More thoughts on Groupon, local

I’ve written a few posts and commented on a few others about Groupon and their pending IPO. To be clear, I believe they have to, and will, continue to add to their service offerings and therefor flourish. If they don’t, they won’t. My opinion.

I think they need to provide more value to the retailer and there are many ways to do that. There are many, many companies calling on these retailers trying to sell them everything from advertising, search, websites, mobile, banners, yellow pages, daily deals, etc. At some point this needs to get centralized or retailers will feel like they are being assaulted (they probably already do) by legions of well-intentioned sales reps.

Groupon, with their sales force, could move to consolidate these services under one roof. Someone will (ReachLocal, AT&T (YP), large media company, Yahoo, AOL, Google, Micorsoft, other?). Right now it is like the wild, wild west when it comes to local. Too many players, too many service offerings and thus too confusing for the merchant who is just trying to make sense of it all.

The local space needs a leader and thus far none has emerged. Groupon is a candidate for that spot as are a handful of others.

Who’s going to figure it out first and capture this enormous market?

Transforming Your Cellphone to Make Cheap International Calls

If you’ve ever used your phone internationally your initial excitement of it actually working in Spain, Italy or China is dampened when you get home and see the bill.

Racking up exorbitant mobile charges is easy to do if you are not careful about using your cellphone internationally. AT&T charges 99 cents a minute to use your phone in Italy (rates vary by country), and that is if you pay for the carrier’s international calling plan. If you do not, the charge goes up to $1.29 a minute.

Read the entire article here: