Groupon Goes After the Dating Market

Groupon doesn't just want to help you find a bargain. Now, the popular deal-of-the-day site wants to help you find a date -- and maybe send your kids to college.

Groupon, the popular daily coupon service that gets sent to consumers worldwide, this week announced its Grouspawn Award (Grouspawn = group + spawn). This college scholarship will be awarded twice annually to children born of parents who used a Groupon on their first date. According to spokeswoman Julie Mossler, the scholarship will be in the neighborhood of $60,000.

To qualify, couples have to apply at the Grouspawn website and offer their story to a screening committee, which will interview friends and family members to prove that the couple's first date really did involve the use of a Groupon.

And to help you find that first date, Groupon also just launched a free dating service, which so far appears to have attracted just a handful of people.

The news comes on the heels of Rob Solomon, Groupon's president and COO, telling an audience on September 29 at a Shop.org conference in Dallas that the company will continue chasing deals with national retailers as it recently did with Gap, which brought in an estimated $11 million and temporarily crashed its site.