily integrating the service into the Groupon deals process. Another part of Scheduler’s appeal: Merchants can use it to manage all online booking for their business, whether offering Groupon deals or not.

Merchants can customize Scheduler and take advantage of a client list and a business dashboard, which show realtime stats on total appointments, new customers, and percentage of bookable time filled. Importantly, Scheduler also gives merchants the ability to track Groupon redemptions.

On the customer side, once a Groupon has been purchased, they can then proceed right to Scheduler and make an appointment. The service sends customers immediate booking confirmations, as well as email reminders up to 72 hours before scheduled appointments, according to the release.

According to Groupon’s statement, the product successfully piloted in Sacramento and Miami, and is now ready to roll out nationwide — in beta, of course.

For more, check out Scheduler at home here.

Now this is an interesting, if potentially flawed, concept. It’s called CoupFlip and it’s essentially a secondary market for Groupons, Amazon Deals, and the like. Say, for example, you buy a Groupon to the local stoat grooming place and you realize you don’t have a stoat. Before CoupFlip you’d have to hunt down the local chapter of the Stoat Lover’s Club and possibly sell your deal at a slight loss or you eat the cost (not the stoat), vowing never to be fooled by Groupon again.

Now with CoupFlip you can upload a PDF of your deal and get cash immediately. This coupon sits quietly in the system and CoupFlip will bring it up when you visit, basing its recommendations on your location and buying habits. It is, for example, a great way to get Groupon deals (like this one) after the fact (like this).

The important distinction here is that CoupFlip “takes inventory” of deals – you don’t sell them on consignment – and you get cash on the barrelhead.

“CoupFlip capitalizes on the opportunity here for a secondary market to unlock billions of dollars of unused value. The convenience for the consumer couldn’t be better. We are the best solution for the millions of people who have ever failed to use a daily deal or wish they could get their hands on a deal they missed in the original ‘flash sale,’” says CEO Phil McDonnell. McDonnell was formerly a Google engineer and now lives in New England.

“We’re a Silicon Valley-style tech startup, but we’re homegrown – and our sole focus at the moment is on Boston. Our key advisors are New England-based venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. To put it frankly, we’re living proof of the Northeast’s entrepreneurial potential,” he said.

“CoupFlip combats buyer’s remorse – that pang of regret you feel after making an impulsive daily deal purchase. When you see a weekend spa package for $99, you don’t calculate the long-term impact of that purchase on your personal finances. You jump at the deal immediately – right then and there – because you emotionally know it’s a darn good deal,” writes McDonnell.

“Unfortunately, even if that weekend spa package is an incredible deal, it might not make sense for you personally. That’s where CoupFlip steps in.”

There doesn’t seem to be anything outright wrong about CoupFlip’s efforts although I suspect Groupon may feel differently. However, it’s exactly the same as giving your friend a coupon, and barring any pending requirements to show photo ID and proof of citizenship at your local Thai place in order to get the $20 for $40 of food special, there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s just a market for coupons, pure and simple.

What are the flaws? Well, people sell deals for a reason – they’re usually bad. The company could topple over with the weight of unwanted junk. CoupFlip uses algorithms to rate the popularity and potential for sale and prices the coupons accordingly. While you might get less for the stoat washing service, you’ll probably get more for a $50 dinner for four at Masa. Besides, the world needs parasitic services like this one – just ask StubHub.

Another acquisition for Groupon, and a sign of how the e-commerce company is getting more focused on mobile as a route to future growth: it has picked up Kima Labs, which makes mobile barcode reading app Barcode Hero and mobile payment app TapBuy. The terms of the deal were not disclosed; we’re trying to find out.

The news comes just hours after news broke that Groupon had bought another mobile startup, Hyperpublic, which makes geolocation technology.

As a result of the acquisition, Barcode Hero — according to its site, which confirms that Groupon has purchased Kima Labs — will be closing down its service effective Monday, February 20. That means its iPhone app will no longer be available to download after that date. Those who already use the app will have until March 16 to download their data.

