I must admin that I’ve been baffled by Groupon’s success.  I’ve been a member for probably 6 months and only bought one Groupon – a discount to a dry cleaner that i already use, which I’m sure they were thrilled about.
Basically Groupon aggregates local email addresses – they are an intermediary.  In a world where every industry is constantly being disintermediated, why are we heaping praise on a new intermediary?
I could care less about the witty writing – I never read it.  I guess it makes for some …

To seek user feedback, or not to seek user feedback… that is the question.
Of course, I’m not talking about getting user feedback after you launch your product – you’d be crazy not to listen to what your users are telling you then.  I’m talking about getting user feedback on your idea before you build it.
There is a common saying: “build what people want”.   You can’t really argue with that.  The hard part is figuring out what people want.  It seems like a sound strategy to talk with potential customers about …

Let’s play an innovation game.
Here is the scenario: You are trying to increase donations to feed hungry children around the world – a noble cause if there ever was one.  According to the World Food Programme, it only costs $0.25 per day to feed one child.   You are going to use the web to create a site to solicit donations.  What can you do on the site to maximize the likelihood of a visitor donating?
Odds are you didn’t think of this: The Feedback calculator.  You type in your favorite food, …

With this last post of 2010, I wanted to write about some of my observations of retailers and products during this holiday shopping month.
Charity giving at the register. When I was making a $50 purchase at the local Pottery Barn, as I was paying the clerk asked if I’d like to donate $1 to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.  I think this is a terrific way to raise money (and I said yes).  First, I’ve already taken out my credit card, so that barrier is gone.  Second, they didn’t ask me …

How do you teach entrepreneurship to high school juniors?  In only one hour?
I had the privilege this summer of speaking for an hour to students at the Neighborhood Academy, a college prep school in Pittsburgh for low-income students, about being an entrepreneur.    “Being an entrepreneur” is certainly a broad topic, and you could choose to focus on a number of different areas.  I decided that I would have three goals: make it simple, make it inspiring, and make it practical.
So when I was considering what topics to cover, I stayed …

This innovation goes in the “why didn’t I think of that” category.
Solve Media is turning CAPTCHAs into an advertising opportunity.  Instead of displaying random words with lines crossed through them (that personally I often find too hard for even a human to decipher), Solve Media’s CAPTCHA’s are advertisements with phrases or words embedded in them that you need to retype.  They claim that this type of ad will increase the user’s recall of the brand.  That seems very plausible to me.
Not everybody loves this idea though.  On Gizmodo, author Kyle …

I’ve just co-founded a new consumer Internet company called BrainCredits (www.BrainCredits.com) that we think has huge potential.
Without getting into the details yet of the new business (we hope to release a beta version in a few months), one of the most important steps in the development of our business model was creating what I’ll call our “User Life Cycle” – how a user ultimately becomes engaged with our service.  

When I was growing up, running a lemonade stand was easy.  You picked a hot day, made sure you had a good location, priced it right, and provided a quality product.
But in the Web 2.0 world we live in, that just isn’t enough.  Everyone knows that it takes much less capital to start a business then it did 20 years ago, so everyone in your neighborhood is probably thinking about starting a lemonade stand too.  How will you ever be able to beat the competition?  Here is your guide to …

Two authors that I enjoy reading are talking today about Business Model innovation – a subject that I’m passionate about and often write about.   Idris Mootee wrote What Do You Know About Business Model Innovation?, and Stefan Lindegaard wrote about Business Model Innovation – Big Risk, Big Rewards.
Both articles note the confusion that people have when trying to define “business model” in the context of innovation and whether it is different from your “strategy”.  In my experience, if you disagree with someone’s definition of “business model”, the disagreement will typically …

In a recent post I wrote about a few of Register.com’s marketing strategies. The problem was that in my case the innovation didn’t work – they led me to register a domain name and only at the last second did they tell me it wasn’t available. This result was an irritated and resentful customer (me).
I was lucky enough to experience a similar innovation error with USAirways. (Yes, I realize the airline industry is often a target of my posts, but they’re creating this material – I’m not …