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As we reported this week, there's something wrong in the daily deals business. One in five deals purchased expires before it's redeemed. That's called "breakage." New data released by CityPockets provide a much richer breakdown of consumer behavior around daily deals.

CityPockets found that the average time before a voucher is redeemed is 3 months, while the average life of a voucher before expiration is 7 months. The data also show that 20% of vouchers go unredeemed, just about exactly what our previous report found. By CityPockets' measurements, $1.2 billion, with a B, has been wasted on expired vouchers since this market emerged.

DealsGoRound says it has uncovered a $577 million opportunity in the daily deals space. Nearly 22% of deals purchased from Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe and elsewhere go unredeemed according to a survey from Rice University. This represents a huge secondary market for re-selling deals, which is precisely what DealsGoRound does. To illustrate the opportunity here, DealsGoRound has released the following infographic breaking down what Petersen calls the "cycle" of daily deals.

EggDrop is a new mobile application for buying and selling goods in real-time with those in your local community. The idea is to improve upon the mobile commerce experience by using the technology that ships on modern smartphones. The app lets you use the camera for posting photos of items for sale, filter searches by location and receive push notifications to stay informed about the items you're watching, buying or selling.

In addition, EggDrop introduces an interesting pricing model - the "falling price auction." This enables so-called "frictionless" transactions that work without any haggling, bargaining, deals or discounts. It's as if eBay has been re-imagined for the mobile, social, location-based age.

The number of daily deal sites is growing at an amazing rate. Recent data from daily deal aggregator Yipit, shows there are now over 480. The number has grown by almost a factor of 10 over the last year (chart below).

Entrepreneurs definitely have become interested in this model. The largest, Groupon, is actually being studied by some leading academic researchers. We thought it'd be worth summarizing five interesting observations from this research.

As an entrepreneur it can be dizzying to watch Groupon and Living Social grow so quickly, raising huge venture rounds at massive valuations while contemplating multiple billion dollar acquisitions and IPOs. While certainly this is something even the most disciplined founders find themselves dreaming about, the experience is such an outlier it's not something you can build projections from. However, I do think there is one key lesson entrepreneurs should look at - we are moving into a new "default business model" for consumer software that many of the fastest growing startups are applying to their business.

While most consumer software over the last few years was commercialized by serving advertisements (and before that by charging licensing fees) increasingly I expect consumer technology to be commercialized by enabling purchases and taking a percentage of the transaction over the next few years.

Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans.

On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google's YouTube, Apple's iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you're invited. She's a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects.

Today, at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, Nic Covey, Director of Insights for Nielsen Mobile, spoke on the subject of m-commerce (commerce that takes place via the mobile device). In his presentation, he covered what retailers must do to make their sites ready for the mobile web as well as discussing some stats on who uses the mobile web, what prompts them to shop online, and what concerns they have today about the mobile shopping experience. Additionally, Covey reported that, based research done by Nielsen Mobile, nearly half (49%) of mobile data users have said they expect to participate in mobile commerce in the future. It looks like this is one trend about to take off.