Google, GroupOn: GroupOn Perhaps Was Not The Next Big Thing

Image via WikipediaApple and Microsoft were born around the same time. They were not at peace. Netscape came along. Microsoft killed Netscape. Google offered to sell itself to Yahoo. Yahoo refused. A few years later Bill Gates offered to buy Google "at any price." Google refused. Google tried to buy or bury Facebook. Facebook survived. Facebook tried to buy Twitter. Twitter refused. So Facebook hunkered down and "learned" as much as possible from Twitter. Facebook has tried to buy FourSquare, more recently it has tried to bury it.

See, there is that buzz factor. The company that had the crown seat in the buzz kingdom until recently is able to spot the next taker and gets uncomfortable.

Google, GroupOn: Google Just Got Offline

Image by ifindkarma via FlickrThis is Google getting offline. That is a big jump. I hear GroupOn has a salesforce. Google has not had that. This is Google now getting high touch. High tech is no longer enough. Online only is no longer enough.

Google went offline before it went into hardware. That's significant. A company like Google getting offline also shows how mainstream the web has become. The term In Real Life no longer applies. What do you mean in real life? The web is as real as it gets.

Local, social, mobile, global.

Google, GroupOn: Google Could Not Have Avoided The Deal

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Why Google Hearts Groupon: Groupon is the clear market leader in the fastest growing new category on the Internet .... “I think the way Google will evolve is they will want to control everything significant on the Internet.” ....... Google Places is increasingly front and center on the main search results page for local searches, and VP Marissa Mayer recently switched from Search to now running Location and Local Services. She is known to be a big fan of Groupon .... Through its online-to-offline coupons, Groupon has figured out how to track that last mile in local online commerce between the ad and customers showing up at a store..... Google could start showing Groupon deals as tags on local searches or within Google Maps. The ability to add deals to their Places pages could make Places more appealing to local businesses as well. ..... scaling the business from one which deals with a few hundred businesses per day to tens or hundreds of thousands .... Groupon still requires a large local sales force to manage these deals, and an army of copy writers to make the deals appealing.

This is a case of the dog finally catching up with the car. Google might have missed out on social, but it tried extra hard to get local and location right. That begs the question, Facebook refused to be bought for a billion, and now its market value is 50 billion, did GroupOn just miss out?

Google, GroupOn

Image via CrunchBaseThis is great for Google. But was this great for GroupOn? Why did GroupOn not seek an IPO route? That is the question I find myself asking.

Is GroupOn Like YouTube?

Image via WikipediaFor one I was thinking GroupOn was not going to want to get bought. It had a great independent future, I thought. But perhaps the GroupOn founders felt like they were a one trick pony, and they were not going to be able to ride the imagination wave year in year out, and another hot company will show up, the buzz will move on. And Google wanted the sexy back bad.

Model Job Offer Scam Threat

from Tammy Thomas tmiy12345@gmail.com
to Paramendra Bhagat
date Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 4:57 AM
subject Re: Model Job Offer!
Nov 19 (3 days ago)

You must be very foolish and stupid for you posting the info of the company at http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/11/model-job-offer-scam.html...

The Yipit Iterations, Pivots And Turnaround

Image via CrunchBaseI first visited Vin Vacanti's blog perhaps a year and a half ago. We might have exchanged an email: hello! Back then his blog looked like it got updated once every few months. I had never met him. It was the depth of the recession. Although to a startup that has not made it yet, can look like the curtain is down for no explainable reason.

Self-Serve Makes Sense For GroupOn, Also FourSquare

Image via Wikipedia

Yipit: Groupon Reveals Its Future Lies In Self-Serve: “Groupon Stores is a place where your favorite, local businesses can sign up, create a store page, and post deals at anytime for you to see. Welcome to the future of Groupon.” ..... if self-serve can dramitically increase the number of available offers then personalization should improve..... Receiving offers is already one of the leading reasons for consumers to follow businesses on Facebook and Twitter

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

Image via CrunchBase

I am in my 30s. Isn't it a little too late to be asking that question? I take solace in the fact that we live in an era when people will have a few different careers before they retire and go ahead and die. That would be fine except I seem to be having a few different careers at the same time, in parallel: no complaints. I have tried to learn positivity from my man Obama.