As for TapBuy, it’s not clear yet what will happen with the company’s service: the site still does not make any mention of the acquisition, so presumably users of its location-based deals will be able to continue using the service. [Update on this below.]

Like Groupon, TapBuy offers daily deals, in its case for some 100 brands. It also processes transactions using credit card information provided by users, providing some intelligence behind it by grouping purchases together and adding coupons to purchases.

Kima Labs was founded by Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford, who cut their e-commerce teeth at Amazon.com, among other places, and its main focus is mobile shopping. Scholl has confirmed the acquisition directly to me, too, for what it’s worth.

Kima’s chief engineer, Andrew Miner, is also ex-Amazon. There, he led the team behind Amazon Global, the service that lets users buy from Amazon and merchant partners internationally. That points to this acquisition potentially having a wide remit for the company, which has expanded aggressively outside the U.S. (at a big cost, according to the last quarterly results).

All also worked together at Pelago, which was acquired by Groupon in April 2011. As TC reported at the time, Pelago’s CEO, Jeff Holden, now oversees product development at Groupon. Pelago’s most well-known product was location-based services/check-in app Whrrl.

Kima Labs has an impressive list of backers, including Naval Ravikant, Ron Conway, Owen Van Natta, and a strategic investment from the Washington Post Company.

The Kima Labs acquisition, coupled with the Hyperpublic news yesterday, represents a significant pick-up in mobile activity for Groupon under VP of mobile, Michael Shim, who hopped over to Groupon from Yahoo a year ago — one of the many bright execs that Yahoo lost last year in a spate of departures.

Put together, they give a strong indication of how Groupon sees its mobile future shaping up longer term: yes, the company wants to push good deals to you when you’re on the move and near a point of purchase, but Groupon could be looking to play an even more central role in the bigger opportunity in mobile commerce, too.

Updates: Groupon gave TechCrunch the following statement on the transaction:  ”Kima Labs has developed popular apps that make mobile transactions easier, more fun and more of a possibility for merchants. We’re excited by the team’s ability to create technology that consumers love, and we believe they’ll be strong assets in our pursuit to change the way people shop.”

Meanwhile, Scholl provided us with the following detail on TapBuy: TapBuy will be wound down as well, “but on a longer schedule that we haven’t announced yet.”

At the Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference in San Francisco Thursday, Groupon Founder and CEO Andrew Mason took to the stage to talk about the daily deal behemoth’s newly-minted position as a public company, its roller coaster ride both leading up to and since its IPO, as well as plans for the future.

There was a lot of pressure bearing down on Groupon in the months leading up to its emergence on NASDAQ, with many grumbling about its overvaluation and undercooked business model, among other things. After listing its initial offering at $26 a share in November, the company’s stock today has dropped to $20 a share, after a series of ups and downs.

It also recently shared its first earnings report as a public company, missing expectations, losing $350 million overall and seeing $137 million in international operating losses. Most of this loss, however, could be attributed to the company’s aggressive international expansion, as 70 percent of its some-10,000 employees are now overseas.

Though one might be able to say this about any number of points in a company’s history, it does seem that Groupon is entering a crucial phase of its development. In just three years, it skyrocketed to domination in the deals space, raised multiple massive rounds of funding, and piloted a successful (and huge) IPO. The quiet period (pre-IPO was tough on the company, exposing many of its inherent weaknesses, but “toughening it up,” Mason said today.)

That’s all well and good, but there are appallingly low barriers to entry in the daily deals space, and while Groupon deserves much credit for maintaining a firm grasp on market share in spite of a slew of competition (much of which has now receded), it must now transition from Groupon 1.0 to Groupon 2.0. The company is well aware that it needs to deliver longer-term value to both merchants and customers if it is to continue outpacing competition.

Groupon is focused on closing the redemption loop on its platform, and enabling merchants to encourage repeat visits to their stores, and distance itself from its reputation as platform that encourages bargain hunting and not loyalty. Mason says that he and the team believe in the success they’ve had in bringing marketing to small businesses, and that they are eager to continue expanding on their mobile services by shipping mobile devices with pre-installed merchant apps, for example, that can be used by its merchants to track redemption and collect data on customer spend.

