Groupon.com’s board of directors met Wednesday to decide whether to take google’s $6 billion offer. The coupon site has a team of sales people who are well connected and able to strike up deals on short notice. Google’s shares fell 4.5 percent, partly on concern it may shell out too much for a business likely to face increasing competition. The company company was founded by music graduate Andrew Mason, who lives in Chicago with his girlfriend and 20 cats. Groupon currently serves Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. You can find Groupon’s daily deals online and also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Impulse buying will tail off significantly after a few purchases. Google then puts up this kind of bubble box that says this is the business and here is the address.”. The deals are activated only when a minimum number of people agree to make a purchase, giving Groupon clout to negotiate steep group discounts on products and services. But why would Google want to spent more than it did on YouTube to own a coupon service? The Dow Jones IndexesSM are proprietary to and distributed by Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and have been licensed for use.

Though Google isn’t necessarily new to the neighborhood space (think Google Places), it doesn’t have nearly the presence that Groupon does in that area. If you define it as a separate market, it’s not going to be an issue,” said Richard Brosnick, an antitrust expert with the law firm Butzel Long. Because it’s a bad deal for retail. Restaurant.com burned through the restaurant market with its similar "buy a $25 gift certificate for model. This is a potentially bad deal for Google.

Tech Eye describes how Groupon works, and why it is such an attractive investment for Google. There is nothing unique to what they’re doing,” he said of Groupon, “so there is a risk that Google overpays for Groupon at this point.”. Get more multisource tech video news analysis from Newsy. The discounts help merchants bring in extra business, while Groupon keeps up to half the new revenue that its partners garner from each coupon. Facebook could use Groupon’s vast merchant directory to expand its own local offerings.

And on the other side of things, it’s something Groupon may not be able to maintain at such a fast clip on its own. The stock was also battered by news that European regulators had opened an antitrust investigation.