Groupon

Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, we're cutting the live stream to free up bandwidth. Our tenderest apologies to the daily live listeners, but be sure to follow @the404 on Twitter for an extremely truncated, livebloggish version of the episode.

If you're now wondering what to do from 12-1 p.m. every day, we recommend rewatching old episodes and pretending they're live. On today's show: sunbathing groundhogs, instant Facebook millionaire David Choe, a CBS pilot show about Groupon, and "Reading Rainbow" host LeVar Burton strikes back.… Read more

Try going to any part of online retailer Mertado's Web site and you'll be redirected to one page with this message:

"Today, we're pleased to announce that we are continuing this journey by becoming a part of the Groupon family."

As of today, Groupon has acquired Mertado, an online social-shopping company that used Facebook as its distribution platform and sold product deals matched to users' lifestyles, such as housewares, electronics, and food.

"Our mission at Mertado has always been to expose a selection of high quality, unique, lifestyle-oriented products to consumers wherever they spend … Read more

Shoppers will be able to use PayPal in more than 2,000 brick-and-mortar stores come March.

The e-commerce payment business, owned by eBay, started a preliminary run this week in 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar. By the end of the year, PayPal plans to add 20 more retailers and expand nationally.

"We are excited about our partnership with The Home Depot," Nayar said. "We will continue to be focused on delivering the best possible product experience for customers and retailers as we expand with The Home … Read more

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason admits that his team made mistakes before the daily deals site went public late last year, but he defended his performance in guiding the startup's meteoric rise.

In an interview with Lesley Stahl aired tonight on the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes," Mason conceded that his team made a "bush-league mistake" when it misstated its revenues before going public. The Securities and Exchange Commission forced the daily deals provider to revise its filing papers after the company reported that it generated $713.4 million in revenue in 2010, while the SEC … Read more

It's our annual prediction extravaganza! Stephen, the All-Seeing Eye, NostraTongus, and Molly the Mage look into 2012 and guess at which companies, which gadgets, and which trends will appear, die, expand, or maybe just go horribly wrong. Spoiler: we all think Facebook will IPO.

Subscribe: iTunes (MP3) | iTunes (320x180) | iTunes (640x360)

RSS (MP3) | RSS (320x180) | RSS (640x360)… Read more

It's the end of the year show! And we celebrate that, and Hanukkah, with a very special Rumor Has It today.

Instead of rounding up the week's hottest rumors, we've rounded up the year's hottest rumors. Bam! And we bet you can guess what's on our list.

We cover the ones that did come true, the ones that didn't, and the ones that were so annoying, we wanted to scream. Why won't some of these rumors ever die? At least they keep us in business.

What was your top rumor that did come true, didn't come true, or annoyed you to death? Let us know in the comments.

We don't have a show next week, but tune back in January 3, 2012 (!), for the first Humiliation Day of the year. Augh! … Read more

Here's an upbeat tidbit to end the year: 2011 is on track to the biggest year in venture capital deals in a decade.

Big years make for daring bets, and for this year I've chose a dozen influential investors to single out for their role in fueling startups of all sorts.

If the final quarter shapes up as it looks like it will, venture capital deals will total $30 billion for the year, a 25-percent jump from 2010, according to Anand Sanwal, whose firm, CB Insights, tracks investment activity among VCs and some big angel investors.

"I … Read more

Marc Andreessen's view of the world boils down to software.

From where he stands, as the guy who co-founded Netscape Communications and now co-runs the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, no industry is safe from software. Or, as Andreessen put it in a much-discussed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, "Software is eating the world."

Software has chewed up music and publishing. It's eaten away at Madison Avenue. It's swallowed up retail outlets like Tower Records. The list goes on.

No area is safe--and that's why Andreessen sees so much … Read more

As more and more companies get into the daily-deals game, the bankers behind Groupon's IPO must be banging their heads against the wall. And now, there's one more formidable entrant to give them headaches: PayPal.

The eBay-owned payments company says it is planning on offering deals as soon as the first quarter of 2012. And, according to Bloomberg News, it is taking what could be a smart approach to the ever-popular deal genre: location- and user-habit-based offers.

PayPal has more than 100 million users, and it thinks that it can leverage what it knows about those customers to … Read more