Ipo, Online Deals | featured news

When Groupon Inc filed its plan to go public with U.S. regulators in June, Chief Executive Andrew Mason proclaimed in a letter to prospective shareholders that "life is too short to be a boring company."

I wrote here at Forbes in May about the dangerous trend of unaudited numbers being used by companies, media, and investors to evaluate the potential of these IPOs... As long as they get their return before the gig is up, who cares what the real story is?

Groupon is going to wait at least a couple of weeks before launching the final phase of its initial public offering because regulators still have questions for the daily deals website and the stock market is too volatile, a person familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

... Groupon, far from representing some kind of new paradigm, is a phenomenon we’ve all seen many times before: a money-gushing dot-com that’s gambling it can make it across the IPO finish line by keeping the conversation focused on revenues (growing) rather than P&L (worsening).

Daily deals site Groupon Inc filed for an initial public offering, hoping to capitalize on the biggest investor stampede into Web start-ups since the dotcom bubble burst a decade ago.