Groupon is looking for a buyer. The Chicago-based company that pioneered the local commerce category known as “daily deals” has contacted several public companies in the past month to try to drum up interest in acquiring it. On its IPO day in 2011, Groupon was worth more than $16 billion, making its decision to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google a year earlier look smart. Today, Groupon is valued at just $2.4 billion; it acquired its principal competitor LivingSocial for $0 in 2016. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Recode Daily: Today’s daily deal: Groupon wants to sell itself
Plus, the world holds its breath as the first Thai soccer players are rescued from a cave; Sonos files for an IPO; some upscale restaurants are turning into co-working spaces during their off-hours.
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Eight members of the Thai soccer team trapped in a cave were rescued after more than two weeks. A group of 13 foreign cave divers and five Thai Navy SEAL divers accompanied the teenage boys one by one through the narrow, flooded passageways on the hours-long journey. Here’s a fascinating step-by-step diagram of what it really takes to get the rest of the boys and their coach out of the cave. [The New York Times]
Among the first casualties of President Trump’s trade war with China: German cars and American steak. Triggering what China calls “the largest trade war in economic history,” the U.S. on Friday imposed a 25 percent duty on $34 billion of Chinese imports; Beijing immediately responded with tariffs on U.S. soybeans, meat and vehicles. Meanwhile, Trump is planning to announce his candidate to replace Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy via a prime-time TV special tonight. [Bloomberg News]
As Amazon’s ad business surges, some advertising companies are worried that they are giving Amazon the data and market power it needs to eventually run them out of business. In the first three months of 2018, Amazon reported revenue for its “other” segment —which is largely advertising — rose 139 percent to $2 billion, and it doesn’t need a middleman like ad agencies. Meanwhile, a report has surfaced criticizing Amazon for allowing its platforms to spread white supremacy and racism; shoppers can buy onesies for babies stamped with alt-right images, Nazi-themed action figures and anti-Semitic books and music. [Claire Atkinson / NBC News]
Here’s a Q&A with Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox about how Facebook checks facts and polices hate speech. Cox was recently promoted to run product at WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, which means he is effectively in charge of product for four of the six largest social media platforms in the world. Talking about weeding out toxic content and bad actors, Thompson says he feels that the company’s immune system is evolving more rapidly than the virus. [Nicholas Thompson / Wired]
Wireless speaker company Sonos filed for an IPO. Founded in 2002, Sonos has grown into a dominant force in the speaker industry — but its current business model is highly reliant on integration with other services and partners, like Spotify, Apple and Amazon. And those guys have their own device plans. [Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge]
Meet the face behind the cartoonish emojis of Android. Emojis are rendered differently across platforms like Android, iOS, Facebook, Samsung and others, and the Unicode Consortium decides on the actual content of the symbols, but Google’s “emoji interpreter,” Jennifer Daniel decides what makes an emoji “Googley,” which means more cartoonish than the others. Daniel, who found herself at the center of a media frenzy after she tweeted that Google was removing the egg from its salad emoji to make it more vegan-friendly, says there is shockingly little communication between the big vendors as they start to interpret Unicode’s descriptions for the icons. [Jillian D’Onfro / CNBC]
Top stories from Recode
On the Recode Decode podcast, Levy said that “the worst-case scenario for us is that Silicon Valley gets so far behind on these issues that we just can’t be trusted as an industry.”
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, the founder of Craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies talks with Kara Swisher about his foundation’s recent donation of $20 million to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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