We Are Q Inc. » Mobile http://marinamann.com/blog Digital, Social, eCommerce + Mobile Wed, 09 May 2012 20:17:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= What is ‘Groupon Now’? Local Hourly Deals Go Mobile http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/07/21/groupon-now-local-hourly-deals-are-mobile-ready/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/07/21/groupon-now-local-hourly-deals-are-mobile-ready/#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:08:54 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=1303 Getting small businesses to spend money on advertising is hard work. Since its launch in 2008, Groupon has built a multi-billion dollar business doing it. However, despite the media and business success-stories, many small businesses and customer have surfaced detailed horror stories. Victims of their own group-selling success, some small business owners are no longer interested in daily deals.

Bad Groupon stories can go something like this:  A local pizzaria posts a daily deal, happy to take a reduced margin to bring in new customers. No guarantees if they will ever come back, but they’ll come once.  The up-side? Landing a Groupon deal, even at a loss, can put a small business on the map. (These days 98% of Groupon deals tip.) In this case, hundreds of customers stream in for pizza, wielding their Groupon vouchers, complaining about slow service and demanding exceptions to the small print. The restaurant management finds itself overwhelmed and understaffed. No one is happy, least of which is the local restauranteur nor the regulars who happen to pop in to their local during a daily deal.

Today, Groupon boasts over 80 million subscribers and despite a loss of over $400 million last year and a continued onslaut of Groupons turned ‘bad-ons’ for local merchants and service providers, we can all expect an exciting IPO coming soon.

What is Groupon Now? Groupon copy cats and established statup like Foursquare as well as big brands like AmEx are getting in the daily deal game. Every major newspaper or owner of a mailing list is working daily deals.  To stave off the unwashed latecomers the company recently launched Groupon Now: hourly local deals in about 25 cities. Perfect for leveraging the mobile customer experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How does Groupon Now work for Mobile?  Unlike regular daily deals, purchased for future use, ‘Groupon Now’ deals are redeemed immediately via web or mobile. Customers only pay if they use the deal and merchants can manage their business in real time. On days when business is slow, a merchant can create a deal to be redeemed by a customer immediately. Local businesses may be less afraid of it because they can shut it off quickly if they need to.

The mobile model seems to resolve a list of problems with the Groupon daily deal model for both small business owners and service providers. In the scenario below, Jodi missed her regular yoga class, but still feels like a workout. She’s already out and about with her gear so she uses her mobile phone to find a workout deal in her postal code. Jodi finds 7 fitness deals, each for a particular class time. She selects the one that works best for her and buys it up via mobile. Voila. If Jodi’s not able to use the deal, no need to sell it to friends or login to a deal swap site to unload it. It’s automatically refunded.

 

Pretty compelling but what does this model do for loyalty if traffic is not necessarily profitable traffic? Will people come back at regular price or simply wait for another deal? In essence, the lack of loyalty is baked-in to the Groupon model. Because if you were loyal, you’re not going to buy another deal are you?

However for big corporations getting into the mobile moment-by-moment deal game, like The Gap and AmEx it’s a different story which I’ll attempt to cover in my next post. Until then, add your thoughts and comments.

Marina Mann

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Read more? Here are a few articles to discover…

Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse, An in-depth series looking at the daily deal industry written by Rocky Agrawal, an entrepreneur who has worked on local products since 1995; TechCrunch dated June 13th, 2011  http://tcrn.ch/riXi3n

Meet The Fastest Growing Company Ever, written by Christopher Steiner, Forbes Magazine dated August 30, 2010, http://onforb.es/qjU2tp

A look at how daily deal sites work, The Associated Press, published Jul. 20, 201 http://bit.ly/mUAA3A

American Express flexes its muscles in local deals market, Ryan Kim, GigaOm, June 20, 2011 http://reut.rs/og32qt

]]> http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/07/21/groupon-now-local-hourly-deals-are-mobile-ready/feed/ 2 SXSW Interactive 2011 Highlights http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/03/17/sxsw-interactive-2011-highlights/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/03/17/sxsw-interactive-2011-highlights/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 03:01:45 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=1219 We and our baggage are back from SXSW Interactive 2011 (#sxswi) albeit returning home from Austin on different flights. This year, SXSWi  was estimated to be 30% bigger than last year! And more consumer focused than ever. [We at] We Are Q, Inc. still managed to have a great time, although I think this year was my last. It’s just feels too big now. I will add photos shortly but in the meantime, here’s a video produced by the Guardian.co.uk which give you a small glimpse of what goes down.

