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Disruptive discount provider Groupon and live events company Live Nation have teamed up to launch GrouponLive, a new site for ticketing deals. Live Nation Entertainment, formed by the combination of concert promoter Live Nation and ticket seller Ticketmaster, currently promotes over 20,000 shows per year. But with the economy's downturn, selling out a show is hard these days. The new venture, GrouponLive, will address that problem, not only by discounting seats, but also through the power of the Groupon brand, which brings the news of concerts and other events to Groupon's worldwide user base of millions. Many of these users represent new business for Live Nation, as they may not have heard of the events being promoted beforehand or they decide to buy a ticket at the last minute, but only due to a deal.

Visa is launching its own version of the location-based discount, in a move that rivals Facebook Places Deals, Foursquare and other mobile social networks hoping to capitalize on a shopper's physical presence in order to offer them bargains. But in Visa's case, no "checkin" is required. In fact, neither is a smartphone.

Instead, the credit card company is experimenting with SMS text messages containing offers which are sent users who opt-in to the new program. In its initial phase, clothing retailer The Gap is Visa's only partner. Discounts are sent to consumers in predefined zip codes and demographics after qualifying transactions are made with their Visa cards.

MasterCard recently launched a new mobile application called "MasterCard Marketplace Overwhelming Offers," which delivers daily deals to iPhone users. Despite its mouthful of a name, savvy shoppers planning on purchasing a big-ticket item in the near future may want to keep an eye on this one.

Like the popular Internet retailer Woot (just bought by Amazon), the app provides deeply discounted items, available in limited quantities for a limited time. At 12 p.m. Eastern (GMT - 4:00) every day, a new deal is posted to the mobile app, offering "door-buster" type savings of 50% or more on brand-name products from a network of over 28,000 merchants.

Georgetown roommates David Ambrose and Justin Tsang never thought their time spent together in the dorms would amount to a joint business. The two recently launched Scoop St. - a group buying discount site for local deals on restaurants, spa packages, sporting events and concerts. Similar to other shopping sites like Woot and GIlt, users have a limited time to purchase. However, with Scoop St. and competitor Groupon, a minimum number of users must sign up for an offer by the end of the day. When the minimum is met, your credit card is charged, but if no one else signs up for the deal, then you aren't charged a penny.

If you're a smart shopper (and these days, who isn't?), then you probably check the weekly circular for deals and clip out coupons so you can save at the store. Or maybe your coupons arrive digitally, through emails and text messages. But wouldn't it be better if your phone itself could function as the coupon? That's the promise of MoLo Rewards, a wireless coupon application which lets you scan your phone at the point of sale to instantly redeem all your coupons or loyalty rewards using either Near Field Communication (NFC) or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

Around this time last year, we were excited about a new Firefox extension called MySocial24x7 which brought FriendFeed activity streams right into your browser sidebar. Built on the Google App Engine platform, the add-on was one of the first to make use of the FriendFeed API. Unfortunately, the add-on's creator Sandosh Vasudevan stopped work on the extension and soon it became out-of-date. But now, with permission from Sandosh, a new developer has taken over and the add-on has returned.

Ohpan is a news ticker. OK, that's one way of describing it, but it's about as far removed from what Ohpan does - and has the potential to do - as calling a Tivo a VCR. Unveiled today in invite-only beta (don't worry, we've got access codes for you), Ohpan takes the concept of a scrolling feed and tricks it out until it's hardly recognizable. Atype Studios, the creator, calls it a dynamic side-scrolling infostream.