According to press reports from China, Groupon is not getting along with its Gaopeng.com group buying venture partner Tenacent. "Apparently the site went up for a day, Tencent balked and pulled it back down," TechCrunch hears. "Beyond that, people tell us the operation is pure chaos: Rapid hiring, little due diligence and money being thrown around. The biggest gripe: It's almost entirely run by foreigners." Perhaps asking for trouble, Gaopeng recently ran a hiring ad with the promise of limitless finds, plans to hire 1,000 people in a matter of months, and consultants and MBAs in particular. "Not people …

At a meeting on Wednesday, kiosk DVD rental service Redbox told analysts that it was ready to on Netflix. "Redbox President Mitch Lowe said his company's forthcoming digital option will be subscription-based Internet streaming instead of a transactional service through which consumers pay separately for each movie," reports The Los Angeles Times. According to Lowe, a single monthly fee will allow users to access movies on multiple devices and access discs through kiosks. Redbox will therefore be competing directly with Netflix, which presently has over 20 million subscribers to its DVD-by-mail and Internet streaming subscription plans. Redbox has yet …

U.S. consumers are more likely to buy a smartphone in 2011 than PCs, mobile phones, e-readers, media tablets and gaming products, according to a recent Gartner survey. Smartphone sales are expected to grow from 67 million in 2010 to 95 million this year while PC's increase only from 45.6 million to 50.9 million. Smartphones were followed by laptop computers and desktop computers in rankings of U.S. consumers' average intent to purchase in 2011. Regular mobile phones ranked fourth, followed by e-book readers in the fifth position, and tablet computers ranking sixth. The findings were based on a survey …

It shouldn't be any surprise that consumers are heading to places like drug stores and dollar stores for more food purchases: Supermarkets keep finding ways to tick their shoppers off. The list of shopper peeves include high prices, hard-to-reach shelves and misplaced signs, reports a new survey from Supermarket Guru. And the biggest peeve of all? Some 62% of shoppers say that when stores have items on sale, they run out. "It's amazing to me that in today's world—with just-in-time inventory and all the technology they have, that stores let this happen," Phil Lempert, CEO of the Supermarket Guru, …

Republicans in the House and Senate introduced bills on Wednesday that would vacate the Federal Communications Commission's recent net neutraity order. The so-called "resolutions of disapproval" need to be passed by a majority in the House and Senate and also need to be signed by the president to take effect.

Macy's hopes to change the way it connects with college-age shoppers, and is testing an intense Spring Break-themed promotion in the Chicago market. Bikini-clad models will hand out hot chocolate and "booty bags" at pop-up events on 10 different campuses, encouraging the 150,000-plus college students in the snow-covered to attend a March 5 event at its downtown State Street store. At the Macy's Star Beach Party, young shoppers will find offers and giveaways throughout the store, a private beach-themed party with models in the latest Spring Break clothes, and a performance by Chicago band Hey Champ, as well as …

Former J. Walter Thompson chief Burt Manning has been named chairman of hte advisory board of Automated Media Services Inc., a company that has been developing out-of-home TV advertising platform 3GTv.

Possible Worldwide is the official name of a new unit inside WPP Digital that rolls the agency's disparate array of digital agency networks into one, centralized holding company unit combining: Schematic, Bridge Worldwide, BLUE and Quasar. Schematic CEO Trevor Kaufman has been named global CEO of the new organization, which has 18 offices and about 1,000 staffers worldwide. "The shift in marketing isn't just a shift to digital," Kaufman said in a statement explaining the Possible logic. "It's a shift from broadcasting messages to focusing on creating great branded experiences that benefit both the client and the consumer."

Likely as a symbolic gesture, AOL's impassioned CEO Tim Armstrong has invested roughly $10 million in 477,000 shares of AOL stock. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Armstrong bought the shares at an average price of $20.97 each last Friday. As The Los Angeles Times note, "He nearly doubled his stake in the company to 4% after the stock dropped on news of AOL's $315-million acquisition of online news and opinion site Huffington Post."

Holding the promise the superior search technology and artificial intelligence, the world is watching closely this week as IBM's Watson computer challenges human opponents to a little game of "Jeopardy!" Putting the contest in its historical context, The Boston Globe reports that, "The Watson system, the result of four years of work by IBM researchers around the world, is something of an heir to the company's Deep Blue computer, which defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in the late 1990s." The Watson project was designed to test whether a computing system could rival a human's ability …