Groupon, the online coupon business, has jumped on the internet bandwagon by filing for an initial public offering, and the figures it discloses in its S-1 filing are astonishing in various ways.

In short, Groupon is  growing like crazy in terms of number of users and offers, while losing money at an eye-watering rate. To make up for the latter, it has come up with an ingenious way of smartening up its figures.

The S-1 filing shows that Groupon had 83m subscribers at the end of March and its revenues rose from a total of $713m in 2010 to $645m in the first quarter of 2011 alone. Read more

Microsoft has just unveiled some details of its future Windows 8 operating system and, while good-looking, it shows signs of the traditional Microsoft compromises to keep faithful to past versions.

A video shown at the D9 conference on Wednesday shows the new “tiles” that are Microsoft’s way of making it easy for users on its planned generation of tablets to navigate their way around. It clearly hopes that Windows 8 will allow it to catch up with Apple’s iPad.

In the background, however, is the familiar Windows file manager architecture for navigating applications – you can see it switch between the two in the video. Microsoft is thus layering something new on top of something old. Read more