Finally I might have found it: a for profit micro finance startup with IPO ambitions. (Microfinance: The Next Big Thing?) And the fact that I am about a year away from my green card feels like no hindrance at all. I will just get someone else to incorporate the company. The conversation is in full swing, the work is on.

Google Car, Google Monorail
Physically Aware Internet
Solar Panels To Roll Out
To Natural User Interface
Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind
Etsy, GroupOn, Zynga
Becoming Whole With The Mobile Web
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Before this I have been emailing my 12 line resume - in text format, my machine does not have Microsoft Office on it - to all sorts of people on Craig's List. For the longest time I did not even send cover letters. What is that? The thing is I have never had a job. Don't ask how that came to be, but that is the fact. Then I started sending cover letters, the same standard, half hearted cover letters where I was calling all sorts of jobs my "dream job." The truth is there is no dream job out there. My dream job necessarily has to be self created.

Then I have thought of tech consulting and social media consulting. (An Online Social Media Instructor, Not Your Usual Yoga Guru)
Image via WikipediaThere are more than a dozen coders in India on stand by for me as we speak. I find them projects, they get working, I pay them their hourly rate, take my cut, and we all end up happy: that has been the idea. (Becoming Whole With The Mobile Web)

I just talked to the guy in Kerala last night, and to the dude in Pittsburgh today.

I was going to doodle along for a year like that, doing a few things, but not really doing much, learn some Scala along the way, (Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala) and get into the mobile web upon getting my green card. I have a mobile app in mind that would grow from the small screen to the big screen.

I have had people ask me if I might have run for president if I had been born in the US. First of all, people, I am utmost flattered. But that question is too theoretical. That is like asking what would life be like if earth had moon's kind of gravity. The mental exercise is not worth it. Microfinance fascinates me, the affordable housing issue in NYC does not.
Image via WikipediaThere are a few things I wanted to do in tech, but then I will keep my serial entrepreneur options open, and perhaps I will get to invest in ideas that I might not get to bring to fruition myself.

Large scale group dynamics is my thing. I am really, really good at it. (Iran) Even when I have expressed Nasdaq headed tech company ambitions, I have thought more in terms having money to pour into microfinance, and less in terms of private jets. But why take that long route? Why not go straight into microfinance? There is no limit to how much money you can raise if you do it right. This is potentially a market in the trillions of dollars.

But make no mistake, the tech part of this startup is central to what it is going to be. This is first and foremost a tech startup. The concept feels like having your cake and eating it too.

This is one brave new century.

Related articles

• Microfinance: The Next Big Thing? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Google Car, Google Monorail (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Becoming Whole With The Mobile Web (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• A New Model for Microfinance (humanrights.change.org)
• As Microfinance Explodes in India, Regulators Step Up Oversight (fastcompany.com)
• The 2010s Belong To New York City (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• For-Profit Microfinance Matures, India and Africa Lead the Way (fastcompany.com)
• Abusive Microfinanciers Have Prompted Lawmakers in India to Regulate the Industry (fastcompany.com)
• Craig Newmark: Microfinance, the Grameen Bank, and Lisa Simpson (huffingtonpost.com)

Etsy, GroupOn, Zynga

Image via CrunchBase
Steven Carpenter

On Etsy

While eBay saw its marketplace growth stagnate at just over $1 billion a quarter, I see several areas Etsy must optimize just to pass $100 million in business

On GroupOn

No other startup has gone more quickly from launch to $1 billion+ in valuation except YouTube (12 months), which Groupon achieved in 16 months .... Groupon is achieving considerable revenue growth across all measures: more customers, higher deal prices, and rapidly expanding markets. ..... makes its model highly attractive (hence, every week seems to bring new copycats). .... Groupon gets more of its traffic from Facebook than any other site, including Google ...... the company does not hold any physical inventory and its customer acquisition costs are so low. ..... Groupon has raised a total of $171 million to-date, employs more than 200 people, and serves 52 markets. Its next biggest competitor, LivingSocial, has raised $49 million, employs about 50 people, and serves 14 markets. .... Groupon is far ahead. The data suggests that Groupon is not yet feeling the impact of all the new entrants. ..... There is no reason to believe that this concept couldn’t be extended to virtually any category or service provider.

