I still remember when the buzz about ‘GroupOn entering in India market’ was almost every corner of internet in India. Internet users, who had some idea about GroupOn’s business model or potential to offer products/services at throw away prices, were thrilled to learn the GroupOn’s acquisition of SoSasta.com – an Indian clone of GroupOn. However, for last couple of days both the companies are, apparently, no more enjoying the togetherness of each other.
To surprise all, SoSasta.com is not carrying a tag with the logo which used to claim “A product of Group”. Interestingly, SoSasta.com has also removed all punctuations and textures about Groupon from its website. We have failed to find a fine print of “A product of Group” which used to be there at footer of every page on SoSasta website.
Though, we don’t have any confirm source for the exact reason behind such twist, it seems to be a post effect of a recent embarrassment which SoSasta faced after its users database, containing more than 300,000 users’ personal information including login id and password,  got hacked last weekend. Surprisingly, it was reported that all such confidential information, supposed to be in encrypted format, was store in clear text format and also was indexed by Google search engine.
This could be mere co-incident which may went unnoticed by GroupOn or SoSasta management, but speculations have already being made about GroupOn’s self-driven initiative in Indian market after it will settle down the legal battle to acquire groupon.com, which seems to be at the next corner.
Recently, another global daily deal giant livingsocial.com has starting tapping Indian market and has already started its offerings without launching any introductory home page.
We have tried getting concerns on this issue, but both the companies have not reverted back to us with any clarification yet.
