LivingSocial News

LivingSocial Inc. - as a brand, at least - "does not stand a chance" and is going to vanish in 2014, or so predicts 24/7 Wall St.

This summer, LivingSocial, a website which focuses on helping people to discover shopping, dining and family entertainment deals in their own cities, will be bringing their Backyard Festival to Randall's Island on July 13th.

The e-commerce behemoth Amazon has recently reported its earnings in which it missed the revenues estimates but easily beat the earnings expectations, which were already very low.

Federal authorities say a gang of cyber-criminals recently stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe.

D.C. Tech this week, as much as any other, was a national story, either because it drew the attention of national press or because its actors are traipsing around the country, or both: - Grotech bucked the sad, sad national VC fundraising trends by raising a $225 million fund.

In addition to the possible legal pitfalls of advertising on Groupon-type websites, there are also ethical and practice management concerns to be weighed by healthcare practitioners before agreeing to such arrangements.

Over on MasterCard's Cashless Conversations blog , Ken Moy writes about the recent additions of BK Delivers, LivingSocial and Rakuten.com to the list of merchants now accepting MasterPass .

Grotech Ventures , based outside Washington, D.C., has raised a new $225 million fund to invest in early-stage technology companies - and that's good for Denver-area startups.

At the close of last year's Capital Fringe festival, Executive Director Julianne Brienza was saying what had always seemed inevitable: Fringe's time in Mount Vernon Square was running out.

Mandy Cole, LivingSocial Inc.'s longtime sales chief, departed the D.C.-based deals giant this month for a new gig at Stella & Dot.

LivingSocial's Indonesia operation is expanding into Bali, the Jakarta Post reports.

Gun control advocacy groups CREDO Action and The Gun Truth Project have released a report criticizing LivingSocial 's refusal to ban deals from its site that combine gun use and alcohol.

A flurry of three press releases hit my inbox Monday from liberal San Francisco-based advocacy group CREDO, each linking to a report blasting LivingSocial's various shootin' and drinkin' events, and each implying that the two activities happen at the same time .

One of LivingSocial's first investors was Don Rainey of venture capital firm Grotech Ventures.

It's a strategy that's worked well enough for his Vienna, Virginia-based venture capital firm, Grotech Ventures , that it's been able to raise $225 million from limited partners for its latest, oversubscribed, investment fund.

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography.

Steve Case, founder of AOL, warned nearly 6,000 UNC graduates Sunday that America cannot afford to rest on its laurels if it wants to continue to be the world's economic leader.

Several desks in Venga's single-suite headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW have yet to be filled.

If there was any doubt that daily deals rivals LivingSocial Inc. and Groupon Inc.

Groupon yesterday reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and trimmed its losses for the first quarter as compared to a year ago.