Groupon Acquires Realtime Location-Aware Service Glassmap To Help You Find Deals

Y Combinator company Glassmap, a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon. A representative from Groupon has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has indeed acquired Glassmap and is “excited to bring the team aboard.”

This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing and like to do so that it can push more relevant deals to you. This is something that companies such as Google are also working on.

Here’s what the company had to say:

Today, we’re happy to announce that Glassmap has been acquired by Groupon! Our goal when we started building Glassmap was to help people find what was interesting and relevant around them. But in plainer terms, we just really wanted to mold all these fancy ideas and innovations of Silicon Valley into a simple and useful tool for the real world. Groupon has revolutionized how people today use technology to interact with the real world, and that’s why we’re so excited to join them. Together, we’ll be able to create even more amazing products.

Most importantly, we want to thank all our loyal users for riding with us for these past two years. It’s been really fun for us, and we hope to continue delighting you with our efforts with Groupon. The Glassmap application will wind down and close on February 15, 2013.

As the team mentions, it now has an opportunity to take what it has built and put it in front of a more mainstream audience – like outside of San Francisco.

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When the service launched, I spoke with its team, and they told me about some pretty interesting location technology it was building, which doesn’t tax your phone’s battery like other apps. The team, Geoffrey Woo, Jon Zhang and Jonathan Chang, are all engineers who dropped out of Stanford’s MS program. Their focus in school? Distributed systems, circuits, web and mobile development, and industrial design.

Quite a grab for Groupon.

No word on what the purchase price was, but this sounds like one of those fancy acquisition/hires that we talk about all of the time, mostly surrounding Facebook and Google. Is Groupon about to get more hip? We’ll find out.

[Photo credit: Flickr]