On Zynga

Like YouTube, Twitter, and Groupon, social gaming pioneer, Zynga is a member of the “fastest from founding to $1B valuation” club, having earned its membership in just 19 months. .... over half of Facebook users are playing Zynga’s games .... Farmville alone now attracts over 100 million unique users per month, just 10 months after it launched. ..... PayPal said last week that Zynga is now its 2nd largest customer by volume ..... “Zynga Nation” ...... the beneficiary of a once-in-a-decade tectonic shift in the Internet landscape. ..... Zynga accounts for 31% of all active applications on Facebook, more than 2 times Facebook’s own apps ..... The company also continues to sit on a warchest of its largely unspent $219 million in venture capital that it was able to raise because of its rapid success. ..... Zynga’s incredible hockey stick growth of the past 2 years appears to have come to an end .... Games are the No. 1 application in the Apple App Store. Collectively mobile games are a $3B+ a year business

These three companies, especially Zynga and GroupOn, have grown very, very rapidly. Their rise has been dizzying. I have a feeling we will see more and more rapid rise companies. So when I ask, which is the next Zynga, I am not necessarily talking of the social gaming space. Actually, I am not. I am asking, what could be that next space that will create that next rapid rise company?

A lot of the action is moving to the mobile web space.

Related articles

• Zynga: The Google Of Games? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Facebook, Zynga charge fees for share sales (sfgate.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Pre-IPO Fees (businessweek.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Fees on Private Sales of Shares (Douglas MacMillan/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Fees on Private Sales of Shares (businessweek.com)
• AOL Joins the Daily Deal Movement with Groupon-Like Site (mashable.com)
• The Headache Of Share Trading For Facebook And Zynga (allfacebook.com)
• Fastest-Growing Facebook Pages (forbes.com)
• For 'Zynga to become the Google of games,' it will take more than good timing (games.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Add Fees to Stock Sales, as Early Employees Consider Sale Options (insidefacebook.com)

$400 Million, $140 Billion And 2020

Image via CrunchBase

Wall Street Journal: A New Digital Battlefield: The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

I expect these two numbers to have changed places by 2020. Everything is going online. TV is not going to be a separate medium for too long. The internet will eat up and digest the TV. But we are going to have to move to universal 100 MB plus broadband for that to happen.

Wall Street Journal: Web Start-Up Values Soar:In an echo of the 1990s dot-com boom, some investors also are giving lofty valuations to Web firms that have no revenue and that barely have a product out..... Quora ...... Blippy ...... Foursquare .... last year, when Twitter Inc. was valued at $1 billion during a round of funding, up from $95 million in mid-2008 when it raised a previous round of funding .... Many investors won't recoup their investments ...... SecondMarket, which operates an exchange where investors can trade the stocks of closely held start-ups ...... "There's a big disconnect between the public market and the private market" ..... Deal-of-the-day site Groupon Inc., for instance, was founded in 2008 and quickly brought in consumers eager to tap its discounts. By April when it received a $135 million investment from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd. and venture firm Battery Ventures, Groupon was valued at about $1.35 billion.

Blockbuster Nears Bankruptcy:a milestone in consumers' shift away from brick-and-mortar video stores to films delivered by mail and the Internet

Netflix, Studio Reach Streaming Deal
A New Digital Battlefield:TV shows are emerging as a new front in the war over digital media between Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., amid their ongoing battles over electronic books and online music..... Several executives said those rentals could be a step toward a world where people see less advertising or stop paying for cable subscriptions—two principal sources of revenue...... Apple accounts for 57% of transactions in Internet video-on-demand movies, on a number-of-sales basis, and 53% of the TV shows market ...... The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

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