A few winners that rode into the sunset on the virtual horse include these four group text (yes text) not-so-startup startups: GroupMe , Yobongo , Beluga and TextPlus

Hashable – a potential replacement for Linkedin where you check in to people, not places.

And of course SXSW is the best place to use Foursquare. You can really see the benefit + utility of the app in context. It’s easy to get hooked lurking to see where your friends are in your search for the best session at any given time or who’s at what party. This year, Foursquare also launched a number of new features and a serious integration for discounts on  AMEXs new platform for realtime checkins.


]]> http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/03/17/sxsw-interactive-2011-highlights/feed/ 0 Social Commerce: The Recommendation Economy On Steroids http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/08/what-does-social-commerce-mean-to-you/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/08/what-does-social-commerce-mean-to-you/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:24:05 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=1165 As the effects of the recession roll into year four -  relief is in sight:  2010 holiday online spending grew substantially over an abysmal 2009 of eCommerce revenues.

Nevertheless, it’s increasingly clear to Marketers that lifestyle and behaviour changes born of economic abundance and endless borrowing have translated into values of thrift, and conscious choices by consumers. This new dynamic is described by SAI Marketing as the “New Normal”.

The “new normal” leads to a more cautious approach by consumers to personal fiance management. We see that by a reduction in the appetite for credit and the ongoing rise in savings in both Canada and the US. This trend has impacted not only the way consumers “buy” but also must explicitly imapct way Marketers “sell”.

Changes in consumption patters are undeniable. Marketers continue to resort to extreme discounting and product bundling, but consumers are reluctant to spend money outside of their tightly defined needs. This phenomenon will only worsen as gas prices continue to climb in Q1 2011 and consumers’ disposable income continue to dwindle.

“Exuberant claims, tag lines, promises and celeb endorsements are no longer enough to sway consumers who are more value-driven than ever. Consumers have taken control back from marketers and will only engage with brands on their terms.” -SAI Marketing

“I don’t trust the Marketers, but I’ll trust my friends.” Enter Social Commerce.

Among the many definitions of Social Commerce documented by Paul Marsden of Social Commerce Today here’s a few I liked for their simplicity and matter-of-fact-ness…

Definition 15: Paul Dunay (Avaya) (October 2009)
  • Social commerce: Working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.
Definition 17: IBM (October 2009)
  • Social Commerce: Connect and foster active participation with customers to help improve your customer experience… including ratings and reviews, blogs, micro-blogging as well as forums and communities
  • 17a Social Commerce: The concept of word of mouth in the context of e-commerce
Definition 20: John Jackson (DecisionStep) (February 2010)
  • Social Commerce: The ability of two or more people to collaborate online, to share opinions and influence each other’s buying decisions

  • In practical terms, what social commerce or social eCommerce means is that most consumer interactions with your brand and invariably the buying decisions that go along with that – won’t happen on your brand’s main website.

    As a result, a recommendation economy has become ubiquitous and immeasurably simplified across mass distances by Social Media. Consumers will ask themselves… What are people like me buying? What are people I aspire to be buying? What are people who I trust buying? Invariably, not only are friends influencing friends eCommerce shopping choices online, those choices are translated offline as well.

    Here are a few tips for Marketers and eCommerce engaged brands to consider in the world of Social Commerce:

    1. Connect products with people in a distributed network – sort out your data and distribute it across networks

    2. Add value through third party sites – suck in data from review sites, photos from Flickr

    3. Enable real-time, social eCommerce shopping- let friends shop together online

    4. Allow your customers to buy from anywhere, from any device – democratize the sales process

    5. Create and distribute Widgets that allow customers and partners to embed your information and share it with their social networks

    6. Consider exchanging smart data – which is a number of free-to-connect nodes or social networks where exchange cost is zero

    • ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/08/what-does-social-commerce-mean-to-you/feed/ 3     Extra! Extra! The Daily (iPad Newspaper) Hot Off The Internets http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/02/exta-extra-the-daily-ipad-newspaper-hot-off-the-internets/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/02/exta-extra-the-daily-ipad-newspaper-hot-off-the-internets/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:22:10 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=1116 Today, Apple and Murdoch’s News Corp finally launch The Daily, otherwise known as the iPad newspaper.

    The iPad Newspaper is out

    Apple’s VP of Internet Service, Eddy Cue officially described the features this morning, Wednesday, Feb 2, 2011. The app was available in the iTunes store as of 12:00PM EST. It’s the first online newspaper designed for the iPad.

    The new digital newspaper has an initial budget of about $30 million and a workforce of about 100 people. Most of its contents will be original although the newspaper also will use contents from other media owned by News Corporation such as sport videos from the Fox channel, according to The New York Times.

