This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole. As the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen wrote in his 2011 e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” the Internet is a wonder when it comes to generating “cheap fun.” But because “so many of its products are free,” and because so much of a typical Web company’s work is “performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers,” the online world is rather less impressive when it comes to generating job growth.

To be sure, these sites don’t seem to attract heavy user engagement. So why the surge in traffic? Media buyers suspect these companies are somehow paying for clicks or duping lost searchers. Still, they can command a decent premium via SSPs, since they can be easily labeled as delivering valued audiences such as auto buyers. Meanwhile, the content—since it's not racy, merely lousy—doesn’t raise alarms with verification software from companies such as DoubleVerify.

Actually, this reminds me of an essay I read a long time ago about Soviet science fiction. The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: “if only”, or “if this goes on”. Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied that things could be better, the second that there was something wrong with the way things are. So stories had to be written about “if only this goes on”, extolling the wonders of being wonderful Soviets.

Some of my earliest memories are of science fiction. Not of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties: the interplanetarily themed chrome trim on my father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88; the sturdy injection-molded styrene spacemen on the counter at Woolworth’s (their mode of manufacture more predictive than their subject, as it turned out); the gloriously baroque Atomic Disintegrator cap pistol (Etsy currently has one on offer, in “decent vintage” condition, for two hundred and fifty dollars); Chesley Bonestell’s moodily thrilling illustrations for Willy Ley’s book “The Conquest of Space.” They were all special to me, these things, and I remember my mother remarking on this to her friends. Not that I was very unusual in my obsession. The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.

Benilov and co say that the drag will be higher in the region where the bubble density is higher, in other words near the centre of the glass. This creates an imbalance that sets up a circulation pattern in which the liquid flows upwards in the centre of the glass and downwards near the walls.

Optimism can make you healthier, happier and extend your life. The Army teaches it in order to increase mental toughness in soldiers. Being overconfident improves performance.

Liver fat mucks up the workings of the liver. It is the root cause of the phenomenon known as “insulin resistance” and the primary process that drives chronic metabolic disease. In other words, neither fat nor carbohydrates are problematic – until they are combined. The food industry does precisely that, mixing more of both into the Western diet for palatability and shelf life, thereby intensifying insulin resistance and chronic metabolic disease.

Gamification is awful for many reasons, not least in the way it seeks to transform us into atomized laboratory rats, reduce us to the sum total of our incentivized behaviors. But it also increases the pressure to make all game playing occur within spaces subject to capture; it seeks to supply the incentives to make games not about relaxation and escape and social connection but about data generation. The networked mediation of games — in other words, playing them on your phone or through Facebook — undermines the function of games in organizing face-to-face social time, guaranteeing presence in an unobtrusive way. Instead we typically take our turn in mediated games on our time and play multiple games at once, to cater to our convenience and our desire to be winning at least one of them.

One thing Lithium doesn't point out is that online gamification is also a great way to recruit kids into performing some free labor for your business. I mean, isn't the ideal online technical support superfan a geeky, game-loving 13-year-old boy with a lot of time on his hands? And since you're paying him with badges rather than cash, you can totally avoid that weird grey area of child labor.

A lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds.

So, here are my amnesty predictions guesses.  I got my salary data from Hoopshype.com. I'm assuming the cap will be around $60 million, which makes the league minimum payroll around $45 million.  I also make the assumption that both Dwight Howard and Chris Paul will opt out of the last year of their contracts next summer, since both would be eligible for the new CBA's "max contract at 30% of salary cap" rule, which will net them significantly more money than their current player options.  This has a heavy impact on some teams' 2012 salary targets (i.e. getting low enough to bid on those players in summer 2012).

William Alexander Morgan being applauded by Fidel Castro, in Havana in 1959. Morgan said that he had joined the Cuban Revolution because “the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others.”

A product manager in the digital space is someone who really owns the whole process of creating and executing products that audiences love. That means everything from the product strategy and vision to the detailed delivery and the ongoing running of that product or service. That ongoing part is crucial – and it is what makes them different from project managers who flit from task to task.

