Group items tagged

As Groupon prepares for its IPO, critics are circling the daily deals site wondering whether it's worth the hefty $25 billion valuation it currently holds. Key to the future of Groupon's success is its ability to woo merchants, with the promise that participating will boost business and draw new customers.

But recent story in TechCrunch highlighted the hesitation that some merchants may feel about getting involved with the site. TechCrunch revisited one merchant who proclaimed that signing up for Groupon was the "single worst business decision" she had made. Her story echoes other merchants who have claimed that Groupons actually result in unprofitability, administrative nightmares, and, to cap it all off, that they don't result in new regular customers.

Jessie Burke, owner of Posies Cafe in Oregon, first told her story in September 2010. According to Burke, Groupon pushed her to offer a deal that would let users buy $13 of product for $6. Groupon originally wanted 100 percent of the money (what it usually takes when consumers pay less than $10 on a deal), but relented, revising their percentage cut of the deal price to 50 percen

Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, it now sells more e-books than it sells physical books: Amazon reported that it sold 115 e-books for every 100 physical books it sold in 2011. Unfortunately, e-books are still very much the same as physical books: they are static, their content is not updated nor does it include videos or interactive infographics.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, we highly recommend downloading “Our Choise”. Not only is it an intelligent and interesting book, its format is the first peek into what your book experience will become in the next few years. It might be time to kiss those physical books goodbye after all.  If you’re not convinced, check out the great demo given at TED:

Here’s a quick breakdown of the big differences between desktop and mobile platforms: Mobile device hardware is smaller and generally tends to have lower hardware resources than desktops/laptops. Smaller screens bring about different design considerations and challenges. Touchscreen technology introduces new interaction concepts that differ from traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse). With a mobile device, internet connectivity is not always as reliable as a hard-wired broadband connection, which means internet connectivity is a concern and data transfer could be significantly slower. Although these sound as if they are hurdles to get over, with careful thought and consideration, there’s no reason why they should be. Touchscreen technology is exciting. The smaller screen design will really make you think about how to get the user to interact with your mobile web app in the most satisfying way possible. What we should really be doing is looking at the list of differences above and seeing opportunities to deliver our content in a different way. Building mobile web apps will be a paradigm shift from traditional web development and web design.

In the next sections, we will discuss development/design considerations, as well as concepts and techniques for building mobile web apps.

Keep File Sizes Small

We’ve changed how we use RSS

The simple truth is we’re less likely to use RSS or email subscription now compared to our RSS usage in the previous era of the Web.  We’re just less into RSS readers and start pages.

We’re using real-time web & social networking more

The European Union's data protection advisory body will reportedly recommend that location data about cell phone users be subject to strict privacy protections, a move that could challenge technology company practices

The panel will recommend that the location data that the mobile industry collects about users to provide location-based services and target advertising should be subject to the same protections as people's names, birthdays and other highly personal data.

Companies shoul

n advertising circles there is an axiom that says that a customer has to be exposed to your product or service at least three times before they will convert. It's called the rule of three. It's why companies run remarketing campaigns. It's also an explanation for two conflicting surveys concerning location based social media.

In the first survey by Dubit, a youth communications agency, they found that 48% of teenagers surveyed had never heard of location based social media services such as Facebook Places and Foursquare. And of the 52% of the teenagers that had heard of these services, few of them actually used those services. The survey consisted of 1,000 teens between the ages of 11 to 18.

The second survey by Comscore's MobiLens showed that 16.7 million mobile users accessed check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And 95% of those users regularly accessed a mobile web browser. The medium age range was 18 to 34. So what's going on? How can teenagers, who practically live and sleep with their mobile phones, be so out of the loop when it comes to location based social media? The answer is that they simply haven't been exposed to the services often enough to see the value.

We observed the emerging trend of online dating among today’s tech savvy generation and in order to simplify it, we decided to launch Dates Near Me, a free mobile dating service which caters towards the requirements of today’s generation. The iPhone dating application works by broadcasting the location of users based on GPS signals that permit them to find nearby singles and meet up right away if they desire. “Begin your search to find a like-minded companion, friend, lover or date using DatesNearMe mobile phone dating application on your iPhone and Google Android. With the singles showing an ever increasing desire for on the spot gratification, we realized the importance of mobile dating technology”, remarked the CEO of DatesNearMe.com Few reasons that make DatesNearMe better than any other mobile dating application are: 1. Highest level of privacy and security settings so that you can flirt with comfort. 2. Find singles around you with the help of our map view or list view. 3. 100% Free. Definitely no charges or catches. 4. Filled of features with high user friendliness. 5. Create your profile in less than no time. Just a few clicks if you update from Facebook. 6. Add users to your hot List, and see who has added you to theirs. 7. Easily flirt with hotties with winks, smiles and live messages.