    The Daily will offer about 100 pages of news and sports, with naturally, a high level of interactivity, breaking news, HD video and 360-degree photos. Users will have two subscription choices:  they can be billed either 99 cents a week or $39 USD for a year’s subscription. No news yet if  Apple’s iAds will be running on The Daily or if  News Corp. will be selling its own ads. For now, no one is talking about a print version – thankfully.

    While Apple dominates the tablet market, competition is increasing. Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. are making devices to rival the iPad – running on Google’s Android operating system. Global tablet sales may total 54.8 million units in 2011 and 208 million in 2014, according to Gartner Inc. Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads since its release in April, Cue said today.

    Interested? Read more … A first look at The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper -Poynter ; Bloomburg.com ; News Corp’s ‘The Daily’ launches on iPad with Apple’s in-app subscriptions -Apple Insider; Apple and News Corps. “The Daily” Newspaper Hits the iPad, for $0.99 a Week or $40 a Year -Fast Company

    ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2011/02/02/exta-extra-the-daily-ipad-newspaper-hot-off-the-internets/feed/ 0     Mobile Money: An Inevitable Rewrite Of The Banking Industry? http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/11/18/mobile-money-an-inevitable-rewrite-of-the-banking-industry/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/11/18/mobile-money-an-inevitable-rewrite-of-the-banking-industry/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:05:34 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=1052

    Recently, I found myself in a room with Charles Sirois, Chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) on the future of banking. His message: Mobile is the future for banking. Here’s and example of why?

    Kenya is a world leader in mobile money. As a result, Kenya is to mobile money what Silicon Valley is to software due to a little service called M-PESA which has emerged, for all intents and purposes, as new currency along side the Kenyan shilling (KSH).

    M-PESA was launched in 2006 by Safaricom, Vodafone’s subsidiary in East Africa. The service allows customers to transfer phone credit wirelessly through SMS. The M-PESA is equal to the KSH and is exchanged for cash in special locations across the country.

    It’s revolutionary for a number of reasons.

    With 6 million plus users, M-PESA allows mobile customers to store cash value on their mobile phone, exchange cash with anyone via SMS and cash out without the involvement of any bank or the need for a bank account. Although there are no fees for holding an account, customers pay a small fee for every transaction.

    What started out as a micro-finance platform is now a full-on currency in Kenya. Image this… You own a coffee kiosk in Nairobi. Your customers buy your fabulous coffee by completing an M-PESA transfer to you – on the spot – via SMS. You no longer have to carry shillings only to put them under the mattress or have your money stolen, because, carrying cash is simply too dangerous! In the unfortunate situation you do get robbed, you know the account you transferred your money to because you’ve got his/her phone number!

    Almost four years after the launch of M-PESA, people are not only paying each-other with their mobile phone, but they’re asking to be paid salary in M-PESA. So image, now Vodofone, a relatively unregulated mobile company finds itself with more cash on-hand than all the Kenyan banks combined.

    Curiously, only yesterday an interesting development for M-PESA made the news: M-Pesa to get Sh384m from Bill Gates charity Why a charity would be funding Vodafone’s most profitable pay-per-use service remains to be seen.

    In Canada, a more recent mobile money start-up is Enstream, which is a mobile money play and collaboration of the major mobile carriers. After 100 million dollars (rumored)  investment, Zoompass hasn’t recognized much adoption.

    “Zoompass is a unique mobile person-to-person money transfer service that uses a stored value account to send/receive/request money quickly and securely for all 21 million mobile phone users on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo Mobile, or TELUS networks.”

    Personally, I look forward to ending the hunt for coins to ride the TTC or reading a novel at the parking meter as it takes forever to authorize my Visa,  but really, it might be more about reversing the ubiquity of credit cards in Canada before similar mobile innovations will be in reach for Canuks.

    ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/11/18/mobile-money-an-inevitable-rewrite-of-the-banking-industry/feed/ 0     HTML5 is coming! http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/12/html5-is-coming/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/12/html5-is-coming/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:55:25 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=852

    HTML5 is what user experience should have always been without plug-ins and the sometimes excruciating “loading…” times.

    Imagine never having to be confronted with another “click here to download plugin” or “loading…and still loading…” message again. User experience utopia? Maybe not, but definitely user experience relief.

    In the near future, using HTML5, we’ll be able to do all sorts of things that are hard or next to impossible to do with download-able plug-ins currently. HTML5 brings new flexibility of user experience, and promises of semantics, JavaScript APIs for drag and drop, offline storage, image generation, plugin-free video and that’s only to name a few.

