Groupon Acquires Groupon Clone CityDeal, Expands to Europe Extremely Easily

Groupon's great, but confined as it is to the US and Canada, a void was left in other parts of the world for clones. CityDeal, which operates in most of Europe, is one of those clones. CityDeal is active in 18 countries, from the UK to Turkey and Italy to Finland, and typically uses a different domain name for each nation, which is different than Groupon's sign-in local system on its single site.

The deal will merge all CityDeal properties under the Groupon banner--good call based on the...