It has been piloting Groupon Rewards, a program that serves rewards to repeat customers based on their credit card information, and Mason said that he believes that the “paper model of redemption” is on its way out.

Over the last few quarters, Groupon has been spending an increasing amount on international marketing efforts, and questions from the audience brought up the discrepancy between the company’s U.S. business and its international efforts. “There are big differences now in Groupon’s business in the U.S. versus internationally,” Mason said, “but we’ve seen the model work wherever we take it — besides China.” The company’s efforts in China have been a widely-covered disaster, but Mason was firm in the belief that Groupon would still be successful elsewhere.

He attributed some of its problems in international markets to the fact that the company is just simply farther along technologically in the U.S. “But that’s starting to change,” he said. Why? Well, the CEO clearly has big hopes for rolling out deal personalization overseas, as the company already serves personalized deals in the U.S. based on location, gender, past buying behaviors, and other criteria.

Up until now, Groupon hasn’t offered any of the same deal personalization features on its international platform, but that will be “starting to change later this quarter,” the Founder assured the crowd. Groupon has taken an approach to global expansion that involves replicating its playbook in city after city, but questions remain over whether or not it can sustain its growth on a diet of daily deals alone.

And now it appears that there is some evidence that Groupon is testing an Amazon-like commerce platform abroad, with the company now using international markets as testing grounds for new services. With personalization moving abroad, and in testing more robust shopping experiences, Groupon is hoping that its aggressive spending on its global business (and transactional advertising) will be a valuable investment in the long term.

And perhaps a VIP service, too.

When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.

Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.

Like Groupon’s mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not have timeouts on buying them.

According to the site, Groupon Deals offers consumers a “complete shopping experience,” although at the moment, the selection of goods on offer is pretty small. That points to this being a local experiment more than anything else for now.

But even so, it is already starting to market the service in some form: A reader tells us that offers from Groupon Deals started appearing in his Facebook feed earlier today.

It is unclear at this point whether this is something that Groupon is planning on offering only in Germany, or whether it intends to roll out similar storefronts in other regions, which currently serve 33 million active users.

We have contacted Groupon to ask questions and will update this post as we learn more. Update: Groupon’s director of communications, Julie Mossler, said in an email: “We’re testing a new site design for Germany and based on customer and merchant feedback we’ll evaluate how to move forward.”

Extending out its services to a more conventional model of selling goods online is not exactly disruptive and cutting-edge, but it is probably also a natural move for Groupon: the company already has extensive relationships with retailers and brands for its time-based daily deals, which cover not only events and services, but a range of physical products, too. Each product on the site comes with a list of “supplier details”: that might mean Groupon has a platform for third parties to upload products for sale.

It also puts Groupon even more directly in competition with the likes of more established players like Amazon and eBay, to mention nothing of more local online retailing operations.

International is a division where Groupon is focusing hard, but at a price. In the company’s Q4 earnings reported last week, Groupon reported a loss of $350 million, with $137 million of that attributable to international expansion costs.

Groupon’s European operation was kick-started back in May 2010, when it bought Germany-based competitor Citydeal for an undisclosed sum. At that time Citydeal was already active in several European markets.

Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany.

Below are my notes – Mason’s responses are slightly paraphrased.

Also read: DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: “Twitter Has A Business Model That Works”

As you can tell from how filled the room is: there’s a lot of interest in Groupon. Can you start by telling us how you would describe the company today?

Groupon has evolved quite bit since we launched three years ago. We started off with a single ‘deal of the day’ in each city, and today we often offer dozens of deals in numerous cities, across many categories (travel, goods, etc.). We think of it more as a curated deal marketplace then a daily deal site now.

And as we go wider and expand into new categories, where are passion lies remains in local commerce. We think technology will fundamentally change the way local merchants do business, with the surge of mobile devices and whatnot.