    It’s hard to find many examples of websites built in HTML5 today. To give you an idea of what’s possible, check out Mugtug.com’s sketchpad.

    ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/12/html5-is-coming/feed/ 0     HTML5: The way we build websites is changing again! And how Apple is investing in shaping the future of Web standards. http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/05/html5-the-way-we-build-the-mobile-web-is-going-to-change-%e2%80%93-again-and-how-apple-is-investing-in-shaping-the-future-of-web-standards/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/05/html5-the-way-we-build-the-mobile-web-is-going-to-change-%e2%80%93-again-and-how-apple-is-investing-in-shaping-the-future-of-web-standards/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:42:18 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=825 HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web.  It’s the evolution of HTML4.1 used widely today and includes HTML and XHTML.

    HTML5 proposes to replace the need for proprietary plug-in based rich media software. No need for the user to download Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and the like to see and interact with rich media. Rich experiences can be created and displayed to the user in HTML5!

    Once adopted by all the browser clients such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and the like, you’ll be able to have a Flash like experience without downloading Flash.  Wow! on very many different levels. Some believe HTML5 could kill off Flash and Silverlight.

    In terms of MOBILE, currently Apple, BlackBerry Windows and Symbian don’t support plug-in based rich media software – and that includes Flash. [However, it is worth noting that many iPhone applications are mainly built in Flash.] So while Internet Explorer “won” the browser war on the PC, MOBILE browsing standards are up for grabs!

    See for your self what HTML5 can do! See: Sketchpad in HTML5 http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/ and YouTube serves video in HTML5 http://youtube.com/html5/

    What does Apple have to do with this? Apple has been a big supporter of HTML5 as a web standard and in so doing has banned Adobe’s Flash from all its devices.  Fewer than two months ago, Apple revealed the iPad to the world. And while the company’s highly anticipated device included a lot of features, Flash wasn’t one of them. A war of words soon erupted over the multimedia plug-in, with Flash responding to Apple and Steve Jobs ranting about Flash saying “the world is moving to HTML5.”

    If you’re building your websites exclusively in Flash – stop.

    While HTML5 updates a lot of things, its main focus is support for web applications. The idea is that no longer will you need to write long, horribly complex scripts or Flash plug-ins to animate your pages. Support for things like image processing, progress bars, canvases an even Ruby scripts are built in. The multimedia tags are the most compelling. No longer do you care about clients having the right plug-in installed. You use a video or audio tag and add to that a list of different formats – MP4/Theora/Flash/etc and the client will use the first one it supports. No more placeholders for “install Flashlight” and best of all, no more being held hostage to proprietary formats.

    For more info on the HTML5 revolution, I recommend exploring these articles:

    Behind the Adobe-Apple cold war http://bit.ly/98iHqK

    Flash versus HTML5: Virgin America breaks up with Flash http://bit.ly/did8vJ

    Adobe Opens Up About Apple, HTML5 and Flash [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/c339dO

    Comments are open!

    ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/03/05/html5-the-way-we-build-the-mobile-web-is-going-to-change-%e2%80%93-again-and-how-apple-is-investing-in-shaping-the-future-of-web-standards/feed/ 0     Apple will announce their new innovation tomorrow: Will “it” do for publishing what the iPod did for music? http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/01/26/apple-will-announce-their-new-innovation-tomorrow-will-it-do-for-publishing-what-the-ipod-did-for-music/ http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/01/26/apple-will-announce-their-new-innovation-tomorrow-will-it-do-for-publishing-what-the-ipod-did-for-music/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:28:38 +0000 Marina http://marinamann.com/blog/?p=807 Tomorrow in San Francisco, Apple will announce to the world media their new innovation. The buzz for the new device has been deafening.  It’s been called: the super tablet, the iSlate the iPad and a few more. The speculated promise is everything from thermal paper to uber multi-touch, in-the-bathtub, under-the-pillow reading and monumental media device. Salivating for readers and media consumers and terrifying for publishers. Will the tablet change everything? Will it do for publishing what iPod did for music? And if it does, are publishers ready for the demand for digital content? Probably not.

    The even bigger question goes beyond the availability of digital content, but begs the question of  paid content. Will consumers pay for content they currently get for free? Do people pay for water? We’ll see…

    More about Apple’s “news” tomorrow:

    Apple iTablet rumour round-up – Telegraph

    The Apple Tablet: a complete history, supposedly — Engadget

    Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry » Nieman Journalism Lab

    ]]>     http://marinamann.com/blog/2010/01/26/apple-will-announce-their-new-innovation-tomorrow-will-it-do-for-publishing-what-the-ipod-did-for-music/feed/ 2