A few weeks ago, iPhone users were outraged to discover that their iPhones were tracking their every move, storing the information (in an unencrypted file, no less), and sending the data directly to Apple when synced with iTunes. Even more shocking was the news that iPhones do this even when they do not have location-based services enabled. Users concerned about their privacy were left vulnerable, with nothing they could do about it while they waited for Apple to offer a patch.

Naturally, Ashley Madison's specialty is guaranteeing privacy and anonymity for its customers (well, that and "an affair to remember!"). Users choose whom they share their photos with. Conversations on the site are password-protected. When users delete their accounts, also deleted is all evidence that they were ever members of the site. All messages and correspondence, photos, and personal data -- gone.

Ashley Madison is an online dating service owned and operated by Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc. Nearly ten years old, Ashley Madison claims to be the world's largest dating site, with nearly 9.3 million members. What truly distinguishes Ashley Madison from its competitors, however, is its target demographic: married people.

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

InMobi SmartPay™ will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the US $200bn mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly and easily into new markets by providing a one-time, no-cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.

The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of 2011.

†The new solution already offers reach to over one billion consumers in seven countries, including the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Malaysia, with huge growth plans to expand to over three billion consumers in 30 countries by the end of the year.

The Installer writes with news of yesterday's stock offering from LinkedIn, which shocked investors by closing at more than double the initial price. "Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares." That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue, leading to speculation that this is either evidence of the second dotcom bubble (a possibility we discussed in February) or a "watershed moment for social media." Many experts are questioning the value of LinkedIn, while others are claiming intentional market manipulation.

"Remember the Sandvine report from earlier this week that said Netflix gobbles up 30% of Internet traffic during peak hours? It needs clarification on a couple of important points, says blogger Kevin Fogarty. First, yes, Netflix traffic spikes during prime time, but only across the last mile. Second, ISPs underestimate what a 'normal' level of Internet use really is. 'When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).'"

re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.

Global Internet traffic is expected to quadruple between 2010 and 2015, according to data provided to Mashable by Cisco.By that time, nearly 3 billion people will be using the Internet — more than 40% of the world’s projected population. On average, there will be more than two Internet connections for each person on Earth, driven by the proliferation of web-enabled mobile devices.Internet traffic is projected to approach 1 zettabyte per year in 2015 — that’s equivalent of all the digital data in existence in 2010. Regionally speaking, traffic is expected to more than double in the Middle East and Africa, where there will be an average of 0.9 devices per person for a projected population of 1.39 billion. Latin America is close behind, with a 48% increase in traffic and an estimated 2.1 devices per person among a population of 620 million.The rest of the world will experience more moderate growth in terms of traffic, but the number of devices per person is forecast to increase significantly. By 2015, there will be an average of 5.8 devices per person in North America, 5.4 in Japan and 4.4 in western Europe.

Somewhat surprisingly, it is neither mobile phones nor tablets that are expected to grow the most in the next four years. Rather, flat panel televisions will experience the greatest production increase globally, up 1063% from 2010, followed by tablets (750%), digital photo frames (600%) and ereaders (550%). The number of non-smartphones and smartphones is expected to increase by 17% and 194% worldwide, respectively

picture a world where software platforms are available online and easily customizable. Picture a world where compute power is generated off site, available in quantities when and where you need it. And picture a world where information is safely stored, efficiently managed and accessible, when and where you need it. These are cloud infrastructures. The economies of scale, flexibility and efficiency they offer will not only save organizations massive amounts of capital and maintenance costs but emancipate them to apply and use information as never before. An unbelievable opportunity to raise productivity while creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses and workers.

Now picture a health-care system where a doctor has medical records at his fingertips, can see x-rays with the click of a mouse, is able to learn and apply the latest diagnostic and surgical technique from anywhere in the world. Think of the efficiencies in hospital supply chains, the delivery of prescription drugs, the processing of billing and insurance claims, reductions in fraud, and the application of best practices for cost controls. The capacity for improvement is endless.  As a matter of fact, these innovations are already being applied in isolated pockets. But for us to seize the opportunity before us it’s imperative that we move from isolated centers of excellence to connected systems of excellence. Pick any industry and systemic improvements like these are available.

A new age of innovation and technology advancement is within our grasp – an opportunity for job creation, greater productivity and economic growth. The time for cloud computing is now. We need government and industry to accelerate broad scale adoption of cloud infrastructures so we can reap the rewards of a true information based economy.

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Big news today in the world of mobile payments: the three largest operators in the UK have announced a joint venture to offer mobile wallet services to its customers, in the hopes of finally kick-starting a service that has been long on discussion but painfully short on execution up to now. O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.

And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon.

“We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”