Creating “content” implies a certain packaging. We are producing “video” content or “text” content. Even “multimedia” content denotes a packaging with a pretty bow for the consumers to appreciate. If information, as they say, wants to be free - then it can be packaged in unique ways that content cannot. 

The terror that Chelsea represented in those early years was that with enough money, all the surprise could be taken out of the sport. When you spend a hundred million and then concede 15 goals across a 38-game season, you raise the legitimate fear that you will simply buy all the talent, win all the matches, and conquer European soccer with your unstoppable army of math. The irony, of course, is that by winning the Champions League with a frenzy of improbable, last-second comebacks, Chelsea finally conquered European soccer behind exactly the sort of unpredictability that they once threatened to eradicate. Somehow, winning the biggest tournament in the game was the least fearsome and most accessible thing they’ve done in the Abramovich era. It took frantic adjustments, the way it does for everybody, and a different kind of good fortune. After nearly a decade under soccer’s most iconoclastic rich dude, Chelsea now wins and loses on lucky breaks and heart, the way everyone loses and wins.

I think it’s fair to say the same is not yet true for Facebook’s native advertising solution. And that’s really what Facebook Ads are: the biggest example of a platform-specific “native advertising” play since Google AdWords broke out ten years ago.

That’s a remarkable and remarkably swift change, and it’s echoed by a national poll done by ABC News and the Washington Post. The national survey, whose results were also released this week, showed that 59 percent of black Americans indicated support for marriage equality. That represented a double-digit increase from findings that predated the president’s expression of support for same-sex marriage.

bpython doesn't attempt to create anything new or groundbreaking, it simply brings together a few neat ideas and focuses on practicality and usefulness. For this reason, the "Rewind" function should be taken with a pinch of salt, but personally I have found it to be very useful. I use bpython now whenever I would normally use the vanilla interpreter, e.g. for testing out solutions to people's problems on IRC, quickly testing a method of doing something without creating a temporary file, etc..

Sometimes, late at night, I Google Latrell Sprewell. I don’t really know why. Some vague longing. It’s been going on since he slipped out of the N.B.A., and the public eye, in 2005. At first, I was looking for news of his return. After a while, I was looking for any news at all. One would have thought that the recent first-round matchup between the Heat and the Knicks would have been the occasion for an update, but this was not the case.

Muller and Becker add that to take advantage of unexpected surprises, you have to put yourself in a position to encounter the unexpected. This is what they call “the essence of motion,” putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, but within familiar environments, to engage with previously unfamiliar people and ideas that are connected to your job, your projects or your interests.

A deep look at the fringe movement that just lost its only shred of scientific support.

PressReader is an app (for iPhone, iPad, Android, Honeycomb, Blackberry, PC/Mac, although I only used the iPad version) that lets you read tons (and I do mean tons) of newspapers from all around the world. It’s quite impressive how many titles — and countries — are covered, and although I only really checked for Canada (where I’m originally from), I’m assuming that most major newspapers from all over the world are included.

But in any case, NYC's tech sector is not anywhere close in terms of fertility to silicon valley. It will be there in another 25 to 30 years. And silicon valley will be even further along.

But of course, the fact that these risks are being taken by a too-big-to-fail institution, whose failure would cause a global crisis, which would therefore inevitably be bailed out if it got in big trouble, and which benefits from taxpayer-backed deposit insurance, is no cause for concern. None at all.

In a surprising letter (PDF) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

GitHub for Mac is powered by TwUI, Twitter's open source, Core Animation-based UI framework for Mac. It's the same framework that drives Twitter for Mac. TwUI lets us create fast, animatable UIs using modern APIs. It's fantastic.

When you think about the gym, don't think about how miserable to feel when you start -- focus on how great you feel when you're done. People who did this increased their intention to workout and enjoyed it more. And bring the iPod so you can listen to music you enjoy -- it'll improve your workout.

