Deal A Day on Local Businesses And Services - At Groupon.com

So as far as the consumers are concerned, groupon is a smashing hit. But is that the case for the other side too? Are the small business owners who are offering their deals on groupon.com at very steep discounts (50% to 90% off as groupon.com proudly advertises) really getting what they desire? Are they making money or losing money on the deal? Are they able to capture new customers or are they losing the existing customer base because of the rush on the deal day?

Recently, Rice University associate professor Utpal Dholakia published a report titled “How Effective Are Groupon Promotions for Businesses?” in which he documented his findings of a study based on interviews with 150 businesses in 19 American cities and 13 product categories that ran Groupon promotions between June 2009 and August 2010. The results are somewhat alarming and quoted in a related NYTimes blog post (below).

As a small business owner or a service provider, can you really make groupon work to your advantage too? NYTimes reporter Jay Goltz thinks you can, and breaks it down with some real numbers in a practical example in his article titled “Doing the Math on a Groupon Deal“. He shows you how you can either lose money and get nothing, or make some money and gain a few new customers, depending on how you structure your groupon deal.

Check it out and do the math yourself for the small business or service you have, before embarking on a deal. The numbers you come up with may either surprise you, or shock you!


Best marketing ever? Worst marketing ever? It all depends on a few little numbers. Here is the big difference between traditional advertising and Groupon: Traditional advertising requires spending some money and knowing that it can be lost if the ad doesn’t work. With Groupon, you spend no money up front but you mess with your formula for making money. You can win big and you can lose big.

From boss.blogs.nytimes.com (share this quote)

Late last week, California based Mind Technologies announced on it’s website that it is gearing up to offer thought controlled applications to work with mobile applications on popular platforms such as Google’s DROID and many others.  The company states that in addition to their in-house team of software developers, applications will be produced by outside developers as well. These thought controlled applications will then be submitted through the company’s app store for review and sold to the public on a revenue share basis, much like what Apple does for their iPhone.

A Student Wears Electrodes To Control His Avatar In Second Life (Photo: Reuters / smh.com.au)

Mind Technologies – formerly called Jedi Mind Inc until Lucas Films sued -  makes thought (or mind) controlled devices for various uses. The company already makes a gaming application called Master Mind, which rates the electrical impulses produced by the brain (and transmitted to the program via the wireless Emotiv headset) to let the player control the actions of his characters in the game on the screen with his mind using his thoughts. This is faster than the traditional way of controlling the game usings a keyboard or mouse or game consoles because in that scenario, the time it takes for the brain to transmit the reaction to the hands is much slower than directly transmitting the actions from the brain to the game using the mind control application. In addition to the Master Mind application, they also make Mind Mouse – a thought-controlled software application that allows the user to navigate the computer, click and double click to open programs, compose email and send with the power of their mind.

This announcement of entry into the mobile device market is yet another sign that the world is fast moving to the post-PC era.  Not much more information is available right now regarding the thought controlled android apps, but this announcement is very interesting to say the least, so stay tuned to mycodetrip.com and we will keep you updated.

Meanwhile, I wonder if the days of a Manchurian Candidate style chip implanted inside our heads are not far off in the future! What do you think?

So I went to google.com and typed the 1st and 2nd phrase together “fuck you guys rackspace“. Guess what, the 1st search result link was the blog post I was looking for!

Here, try it out for yourself!

I'm feeling Lucky!

How delightful! I would find out soon enough that the developer was/is Allison Gianotto. My “geek” alter-ego took over, so out of intense software developer curiosity, I visually examined the post, to try and figure out how google could possibly have associated the “fuck you guys” and “rackspace” and properly decided that this was the post I was looking for, given that the HTML body of the post did not have the 1st F* phrase anywhere at all!

It turns out that the title of the featured thumbnail image has the 1st F*phase in it’s name. So that is a clue. Obviously it is not that simple, but that would be a start if I were writing a similar search engine (which I obvisously am not smart enough to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here blogging about it.)

But I digress. Google’s search results are still as relevant as ever, and I can only imagine how hard their engineers and PHDs are working behind the scenes to make search results as accurate and relevant as possible! While Mark Fuckerberg is busy harvesting your social data – including your home address, email address, neighborhood, friends, preferences, even how you like your eggs cooked and how you like to bust your nuts on your woman’s face – and making millions of dollars off of you, google is actually adding value to your everyday life for FREE with it’s very accurate and relevant search results.

Think about it.

According to the AWS SDK for .Net website:

The AWS SDK for .NET supports the AWS infrastructure products, including:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling

For more information, visit the following resources.
Amazon Web Services SDK for .Net Home Page
AWS SDK for .Net “Getting Started” Guide
AWS SDK for .Net Developer Discussion Forums

Further Reading

• The Camel Has 2 Humps. February 22, 2006. Academic Paper by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat – School of Computing, Middlesex University, UK.
• Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb August 24, 2005.