Groupon Just Bought Ditto.Me from the Creator of Twitter’s One-Time European Rival
Remember Ditto.me, the social discovery app we reviewed a year ago? Groupon just acquired it for an undisclosed sum and is going to integrate Ditto.me into its own group buying offering. How Groupon plans to integrate the popular iPhone app is still unclear.
Ditto.me‘s mobile app tried to answer the quesion “What are you up to?”, letting you see what your friends were planning to do through checkings and recommendatins. Groupon on the other hand you probably know about – its the site that started the “group buying” trend that sparked hundreds if not thousands of local group buying sites.
Grouponitto?
You might not have bought anything at Groupon, but you’ve certainly encountered a “group buying” business. What could Ditto offer such a business model? A way to share your buying experience? Maybe.
Ditto’s checkins were categorized into a dozen kind of “badges” such as “See movie” and “At home”. The startup was co-founded by Jyri Engestrom, a Finnish entepreneur that also started Jaiku, a microblogging network popular in Finland, but not really anywhere else – although TWiT.tv’s Leo Laporte loved it. Google bought it 2007. and it took Engestrom 2 years to leave the search giant and start Ditto.
No Ditto
Ditto.me announced its sale on its official blog. What is clear is that Ditto is no longer going to be downloadable after April 30th, when they plan to turn off the service, as well as remove their app from the Apple and Nokia App stores, stating:
We can’t reveal what we’ll be working on at Groupon but we are excited to give it 100% – to enable this, we’ll be winding down Ditto… We think you’ll love what we and Groupon dream up next.
Techcrunch’s Colleen Taylor speculates the whole deal might be an “acqui-hire”, a deal in which a company like Groupon buys a smaller project to bring in its talented employees. You can still open the Ditto.me website and download the iPhone app to see if their engineers and designers were worthly of such a specific acquisition.
We’ll probably have to wait a few months of maybe even 2013. to see what Groupon has planned. Are you thinking of something mobile, with checkins about customer’s shopping experiences? Ditto!
