Groupon

Local businesses are slowly being dragged online. Just like online businesses a few years ago, the early adopters among them are realizing that there is business to be had by putting the Internet to work. Yelp has done a good job emerging as a real force in driving customers to places like restaurants and bars. Groupon takes another approach - they offer a deal of the day from some local merchant, but with a catch. The catch is that a certain number of people need to sign up for the deal for the merchant to follow through. In this way, the merchant drives volume, the customer gets savings, and Groupon carves out a business. In the age of iPhones and Facebook and Twitter, crowds of friends can be mobilized pretty easily - Groupon seems to be emerging at the right time.

Although I like the general idea behind this business, it doesn't fit very well with my lifestyle thanks to tremendously limited and generally irrelevant discount offers. Receiving notifications daily via email felt a like I'd opted in to receiving spam. If they did a better job matching these emails to my interests, I'd have probably left them turned on since they were coming to one of my spam accounts anyway, but as it stands I shut them off after only 2 weeks. They have another big hurdle to overcome as well: getting people to spam their friends. The group buying power model relies on a group... unless the tipping point is reached on a particular deal, you don't get it, so you're encouraged to tap into your social network to encourage others to jump on board. I can see this working on occasion, but the deals just aren't broadly relevant enough. About a quarter of what I received seemed at least matched to my gender, but unfortunately I'm not especially girly and about 90% of my fri... Read more