This trend is driven, in part, by young people replacing the old, but focusing on this overshadows the fact that essentially all Americans — of every stripe — show higher support for gay marriage than they did a decade ago. Both men and women and people of all races, political affiliations, religions, and ages are showing increased support for gay marriage. This is a real, remarkable, and rare shift in opinion:

Yes. I mean, again, I’m not going to talk about specific of the TAC on mobile. But as you know, we get people using our devices both organically as well as through our distribution partnerships with carriers and OEMs. And typically, the OEMs and carriers participate in some of the economics that are on the Android marketplace or Google Play and some of them participate in the economics around Google Search just the way we would do syndication on the Web platform, which you do with many partners around the world. We have similar deals on the mobile front.

The truth is soccer retains a unique identity separate to other industries. Elsewhere in business, rebranding can be an effective tool for a profitable rejuvenation, but in soccer it seldom achieves the desired effect, as fans of MK Dons will attest. Standard capitalist values and practices don’t always translate directly to soccer. It’s why successful businessmen don’t usually make good team owners.

It turns out that sitting around waiting is definitively the wrong way to trigger right-brain creative activity. What gets the alpha waves flowing, facilitating the semi-dream-state in which we’re best able to connect those unlikely dots, is a change of scenery – a long aimless walk, for example, or travel abroad. In this sense, the internet, an endless web of discovery and rabbit holes to alternate dimensions, is an enormous creativity machine. 

I’ve already hinted at it above: Wrap content with appropriate underwriting, and set it free to roam the Internet. Of course, such a system will have to navigate business process rules (the platforms’ Terms of Service), and break free of scale and ROI constraints. I believe this can be done.

After a good season like I’m having, people always ask me about my immediate plans. You never know what’s on the horizon. Me? I feel like I’ve found a home. I’m comfortable here and want to grow further here. If an opportunity comes around it would have to be something to die for. I don’t think now is the time to switch again. I just got here. I’ve moved a bunch. Right now, I’m at a good place.

There was great news on the Android front this week. Samsung reported blow-out earnings, with smartphones -- the majority running Android -- accounting for nearly three-quarters of profits. Meanwhile comScore data spotlights the growing US Android tablet market. Additionally, Google started selling Galaxy Nexus direct, with no carrier contract, for $399. But all three share something in common -- what they foreshadow. Google has lost control of Android, and must swiftly act to regain it.

Is confusion a real problem?
There’s too much money going to agencies who don’t know how to navigate and effectively buy online. The marketer’s lazy, the agency is scared and plays defense. Then you layer in this $4 billion of venture capital investment. The problem is nobody wants to commit to figuring out how to do it right.

Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application, by deleting the application, or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out.

Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t the NYT, which can always use a bit of extra revenue, take advantage of the fact that its stories can move markets so much? Not directly: I’m not suggesting that the New York Times Company should start buying out-of-the-money put options on Mexican corporates in advance of its own stories. But how much would hedge funds pay to be able to see the NYT’s big investigative stories during the trading day prior to the appearance of the story? It’s entirely normal, and perfectly ethical, for news organizations, including Reuters, to give faster access to the best-paying customers.

When this next bubble pops — and it will pop — the idea to make no money can finally pop, too. Then investors can start working with companies to build businesses that have long-term financial goals, instead of just building a short-term mystery.

According to sources close to the situation, Demand Media was deep into discussions with a private equity firm to complete a deal that would have taken the online content company private, for almost double its current value.

ghost.py is a webkit web client written in python.

Pinterest, the social image-sharing pinboard site beloved by maiden aunts and chronically depressed  ex-girlfriends everywhere,  isn’t so hot anymore,  apparently. While Pinterest soared in popularity at the end of 2011 and by March this year was the third most popular U.S. social network, new user signups appear to have dropped off a cliff.

I’m a writer and media inventor usually based in San Francisco, currently on the road. My first novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux later this year, and in it, a few characters’ setups - some of them very unusual - play a pivotal role. Most of my public conversations happen on Twitter.

