Why Groupon Works
Google’s recent reported $6 billion bid for Groupon — rebuffed, for now — took observers by surprise and worried the company’s investors. James Surowiecki analyzes the deal and Groupon’s business model.
Google’s recent reported $6 billion bid for Groupon — rebuffed, for now — took observers by surprise and worried the company’s investors. James Surowiecki analyzes the deal and Groupon’s business model.
Meantime, over the past two quarters, the number of U.S. households that subscribe to cable and other paid TV services fell for the first time since the dawn of cable – by about 335,000 households out of about 100 million, according to data provider SNL Kagan.
Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company writes about the TED phenomenon: “By combining the principles of ‘radical openness’ and of ‘leveraging the power of ideas to change the world,’ TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it’s creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.”
Are e-mail attachments bad for the environment? Data-storage expert Matthew Yeager thinks so.
Wired profiles Hunch, a company trying to master the art of online recommendations. Hunch participants respond to “Teach Hunch About You” questions, and their answers are fed into a master algorithm, which has already revealed some interesting correlations.
A souvenir store on Unter den Linden in Berlin offers 15 minutes of “free” internet usage. To log in, you go to the counter, get an entry code, and are free to use a PC. Moreover, you can use the code to get 10% off the purchase price of any souvenir in the shop. But unlike some “free” deals that come with tie-in purchases, this is a voluntary tie-in.
Rather than create a “global village,” the Internet may have actually “shrunk people’s horizons,” reports an Economist article about a new study by Hebrew University researchers Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy. They used a common Freakonomics topic — baby names — to study how far ideas have spread since the advent of the Internet.
So does a graph of broadband prices and quantities in different countries tell us about the supply curve or the demand curve?
Last week we solicited your questions for New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Here are his answers to a selection of them. Thanks to all.
New York Congressman Anthony Weiner takes your questions.
A reader named Mason DeCamillis writes in with a question/complaint: Why does it take several weeks for magazines to update my mailing address when I move? I just changed my address with two magazines (on their respective websites), and both say it will take up to two publication cycles for the change to take effect. That seems crazy. When I . . .
We recently asked you to consider renaming “digital piracy” in light of recent actual piracy. The question appears to have some resonance, as it was picked up by The Guardian, The Washington Post, and others. For my money, the best suggestion by far comes from a reader named Derek: Downlifting. Download + shoplifting. Pretty accurate description that doesn’t imply violence. . . .
My Michigan son tells me that the Detroit Free Press will be doing home delivery only three days a week as a cost-cutting measure. I asked him what the source of the difficulty is, and he responded succinctly, “The internet, Dad!” Of course he’s right; internet advertising at least partly displaces print advertising, shifting the demand curve for newspapers leftward; . . .
Some of us saw it as a sign of the times when Metacritic suddenly stopped compiling book reviews. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, Metacritic carries aggregate review scores for video games, TV shows, movies, and music. For a time, it was also a cheat sheet to literary taste-making. Then in 2007, CNET, Metacritic’s parent company, killed the . . .
Imagine for a moment that you are a stay-at-home mom with a workaholic husband, five kids between the ages of two and nine, a new dog, and almost no babysitting help. What would you do? How about start up a new business? That’s what Jennifer List, wife of my colleague and co-author John List, did. The result is Seven Smooches. . . .