We now have 150 million subscribers, and we’re good at getting customers in the door of the merchants we work with. Our aim is to change the way people shop locally, giving more buying power for consumers and enhancing transactions and inventory management for merchants.

Do you consider Groupon to be a technology company?

Groupon is a cyborg. It’s a tech company with an important human core. Figuratively speaking, if all Facebook or Google employees would take a few days off to go to the beach, the business would, in general, continue to run smoothly. If we would do it, it would be hell. We talk to thousands of merchants on a daily basis, so that’s a huge human component. If we’re not a tech company, then I guess you could call us an operations-sales-marketing company, which is exactly why our model is not as easy to replicate as some may think.

So the first phase of the business is being hybrid tech/human company, but in order to unlock the next phase, such as moving into more realtime local commerce (Groupon Now and Rewards for example) it makes us more of a tech company again. We’ve tried to set ourselves up from the beginning to be both.

There’s been a lot of skepticism about Groupon, from myself included I must admit. What’s your basic point of view on the way you’ve been perceived? Does it bother you?

When we filed our S1, I got the feeling that the press went from being overly ‘cheerleady’ and giving us uncritical praise to piling on. We’re not a perfect company, and we’ll always be iterating and learning. Obviously, I think the criticism was largely unfounded, particularly during the ‘quiet period’ which make things more difficult because it prevented us from setting up dialogs.

I see two problems with understanding Groupon. One is that your business appears to be easily replicable, making it hard to identify what your sustainable unique advantage is. The second, which reinforces this perception, is the fact that so many shareholders, yourself included, took unprecedented amounts of money off the table during fundraising rounds, plus some investors like Eric Lefkofsky having a bad reputation.

To address the first point you raised, about our model being so easily replicable: it frankly doesn’t matter that you don’t understand. I agree that the barriers for entry for competitors are low, you know, how hard could it be to build an email list? But what the data also shows is that the barriers to success are high.

The ratio of companies that have tried their hand at this and those who have succeeded, is lower than any business model. If you look at how quickly large tech companies like Facebook, Google, OpenTable and Yelp have pulled out, it amazes me how off people still are on this. We combine operational excellence with a human component, which is a big part of our business. We consider ourselves to be our biggest competitor. It won’t be a ninja move from one of our rivals that will kill us.

About taking money off the table: there’s a number of ways I can address this. I strongly defend the practice. If you have a startup, I’d say you should take money off the table early if you have the opportunity. The reason why is that it alleviates the pressure to be short-term focused. I took several millions of dollars off the table (some investors way more than that) and I hit my threshold, I felt comportable enough not to worry about money anymore.

Things will come along in the history of your business if you’re successful. Opportunities to sell, for example, which you’ll be more inclined to entertain if there’s financial pressure, forcing you not to think about the long-term but instead about your own financial well-being.

Unless we want a world where every startup sells to Google or Facebook or Amazon, we should stop considering taking money off the table before an ‘exit’ a bad business practice.

Also, I’ll point out that if we did not believe in the business, we had way more opportunities to take more cash off the table than by doing what we did. It’s a good practice of hedging along the way. Investors will tell you to diversify your portfolio no matter how much believe in one stock. Our investors did exactly that.

You also have to realize that we had enormous demand from investors before we went public, they were falling over themselves. Getting them on board was a strategic benefit. Bringing in great people, good long-term shareholders and familiarize them with the company. There were two ways we could achieve this: by diluting all the shareholders or by letting them sell stock to new, sophisticated shareholders. We’re not screwing them. I will add that none of our investors are complaining about the insider selling.

I give you a lot of credit as a manager, with the successful pivot that you did. How many employees do you have now?

We’re now 10,000 people, and we’re 3 years old.

That’s one of these stories that have never been seen before.

Yes, it’s amazing. If you would take a zero off everyone of our metrics, it would look very normal. We grew enormously fast. The biggest reason for that is the fact that local ecommerce is the largest market out there, and the model works. We’ve also managed to expand to other countries quickly.

Can you address the perceived ‘problem’ with two of the Samwer brothers having so much control over the way you expand internationally?

