david K dundas :: think. build. play.

Good one E! RT @em178 “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it’s the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill #quote

If Netflix were fastfood http://t.co/CAjmkmyk

RT @Textingly: SMS more valuable than QR Codes? http://t.co/64QEaVZb

Ha seriously RT @essencebc: reggie? #whodat

Scary and strange… RT @sacca: Finally, someone uncovers what venture capitalists are really like: bit.ly/rliMSC

What’s next for Daily Deals?

Yesterday Groupon pulled its IPO until they can get their shit figured out. I can’t help but think that an entire market  thousands of entrepreneurs, dozens and VCs have spent millions of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing Groupon.

Consumers, merchants and deals companies all have benefited from the growth of Daily Deals. However, it seems that we’ve gotten too much of a good thing. Merchants are offering less attractive deals so they don’t lose money,  consumers are buying deals less because they aren’t as good, and deals companies are re-evaluating how to approach the market.

This has been written about extensively. But whats next?

Mobile - Groupon, LivingSocial, and BuyWithMe have all stated that mobile is their next frontier. However, it doesn’t feel to me that anyone has done a great job with mobile or real-time deals yet.

POS - Closing the loop is the holy grail, and many companies are vying to be at the merchant’s payment terminal. LivingSocial has gone as far as to give merchants special POS systems to redeem deals.

Socializing deals - Making plans around or a deal or meeting other people around a deal has been tried by ScoopSt and LivingSocial. This strategy has not been scaled successfully yet, but certainly could bring users back to a deals site on an ongoing basis.

After the coming shakeout in the Daily Deals space we will see another wave of innovation around daily deals. However, that innovation will not be around making deals cheaper, but making deals more discoverable and useful to the consumer, and being more helpful to businesses than just enticing a customer to walk through the doors for steep discounts.

todays @clear NYC speed test http://t.co/tx6ynZL

RT i remember his first article good stuff @lynneluvah Jay-Z’s Hegemony in the Age of Kanye http://t.co/ecBhHql (h/t @misterjt)

My random but interesting links from last week… http://t.co/L9Acj1A

Random but interesting Week of 8/21

Here are a few of the more interesting links from last week:

Node Knockout: http://nodeknockout.com/
Our startup Textingly is beginning to dig into Node.js for a couple of projects and I thought I’d check out the Node Knockout at our homebase at General Assembly in NYC. I love the energy, an excitement around the Node.js community right now.

Questions around Facebook’s Valuation http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/25/is-facebook-losing-its-value/
My take: Facebook’s user base and engagement may have plateaued, but they are becoming invisible, integrating into everything we touch electronically. That means business around our social data is just getting started. Facebook knows everything about us and who we know, and they are in every single website on the internet.

Jon Huntsman A republican candidate that actually makes sense http://abcnewsradioonline.com/politics-news/jon-huntsman-supports-sacrifice-from-the-wealthy.html
My Take: He’s moving to the center to stand out, but he’s not extreme in his politics and the media can’t make center sexy. Unfortunately I don’t see his campaign going the distance.

BONUS: Dolphins use shells to catch fish! http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/dolphin-fishing
This is just pretty freaking cool!

Pretty awesome stuff … Mobile development with HTML5 | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog http://t.co/dmU4xhR

5 Lessons from the Facebook places #fail http://t.co/dvgHoSq

5 lessons from the Facebook Places #fail

I can only imagine how gratifying yesterday’s announcement of Facebook’s retrenching around their location strategy was for Foursquare.  

Foursquare was announced DOA when Facebook announced one year ago that they were getting into the location game. 

1. Location requires a unique experience - Mark Zuckerberg said late last year that “Social was not a layer”. It turns out that neither is location. 
2. It says that Foursquare staying focused is working - They are rolling out deals and amazing new features on a weekly basis. They are not running the race against Facebook. They are running it against themselves.  
3. Your users are going to do what ever THEY want to do - Even with +700million users it was hard to get Places traction because training users that they should check in would have to replace a status update. This requires a pretty significant shift in how people use Facebook. 
4. Data is King - If you have used Foursquare’s API vs. Facebook’s API you know that Foursquare has a much more robust data set about location. 
5. We are still early in the location game - Location is still not done well, nor is it easy. This is the cornerstone of Foursquare’s business. Similar to how Facebook connect is the fabric of the social web, Foursquare will be the fabric of the real world. This will be huge for them. 

Kudos to the Foursquare for winning this round. Its what we do as entrepreneurs. We look at Goliath and say F-U try and stop me. Seriously - well played.