Google Offers, the company’s long-awaited response to Groupon, has gone live with a signup for beta program in Portland, Oregon.
Google promises “50% off or more at places you’ll love,” on a sign up page and offers six locations — Portland; California’s Oakland/East Bay and San Francisco: and New York City’s downtown, midtown and uptown. So far, only Portland is offering a beta version of Offers, but no deals are available right now.
The program has been in the works since at least January, when Mashable got hold of a face sheet on services. According to that document, Google Offers will look and operate much like Groupon or LivingSocial and send an email to users with a local deal of the day. Consumers then have a specific time period (likely 24 hours) to act on the deal.
Google’s service comes after the company famously tried to buy groupon for $6 billion. Groupon rebuffed the offer and is now readying an IPO that could be as high as $25 billion.
By: Todd Wassermen from Mashable