Marc Samwer is 100 percent Groupon. Can I embarrass you? The Samwer brothers have a reputation for cloning. And before I started a company myself, maybe I would have looked down on it too. You need to realize that execution is the hard part, the idea is easy.

The Samwers are the best operators I’ve ever seen in my life. We’re super lucky to have them. We couldn’t have done it without their help.

So you have 10,000 employees now. How many of them are outside of the United States?

About 7,000.

I have to give you lots of credit for being such a young, successful founder, and thanks for your candor during this interview.

You can say a lot of things about Groupon, but not that they lack a great sense of humor over there. This morning, the company distributed a press release touting a new invention called Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel (make sure you watch the behind-the-scenes video below too).

The company invites players to sign in with their Facebook account and then spin the wheel to potentially score a discount on select Groupons ($5, $10, $50 or $100).

According to the Clicky terms, only US residents are allowed to spin the wheel.

From the amusing press release:

Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel was designed to provide momentary distraction and meet the minimum threshold of amusement necessary for users to share Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel through social media channels, thereby virally spreading Groupon and increasing its number of active customers.

“The chances of winning are slim, but not impossible,” said Mike Bennett, Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel lead developer. “We designed the wheel to spin in a way that appears random – like you could potentially win on any given spin – but it’s not actually random, it’s programmatically predestined to ‘win’ 1 out of 1,000 times.”

As with many online computer games, the win ratio was determined to ensure that the lifetime value of the new customers attracted to Groupon by Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel will be greater than the total cost of the program, thus making the program a practical and sustainable investment for Groupon.

And since spinning is moderately enjoyable, every user of Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel is a winner – metaphorically. Literally, most people will not win anything.

Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel, is one of several potential marketing instruments Groupon has and will continue to test over time, some of which will be successful while others will not. Continuously experimenting with new marketing mechanisms is an important part of the growth of any company. The “win wheel” is not in itself a new concept.

Groupon will begin promoting Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel gradually over the next several months throughout Groupon’s more than 170 North American markets. The exact speed of deployment is dependent on the accuracy of ROI assumptions as determined by actual data gathered from Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel usage.

“Seeing Clicky spin for the first time, was like watching your newborn baby take his first steps. It was like an orphan who’d never seen the ocean, getting to see the ocean, while he’s getting adopted”.

Well played, Groupon, well played.

To combat the lack of transparency around customer satisfaction with daily deals, Groupon today launched a new version of its Merchant Center. It includes the real-time percentage of deal customers who would recommend the business to a friend, plus their comments. Customer satisfaction is a big question for merchants wondering if they should start or continue running daily deals. Data on satisfaction rates is scarce, though. Worse,  a 2010 study showed that just 36% of customers spend more than the value of a deal, and just 20% return to the business. The feature could be a double-edged sword, encouraging retention or desertion depending on a merchant’s feedback.

The new Merchant Center is now available to all Groupon merchants. It also includes the deal statistics feature launched last month which shows aggregate buyer demographics including zip code, gender, and age.

The customer feedback system may not be totally accurate, though. To calculate the satisfaction rates, Groupon surveys users immediately after they redeem a deal. So far, only 1 million customers have left feedback, so merchants won’t always have a representative sample. The comments may also be highly polarized, with only those who truly love or hate a deal taking the time to respond in words.

Considering chronic gripes about fine print deal term, and employee dissatisfaction than can influence the customer experience, the new feedback stats are a gamble for Groupon. Previously, merchants may have assumed customers were happy since they were getting a big discount. Positive review may also have less influence on a merchant’s decision to stick with Groupon than whether it’s actually helping their business. Meanwhile, a poor recommendation rating or an especially pissed off commenter could lead them to ditch the daily deals service.

Groupon has continued its (talent) acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched – and with extremely little fanfare.

We’ve learned that Campfire Labs, which was founded by ex-Googler Sakina Arsiwala (previously Head of International at YouTube) and her husband, social search technology expert Naveen Koorakula (previously at search companies like Inktomi, Yahoo and Picch), was quietly bought by Groupon.

