From the beginning Groupon has been about Yield Management, most of the business who use Groupon are doing so because they've got excess capacity which they're not using rather than to grow their business.
Even Agrawal (who wrote this series of anti-groupon articles) refers to Groupon as a yield management play.
Extending this to be more dynamic isn't a radical shift, but rather an obvious one. And their partnership with Livenation to compete against ScoreBig is a clear sign they're moving in that direction.
Competitor LivingSocial has already launched a real-time yield management offering called LivingSocial Instant.
