Groupon is acquiring Pelago, maker of the socially-driven location-based check-in application Whrrl, to further innovate in the daily deals space.

As part of the deal, Groupon will be closing the curtain on Whrrl beginning April 30. The companies claim the synergy is meant to spur innovation in the daily deal space.

?We?ve always liked CEO Jeff Holden, the Whrrl team and the technology they?ve developed,? said Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon, Chicago, in a blog post. ?Their obsession with real-world serendipitous discovery, or anti-search, is core to Groupon?s mission.

?Jeff intimately gets consumer buying behavior and the importance of a great user experience, and his team is this awesome combination of data-driven creative ? the people who create smart products that are really fun to use,? he said.

Anti-search
This anti-search that Groupon is so attracted to has to do with consumers that discover great things when they weren?t actually looking for anything.

To further explain, search was created to aid the high-intent consumer. This is the person looking for something very specific and searching for it via a search engine such as Google or Microsoft?s Bing.

Pelago claims that it builds products for the ?zero-intent? consumer, who is not actually looking for anything, and instead a great idea (deal, offer, coupon) finds them. Pelago calls this real-world serendipitous discovery.

?It?s the idea of finding things you didn?t know you didn?t know,? said Julie Mossler, a spokeswoman at Groupon. ?People searching are usually looking for something very specific, whereas Whrrl introduces you to places you did not know were in your backyard.

?The location-based social networking discovery model of Whrrl was what really attracted us to them,? she said. ?In the future you may see us incorporating some of the things that Whrrl is known for into our products.?

Nondisclosure
Groupon has not disclosed any terms of the deal, nor where the Whrrl product is going to go.

Additionally, Pelago?s Jeff Holden will be joining the Groupon team as senior vice president of product management. However, not all of Pelago?s employees will be joining the Groupon team.

Groupon has not disclosed who will leave and who will stay.

Whrrl has been a cloud service for customers and their data. Mr. Holden promises that customer data will not disappear irretrievably into the cloud.

?As such, our last engineering effort on Whrrl has been to develop an experience that lets you get your data such as check-ins, photos, recommendations, your Want To list and etcetera back in a way that we think is pretty convenient and useful,? Pelago?s Mr. Holden said.

?You will be able to continue using Whrrl normally through April 30,? he said. ?Starting today, however, you?ll find on the Web site that you now have an option to retrieve your data ? pretty much everything you ever put into Whrrl.

?It?s explained pretty clearly on the site, so I won?t get into the details here, but I hope you do download your data and ultimately have the opportunity to use it again.?