I noticed something was up when ownership of the domain name campfirelabs.com was transferred to Groupon earlier this week – it currently forwards to their site (as long as you leave out the ‘www’).

There’s no good reason for Groupon to gain ownership over the company’s domain name and forward it to their own website, other than Campfire Labs was acquired by them.

From what I can gather, Campfire Labs was working on a social networking service, trying to improve the way people engage, collaborate and converse with others online. Admittedly that’s quite vague, and this recent job description makes us none the wiser:

We’re an early stage seed-funded startup that wants to change the way people think of social interactions in the real world and online. We are committed to building an intellectually stimulating and fun environment, where technology and product excellence are respected above all. We pride ourselves in having an open culture of equals. We have a cozy office in downtown San Francisco with a red couch and a well-stocked kitchen.

We are tackling very complex algorithmic, technology and product problems. We’re building systems designed to scale. Some tools in our toolkit – javascript (node.js, javascript mvc), hypertable, hadoop, C++ and Ruby. We like unit testing, continuous integration and contributing to open source.

Vivek Wadhwa mentioned the startup in a post about entrepreneurship back in July 2010.

We’ve reached out to Groupon and some people at Campfire Labs, and are still waiting on an official confirmation. But we’ve confirmed the deal through unofficial channels.

According to the company’s website – at least, the Google-cached version of it – Campfire Labs investors and advisors included SV Angel’s Ron Conway and David Lee, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, the late Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani, former Facebook and YouTube CFO Gideon Yu, former eBay SVP Michael Dearing, Felicis Ventures founder and MD Aydin Senkut, Splash CEO Michael Powers, Asha Jadeja and Vuclip CEO Nickhil Jakatdar.

Sigh. Here we go again.

A patent troll called Mount Hamilton Partners has filed two separate patent infringement lawsuits against daily deals juggernaut Groupon and Google, which also operates a digital couponing business called Google Offers.

Mount Hamilton Partners, which purports to be an ‘investor in technology companies’ on its website, garnered headlines about two and a half years ago when it sued OpenTable right before the restaurant reservation service provider went public. Now they’re going after Google and Groupon.

The patent in both cases is U.S. patent 7,904,334, entitled “System and method for reducing excess capacity for restaurants and other industries during off-peak or.”

In the filings, Mount Hamilton Partners argues that the fact that services like Groupon and Google Offers help restaurants fill unused seats and build direct relationships – thus increasing loyalty – with individual customers, infringes its patent, causing ‘irreparable harm’.

The patent in question was filed for in May 2004 and approved earlier this year. As far as I can tell, Mount Hamilton has never produced or sold any ‘innovations’ based on its patented technology.

Both suits seek damages. Both suits should have never been filed.

Now this makes a lot of sense. Groupon this morning announced its latest product, dubbed Groupon Scheduler, an online appointment service that makes it easier for both end users and merchants to go from offer to actual booking.

Groupon Scheduler is based on technology from OpenCal, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup Groupon apparently – quietly – acquired in September 2011. The new product will become available to Groupon merchants and consumers in Sacramento and Miami beginning on December 7, 2011 (i.e. today) and be rolled out in other markets “soon after”.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

More about Groupon Scheduler, straight from the press release:

Business owners using Groupon Scheduler can set up an appointment calendar covering all their staff, services and business locations, allowing consumers to instantly book appointments online without having to call or email.

The service can be used to take appointments for Groupon features or as a freestanding tool to manage a merchant’s entire calendar.

Once they’ve purchased a Groupon deal, consumers can schedule or cancel appointments through their Groupon.com accounts. Both consumers and merchants get immediate email confirmation of each booking, as well as automated email reminders 24 hours before scheduled appointments.

Merchants also have the ability to add “Book Now” buttons on their own websites and use Groupon Scheduler to manage online bookings for all their services – not only those offered through Groupon.

In other words, this marks Groupon’s entry into the online booking services market. The company is trying hard to become much more than just a pure-play, daily deals site that’s too ‘easy’ to clone.