This type of paranoia is relatively normal at Silicon Valley’s largest technology companies. “These huge West Coast companies, peopled mostly by kids who cannot believe their good luck, commonly turn paranoid and think everyone is out to get them,” veteran columnist and broadcaster John Dvorak told VentureBeat. “Microsoft was the worst but not the first. Apple acts this way with Android, and Google has been paranoid for a few years.”

“Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. His first company, Netscape, lost the Browser Wars and ended up getting sold to AOL. His second company, Loudcloud, was (to be charitable) too far ahead of its time, so it “pivoted” into something called Opsware; eventually Andreessen managed to sell it off to HP. His third company, Ning, was even less successful, and ended up buried somewhere in Glam Media. None of them exist today in any recognizable form; none of them ever made much money; and none of them even really made it as far as building anything approaching a permanent income stream.

All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but these perks could be stultifying. At some of these Silicon Valley businesses, there is no reason to leave the office.

The reality is that no agency or vendor can just "make it work." Why? Very simple: the rise of Facebook, Twitter and the other social platforms has made it easier than ever to distribute content at scale. But it doesn't work without a commitment to the content. Content is power. Content drives connections.

So, yes, to adapt an old Internet meme, All your Tumblr (and much of your other social history) are belong to Big Data. But that’s not necessarily bad, if all the power of social media belongs to all of us. Whether that’s a worthwhile trade-off all depends on how we use that power, and what we finally do with all that data.

If not for Machinima, you might be unaware that gamers are terrified of zombies, Super Mario Bros. would have been better off if the villain had more of a back story, an Alienware X51 Mini Gaming PC will catch fire if you put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, and Return of the Jedi, when you really think about it, has a lot of plot holes.

So it seems that the 'do not criticise' instruction is highly counter-productive. As Lehrer says: "The imgaination is not meek - it doesn't wilt in the face of conflict. Instead it is drawn out, pulled from its usual hiding place". Every morning at Pixar begins the same way, with the animators debating the previous day's work ('ruthlessly shredding each frame') in sessions designed to critique, debate and improve . As well as encouraging the team to fully engage with the work of others, the sessions distribute responsibility for catching mistakes across the entire group, a lesson that Ed Catmull learned from the lean manufacturing process.

A lot of startups over outsource. A few years ago, you’d sometimes hear tech startups say they were going to outsource software development. Thankfully, founders have gotten smart about this and it rarely ever happens except as a stopgap. It is still common for startups to hire outside PR firms. If you decide to hire an outside PR firm, that means you don’t care about PR. Just because you are willing to spend some of money on it doesn’t mean you think it’s important. You probably shouldn’t hire an investment banker during an acquisition unless your company is later stage. And you might occasionally use an outside recruiter but the core recruiting activity needs be done by founders.

It's your data so the service would naturally support it being moved right along to your favorite flavour of data store via an API. Public or private. I have used Flickr for years (badly) but I've been using the brilliant IFTTT to back up Instagrams for a while. The options are there, from DropBox to iCloud. Sensibly the service would provide it's own storage (perhaps for a bit of £$) and maintain links to everyones archives for folk wanting to rummage about in dusty drawers. As a grid of APIs evolves we are going to start seeing folk building their own sharing communities in a no-code way. Apple are patenting some of the ideas now... yikes!

When Aron Streit started making matzo in 1916, unleavened bread was a serious growth business, at least on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By the late 1920s, Streit could afford to build a special machine that mixed, kneaded and cooked dough. A decade later, his family added the cotton gin of kosher food — an automated conveyor belt with a Rube Goldberg-esque basket system that moved the matzo to a packaging area on a higher floor. They even opened a retail store next door that allowed customers to watch it in action.

