Groupon’s Business is Decaying in its Established Markets
With GroupOn’s IPO fast approaching, it’s worth considering whether they are a wise investment.
The following is an in-depth analysis of Groupon’s business in one of its oldest markets, Boston, by the folks at daily deal aggregator Yipit.
The entire piece is worth reading, but for the TL;DR crowd, here is the breakdown. Groupon’s costs to acquire customers is skyrocketing, while its revenue per customer is plummeting. Along with shrinking margins and a lower number of Groupon’s sold per deal, Yipit sees serious warning signs in the company’s financials.
A report in today’s Guardian talks about a targeted phishing attack, aimed at U.S. officials, Chinese dissidents and others. Google’s post on the matter states:
Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.
I didn’t realise that Snow Leopard includes a basic form of malware detection called File Quarantine. It’s a very simple virus checker, relying on on-demand, signature-based scanning. Terribly old fashioned stuff. Further to this, signatures were not updated other than in system updates. Practically useless.
Today’s security update from Apple addresses the up-to-date issue, a sure recognition that Apple recognises the security issues OS X is starting to face. Now File Quarantine will automatically update its signatures daily. This would have protected against MacDefender, but caution is still advised, as always. I suppose if these are your threats, quaintly old-fashioned defences will do for now.
Inspired by the insipid text rendering on Kindle, Kevin Lynagh implements TeX’s layout algorithm in javascript in Webkit. While the implementation is impressive, I confess myself more curious about the TeX paragraph layout algorithm itself.
I knew TeX had a clever layout algorithm which obviously considered paragraphs as a whole during layout, rather than lines individually. This much is clear when considering the beauty of TeX-set documents compared to a typical word processor-set document. Like many things in computer science, the solution is both devilishly clever and fiendishly simple:
On a recent TV show, there was a question: “does heaven exist?” Setting aside the answer to the question for now, I want to address an argument that a member of the religious side made in response to the secular side.
The secular side made the statement that religion was based on faith which is by definition belief without any proof. In return, religious person equated the faith required to believe in a God with a faith in money, implying that any person person was guilty of a similar crime if they used money. On first reflection this might appear reasonable: money doesn’t exist as a tangible good so requires faith to use it. But it feels false, this equivalence.