USA - Tag Archive

Daily Deal Market Ripe For Consolidation

2 Replies Angeline

According to Yipit, there are 384 daily deal websites operating in North America that it knows about. This number is almost certainly far higher once you consider all the smaller sites that are not able to run deals each and every day.

So is the market too saturated? Is the industry doomed to fail because there are too many competitors competing for an ever shrinking supply of customers?

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone and one of the biggest communications companies of the time immediately dismissed it with the famous quote:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

That company was Western Union and the lack of foresight for this new technology meant they were never able to compete in the profitable telecommunications industry – an industry which they had previously dominated with their telegram service.

Between 1894 and 1904 over six thousand telephone companies went in to business and from there mergers, acquisitions and closures happened to consolidate the industry to just a handful of companies today.

In 1939 there were 132 railroads in America, today that number is just seven as mergers, acquisitions and closures meant huge consolidation in that industry.

An early 1900's American train

The sort of train that powered America in the early 1900’s

In 2005 there were a huge number of social networks available, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster and Classmates to name but a few. Today? We have one site, Facebook as the market consolidated.

In 2007 there was just one daily deal website worth mentioning which was Woot, a hugely popular and profitable website that continues to grow and increase its revenues. After the launch of Groupon it spawned off thousands of clones around the world, over 400 of them in American alone.

Since 2009 there have been 72 acquisitions in the daily deal industry, 44 coming in the last 6 months alone. Groupon have gone for an expansion by acquisition business model with at least 8 buys under its belt, Google too is eyeing up the industry with several acquisitions in the daily deal market to expand its Google Offers programme.

There are plenty of other acquisitions too, LivingSocial have bought at least seven daily deal sites and BuyWithMe have purchased 6 daily deal sites before they too have been purchased.

So just like other new inventions and markets spawned hundreds of clones, it might look like the daily deal market is in decline as the number of sites decreases but there is still a very healthy merger and acquisition process taking place as the deal market looks to consolidate and become profitable.

Blackberry or crashberry?

20 Replies Christopher Roberts

Since Monday, UK users of Blackberry smart phones have been without email, Blackberry Messaging (BBM) and internet browsing has been very ‘hit and miss’ since Monday – the 1oth of October 2011.

For three days now UK Blackberry users have been without their phones primary functions, and now it has spread to the US. Earlier today USA users of Blackberry smart phones have also been complaining of a lack of messaging.

The problem is also thought to be affecting Africa and the Middle East. Basically Blackberry messaging systems seem to have ‘crashed’ right across the world.


Blackberry’s owner (RIM) has said that the initial problem was caused by core and back-up switch failures.

Basically, one of Research In Motion’s back-up systems didn’t do what they were supposed to when something went wrong with the service, resulting in a massive crash! The system is designed to ‘failover’ to a backup system if anything happens. This worked fine in testing, but when Blackberry actually needed it to work, it didn’t.

The Logo of BlackberryMobile phones were only initially designed to call and then text, however smart phones were designed to provide so much more, hence why people who have paid a premium to get one, are not best pleased at the moment.

Blackberry is currently rates the UK’s top smart phone, up there with Google’s Android systems and Apple’s iPhones, so considering it faces such tough it’s very important in terms of the phones future, for Blackberry to sort the issues out pretty soon!

Blackberry have started a section on their website called Service Update, where users can get info on the status of what’s going on with the issue, what Blackberry are doing to get on top of it, and hopefully soon how long it should be until services are running normally again.

So what do you think? Do you have a Blackberry? Are you satisfied with your service? How do you think this will affect Blackberry’s future in the smart phone market?

Get ready to rewrite the laws of physics!

10 Replies Christopher Roberts

At the end of last week the news broke that scientists at Cern believed they had managed to send subatomic particles faster than the speed of light! This was big science news, and potentially big technology news in the future, however I choose not to write about the discovery straight away, as I wanted to find out as much as I could before reporting back to you.

What happened?

So what basically happened last week was that scientists in Cern (Switzerland) who have been blasting neutrinos (subatomic particles) 732km all the way to Gran Sasso (Italy) for a good few years now, collated all their data, and found that it would actually appear that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso when light was still 18m away Basically the neutrinos raced light 732km and won by 0.00000006 seconds –  or as you could also say, 60 nanoseconds.

Is this true?

Scientists at Cern would tell you that their research has been checked and double checked, therefore what they have found out is true as they can’t seem to find a flaw in the research. However at the same time, almost any good physicist, and no doubt scientist working on the project would tell you that it can’t be true and that a variable must have been overlooked, as the results are impossible!


To verify the findings, two similar projects one in Hida (Japan) and the other in Chicago (USA) are attempting to recreate the experiment, and should have reliable enough results, hopefully, by some time next year.

Why is this important that the neutrinos travelled faster than the speed of light?

Einstein said that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. If you like, light was the universal speed limit, no faster could anything ever go than light, you could go as fast, but not faster. This would mean that to get to the sun, (not that you would want to) the quickest you could ever do it would be in 8 minutes and 12 seconds.

The Sun

It takes around 8 minutes and 12 seconds for the light from the sun to reach earth

If the results from this experiment are correct, with some extra thrust, it would be possible for the neutrinos to get there even faster than light could.

How have they ‘broken the speed limit’?

You may be wondering how the neutrinos managed to get to Gran Sasso faster than light, and as are many scientists! There are two main theories of how they did it at the moment.

The first theory is that the speed of the neutrinos was so great they were simply able to travel faster than light.

The second, much more interesting theory is that the neutrinos didn’t exceed the speed of light, but instead dimension jumped! This means that they probably didn’t travel faster than the speed of light, just used another dimension to get from Cern to Gran Sasso.

The Doctor's TARDIS

The Doctor’s TARDIS (from Doctor Who) travels in time and space, this is only possible if you can either go faster then the speed of light, or jump dimensions

Physicist Brian Cox has an excellent explanation of how this could potentially work. When talking about extra dimensions he has said that:

“…if they are right, then things can take short cuts through the extra dimensions. It’s just like saying there is a speed limit that stops you going, lets say you go from London to Sidney, so you fly around the earth from London to Sidney, but the other way to do it, is go through digging a big tunnel, straight through the earth and that’s a shortcut. So in some ways, extra dimensions can behave like that, so what could be happening is the neutrinos could be taking a shortcut thorough another dimension.”

If this were right, then Einstein’s theory of special relativity wouldn’t be violated, just only valid in three dimensions.

What next?

The data is now out there on the net, for all scientists to analyse. Also, there are many places that are going to try and replicate the stud, to prove or disprove the results.

Hopefully we will have some more news soon, as to whether we actually can get things to travel faster than the speed of light, and as to whether there are are more than three (four including time) dimensions!

Anyone else slightly excited by this? 😀