done a ton of interviews over the years, Allen didn’t seem flustered by the big TV interview—even when Lesley Stahl went with a lame Howard Hughes dig while checking out Allen’s huge airplane collection.
—Redmond, WA-based Concur (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CNQR]]), which makes software that helps businesses track their employee travel and expense costs, made another move into travel-booking alliances by investing $40 million in Cleartrip, a private online travel site in India. It sounds similar to the presence Concur got when it acquired San Francisco’s TripIt to help customers manage their travel itineraries. Concur, which already has several international offices, also announced that it was opening its newest office in India to capitalize on that country’s growing business sector.
—Seattle’s Pelago, maker of the Whrrl location check-in app, was snapped up by daily-deals leader Groupon for undisclosed terms. This comes as the intelligentsia are debating whether check-ins are “over,” but a really interesting takeaway was penned by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider. Gobry points out that Whrrl, “which tried to compete with Foursquare and didn’t get very far,” is a good example of “parking”—when VCs can offload a company that isn’t rocketing to world-beater status. That view also doesn’t really take anything away from the Pelago people who are joining Groupon—Pelago honcho Jeff Holden is now overseeing product development at one of the hottest companies out there.
—We saw a sizable financing round for Lockerz, a social network aimed at “Generation Z” that combines hot trends like game mechanics and shopping discounts with the established sharing features of Facebook and other friend-connecting sites. Lockerz’s marketing materials actually get in some digs at the broad adoption of Facebook and others, positioning itself as something parents wouldn’t use. At the same time, it’s trying to be an intermediary that will allow its users to post things on Facebook—and, as an added twist, it’s actually home to some original Web content, specifically a short TV-style series about young people.
