Groupon: Start in Physical, Get to Digital
Groupon is on an incredible tear, so we’re not buying the “inevitable fall” question in today’s infographic). We’ve recently started helping the daily deal company navigate the M&E space – and their phenomenal growth is well-timed to reinvigorate social commerce across most verticals. On background: thePoint.com first landed on our ‘social good’ radar at Participant)
With Amazon’s relationship with LivingSocial and xxx hundred copycats (remind any of the early Facebook, niche social network days?), it will be very interesting to see Groupon grow beyond daily emails into other discounted merch models.
One potential trend, companies like Groupon, Netflix and Amazon are smartly rooting themselves in physical goods, but as with Amazon and Netflix, will eventually scale to soft, aka digital, goods: hosting, streaming movies, email packages and the like.
Once you presumably own a category, it then becomes time to optimize customer relationships and these three have established their user experience satisfaction levels well. Simple, easy and physical product-based moves to digital products very easily.
An Appocalyptic Tableaux: A Tale of Too Many Tablets
115 million tablets will be sold by 2014 according to the infographic below. 66.5% growth year over year.
Fascinating to think that while just about everyone (and their child) has a cell phone these days, that we’ll all soon have “x” tablets by household.
As the steady stream of upgrade/next-generation iPads arrive, year after year, expect each family to have two then three tablets lying around the house. Think of them as “media coasters.”
We’ll go from 65 apps per device to 650 apps without sweating the micro-transactions.
A peek into the Orwellian iPad-diction of society: The hand-me-down 4G generation will quickly see kids getting the short end of the digital stick; instead of a laptop, they’ll get the tablet and learn to type book reports on touch screens.
The adults will also go tablet for home use, putting much less time on their work laptops, eventually leaving them at the office. Office IT budgets will skyrocket down.
With all email and personal media (music/movies/photos) in the cloud, bluetooth keyboards and mice will fold up into the tablets for the workhorses (voiceover INPUT will be de rigueur), while most will dialog via 140-count (and briefer) communiqués.
Shorter but more frequent individual output will be swallowed by longer and more frequent input, aka consumption. Twitter will be eclipsed by a shorter version of itself; bit.ly will become a real-time and timed-out, unique symbol.
Eventually, we’ll “share” more via links we “like” than actually sharing original ideas. Curation will become less about the “best content channels,” and more about the “opinion channels.” Colbert copycats and O’Reilly orifices.
Andreessen Interviewing Ovitz
Via All Things D, a strong interview on CAA as a disruptor in the 75-year-old entertainment talent game with a $100k line of credit, utilizing only $21k.
What’s interesting on both a disruptor and company building level is that Ovitz and his early partners were able “with a standing start” to launch CAA. Ovitz shares how they went for their bank line, and the head of the bank was good friends with William Morris’ CFO, where Ovitz et al were currently agents. Realizing they were about to all get fired, they pulled an all-nighter to lock up their partnership, and then went in the next morning and resigned.
Similar in some nature to how Ari Emanuel and his departing ICM coterie created Endeavor in 1995, Ovitz shares the hardships of the early days. Like an internet startup, CAA was independent looking to leverage deals. Read more >>