Most anticipate 2011 to be the year of Group buying.  Just as location-based services took off last year, it seems that local daily deal websites have become all the rage.  With a multitude of websites carving out their own niche against the two major competitors, it is going to be interesting to see what evolves in the space.  After some reflection on my own experiences purchasing Groupon and LivingSocial offers I have determined four major opportunities for entrants to group buying.  What opportunities do you see in the space?

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The other night while working late every single one of my Pandora stations had hit a funk.  For serious work I need two things — coffee and tunes.  I had the coffee, I didn’t have the tunes.  In order to get back into my zone I decided to visit Napster.com and use my Napster subscription.  On arriving to Napster.com I was greeted with a white page and a beautiful error message, far from the fix I was looking for.  Every hour I would check to see if things were back up and running.  After 4 hours of down-time, I decided to send an email to Napster customer service in case the outage hadn’t been reported.  This was Wednesday evening.  On Thursday afternoon while I had yet to receive a response from Napster, an email from Netflix arrived in my inbox.  Netflix sent an email apologizing for a service interruption and provided a link that could be clicked to receive 2% off my bill.  I had never reported any problems to Netflix, yet here was an email telling me about a problem I MAY have had along with a link for instant resolution. Continue Reading »

As a child of the 80s I love Walkman. Naturally I felt a little nostalgic when I heard the news last week that Sony was discontinuing the Walkman brand. While I like what Walkman was in the 80s and 90s, I’m not surprised Sony dropped the axe on this beloved brand. The Sony Walkman used to the the cutting edge of technology, or at least consumers thought it was with features such as turbo bass, electronic skip protection and others. At some point Sony quit leading the charge in hand held music devices and just tried to keep up. I primarily have used these devices while working out, the following is a time line of the products I have used while working out.

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This weekend I received a friend request from Camden West.  While the name could be construed as a person, in this particular case it represents a local housing development.  In order to create a presence on Facebook the curator of the housing development registered a completely new Facebook account with the first name “Camden” and last name “West.”  Many people figure out they are in the wrong place when there are so many people-specific terms when creating a Facebook profile.  Or maybe I’m wrong and there really can be a FEMALE housing development that is “looking for friendship.”  However, there are a lot of businesses that still fall into this pitfall.  They don’t understand the Facebook structure for managing different types of entities, so they go through the same steps taken for establishing their personal account.

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Jason Layer Mask

Adobe Photoshop. The greatest tool on the planet to create/edit all your on and offline content…right? WRONG. Just kidding, it is. It’s industry standard so it must be the best! Well, I enjoy working with it anyway. There is so much to Photoshop that even after 5+ years of using it that I continue to discover new tools.

I’d like to share with you today one of those tools I wish I had picked up since I first began using Photoshop. It’s called a Layer Mask. What the heck is a layer mask!? If you keep reading, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m sure there are a million websites out there that explain layer masks. Well guess what… I’m going to be 1,000,001. So if you’d like to read elsewhere about the topic, be my guest!

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Mac Store for Windows?

With the announcement that a Mac App Store would be coming to Apple computers in the coming months, I believe Apple could be up to something bigger.  While Apple computers are still selling very well the company is in a pickle.  Apple’s operating systems run on less than 5% of consumers PC’s and the only way they could increase this number would be by significantly dropping prices.  Dropping hardware prices would be a big mistake and Apple realizes this, so what can they do?  The answer may seem unrealistic at first, but what if Apple launches a Mac Store for Windows?  By doing this they could immediately gain significant profits from the sale of applications on every Windows PC without reducing their premium hardware price point.

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