Groupon: Spending $1.43 to make $1.00

in , ,

David Heinemeier Hansson at Short Logic:

Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account. At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion? My wife shops Groupon a lot. I do not. Partly because I feel I don't need to spend money on most of the things they offer and I know if I simply ignore Groupon, I will save money. I feel the bottom is going to drop out from under Groupon in a few years and everyone in the tech media will raise their hands and run around shouting about how no one saw this coming, how could this happen, etc. For the record, I saw it coming. ( 1:00 PM June 3, 2011 - for future reference)

Twitter's New Photo-Sharing Service To Get iOS 5 Integration

in , , , ,

MG Siegler writing for Techcrunch:

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device. John Gruber, on Daring Fireball: So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account was a system-level service. Perhaps this whole OAuth/XAuth issue is about to become null & void for 3rd party client developers?

Apple Secures Deals With All Four Labels For iCloud

in , , ,

Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ethan Smith writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. has reached terms with major recorded-music companies to allow it to launch a digital locker service that would be more robust than those currently offered by Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. According to these people, deals with three labels have been completed, and the fourth, with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, is likely to be signed this week. Apple has signed deals with Warner Music Group Corp., Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group Ltd. Being out ahead of Amazon and Google to sign all four major labels is huge for Apple. This will allow Apple's music locker to be an 'active' one rather than a passive one. The current way Amazon and Google's services work is you must manually upload music to their services in order for you to stream it later. These deals could conceivably allow Apple to scan a list of all your music in iTunes, and simply make all of that music available on iCloud without you having to manually upload your music. This will make it much more painless to adopt. I'm sure these contracts will allow Apple to do other things as well that Amazon and Google aren't able to do legally.

The Situation Room Meme: The Shortest Route From Bin Laden to Lulz

in , ,

Alexis Madrigal writing for the Atlantic:

Perhaps, then, it was only a matter of time before the photoshoppers went to work on the iconic image, using it as grist for the always-grinding humor mill of the Internet. Already, Keanu Reeves, the grumpy flower girl, a velociraptor, and the shocked cat have been edited into the photo. The Situation Room has been colonized. It is part of our world. Take a look for yourself: Click on the link above and go check out the gallery. I like the Princess Beatrice hat the best.

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 Book About Flies

in , , ,

I saw the news about the crazy price for this book come across one of the websites I visit and/or Twitter the other day. Today, I ran across an explanation of what was happening in this instance. Michael Eisen writes:

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

On Google's Announcement That Chrome Will Drop Native h.264 Playback Support

in , , , , , , , ,

I haven't written about what I think is the 2nd biggest news story of the week yet, but I've tweeted about it quite a bit. On Tuesday, Google announced that in a future version of Chrome, to come out later this year, they would drop h.264 playback support. And then, on Twitter, I announced that I would cease using Chrome & move back to Safari.

In short, I think this is an incredibly idiotic move on Google's part. I think this is a purely evil and corporate political move in order to try to do harm to iOS devices. I think that Google is outright lying when they try to claim the reason for this decision is a commitment to open standards and I do not think its a coincidence that they made this announcement on the day of the Verizon iPhone announcement.

Why do I feel all of these things? Rather than do a poor job of articulating my thoughts, as I am a horrible writer, I will instead link you to John Gruber's piece he wrote today. He called it, "The Practical vs. Idealistic Scenarios for the Near-Term Future of Online Video (OR: HOW GOOGLE’S DECISION TO DROP NATIVE H.264 PLAYBACK FROM CHROME SERVES TO PROP UP FLASH PLAYER)".

I see this as coming back to bite Google in the ass. I also see this as the final move, in a steadily crescendoing series of moves that Google has made in recent years that has made me completely lose trust in them as a company. Also on Tuesday I began searching for a way to migrate off of gMail (which I probably will do soon to MobileMe) along with other Google services I use. I no longer want to have anything to do with them as a customer. Google is the new Microsoft. Microsoft is now the new IBM. And IBM is now an irrelevant behemoth of a bureaucratic consulting company that no longer makes anything of value. And I guess Apple is the new...Apple? See, horrible writer.

Web Analytics For The Past Year

in , , ,

I've decided to publish my past year's statistics for public consumption. Note that my site doesn't get a ton of traffic. A few things I took note of:

  1. February was my biggest month of traffic until the end of September/October. We had two Blizzards in February which I blogged and photographed extensively. Capital Weather Gang here in DC linked to me several times which brought in a ton (for me) of traffic . September/October was when I launched HowToUseAnEscalatorInDC.com & HowToUseMetro.com.
  2. I get a metric shitton of robots hits whether from search engine crawlers or spambot scrapers. Google is #1. Spammers are #2. Yahoo is #3. Baidu is #4. Bing is #5.
  3. Chrome has almost caught up to Firefox.
  4. If you are one of the 19% who browse my website using IE6, please stop. Get off the Internet. You do not deserve to own a computer.
  5. Safari beats both IE7 and 8.
  6. More people use iPhones than Linux (haha).
  7. Nintendo Wii? Who was that? Someone I know, no doubt.
  8. OSX is almost up to 30%.

Gangsta Lorem Ipsum

in , ,

For all your dummy text needs, the Snoop Double Dizzle version of lorem ipsum:

Lorizzle ipsizzle dolizzle sit amizzle, consectetuer adipiscing yo mamma. Nullam sapien velizzle, its fo rizzle volutpizzle, suscipit for sure, brizzle vizzle, its fo rizzle. Pellentesque we gonna chung tortizzle. Sed eros. Stuff fizzle dolor dapibus turpizzle tempizzle shizznit. pellentesque nibh et turpizzle. Vestibulum izzle tortor. Gangsta mammasay mammasa mamma oo sa rhoncus fo shizzle. Izzle the bizzle habitasse bow wow wow dictumst. Dang dapibizzle. I'm in the shizzle we gonna chung urna, pretizzle eu, mattis mah nizzle, eleifend phat, nunc. Stuff suscipizzle. Integer sempizzle velit sizzle mofo.