One might think that Austin-based mobile check-in and social networking company GoWalla would be happy that one of their competitors is now gone, but the story is more complicated. Groupon acquired Pelago, the parent company of local discovery app Whrrl, which is a similar service to GoWalla or fellow competitor FourSquare. Financials of the acquisition were not made public. Groupon will shut down Seattle-based Whrrl on April 30 and is likely to leverage its platform for the company’s daily deals services and use it as a location-based advertising service.
Users will be able to obtain their information and check-in data from the Whrrl website should they choose to do so before the company shuts down. Whrrl has operated under a different angle on location-based apps, with the goal of the platform to personalize the user experience in real time as users feed in preferences and data, which is something Pelago CEO Jeff Holden learned when he was an executive at Amazon for almost a decade.
“The mission alignment of the two companies (Whrrl and Groupon) and the fact that we’ve taken very different approaches is a big part of what makes this marriage non-strange, and in fact, very complementary and compelling,” wrote Holden on Pelago’s blog. “You would be right to expect that the ideas underpinning Whrrl and many of the inventions contained within may reemerge under the Groupon banner.”
While its unclear at this point, this may mean that the mobile Groupon app, which currently identifies nearby deals on a map, could grow to using deals to convince users to check-in or be geo-fenced to a location and personalize discounts to a user’s interests. This would be an attractive service outside of the typical services offered by GoWalla or FourSquare, which allow for chance meetings with others who are checked-in at a locale, the option to gain points and view tips at a place, with an occasional offer from a store or local business.
Groupon has the ability to make check-in based services much more focused on deals, as it’s the company’s core business, and could spell trouble for GoWalla and FourSquare.
While GoWalla is very popular in its home turf of Austin and some other markets, New York City-based FourSquare is much more popular nationwide. The access and growth of Facebook is another concern to all companies, as Facebook is planning to expand its local deals offering.
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