Brands aren’t there in a big way. Sure, fashion brands fell for Tumblr early. Others are dabbling there. But brands haven’t come to Tumblr in nearly the same numbers as they did to Twitter and Facebook before those services really increased their focus on advertising. These types of promoted-accounts systems only work if holders are seeing real benefits to their audiences there. Ask an agency about how important Tumblr is to their clients, you get the distinct impression it’s in the dreaded experimental bucket or “on the roadmap.” Right now, it’s hard to make that case for most brands, which is where the money is. A platform like Pinterest is doing a far better job of funneling commercial intent to advertisers. Tumblr often seems to brands like a content-management system rather than a social network.

Of course the NFL could give a damn about fan behavior at games. They want people in the seats and owners want people guzzling down Coors Light and MGD at the fastest possible rate. They want fans drunk in the parking lot because a drunk fan will be far quicker to pay $10 for more booze than a sober fan. A drunk fan is far more likely to drop $100 on that shiny new jersey. A drunk fan is going to get hungry and there are plenty of overly priced sandwiches at the ready. Don't insult us with your bullshit test. And don't insult us by couching the implementation of this test as for OUR benefit.

Today we announced an entirely new advertising solution for Facebook. Right now, we want to make clear what's changing—and what's not—for you.

InboundWriter delivers real-time search and social intelligence as to what your target audience is reading, sharing and discussing online during the content development process.

Twenty-five years after The Simpsons made their TV debut, the show's creator talks about Homer's odyssey—and his own

“To me, Twitter is like the ideal thing for 5-year-olds because it is so short,” she said. “It makes them think about their day and kind of summarize what they’ve done during the day; whereas a lot of times kids will go home and Mom and Dad will say, ‘What did you do today?’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t know.’”

The key to the balance probably doesn’t lie in raw numbers, though. A Gawker that was only weird Chinese goats would likely, over time, bore its readers. The more substantive stories serve as tentpoles for the entire site; once in a while, they’ll blow up huge, and they’re probably more appealing to the kind of brand advertisers Gawker seeks. (A sampling of current advertisers: Virgin Mobile, Samsung, Corning, Bonobos, AMC, BlackBerry. Gawker sells itself to advertisers by promoting the fact that its readers are both younger and richer than The Huffington Post’s, People’s, Slate’s, or TMZ’s.)

So did Facebook overpay for Instagram?  Probably not.  Photo sharing is an important core activity on Facebook and there was a meaningful threat of Instagram “unbundling” that activity from the rest of Facebook.  If acquired by someone else such as Google that could provide the engine for a broader effort and potentially hollow out Facebook.  As a defensive move spending 1% of its presumed market cap makes eminent sense in the near term.  But that does not imply that similar services that don’t achieve critical mass should count on valuations even remotely close.  It also raises an interesting question whether Facebook will have to make similar acquisitions repeatedly in the future to protect its core network.

Instagram’s numbers are exactly what you’d want to see in a social network — high user counts with the lowest number of employees. This ratio is a measure of efficiency, and it’s no surprise that Instagram comes out on top here, with one employee for every 2.07 million users.

Brand pages are available only to Twitter advertisers and may have the potential to drive revenue by making organic and paid content more connected. If marketers can make their brand pages into interesting destinations, they have a greater incentive to invest in paid tweets to drive Twitter users there.

One-hundred million views, 100 thousand subscribers, and many of the world’s biggest brands still don’t have a suite of tools for customizing their YouTube channels. That changes today as social marketing platform Buddy Media begins letting its big brand clients deck out their YouTube channels with stylized video players and interactive apps. Twitter feeds, e-commerce storefronts, quizzes, linked banners, photo galleries and more can all be hosted on a channel.

Think of it as "survival of the fittest" for information: those tweets that capture the most attention, whether related to a major geopolitical or news event or a particular interest, are likely to persist longer.

A cop walks into a bad neighborhood of Newark, NJ. The city I grew up next to. The city my hometown always considered our older, wayward brother. Cops walks into that neighborhood and sees a gun crime. It's not unusual, he knows that, but it's the first one he's literally seen. Does he ignore it because it's common? No. Of course not. He comes down as hard as possible on the individual committing that crime in hopes it will (1) send a message to others participating in the illegal activity and (2) prevent that particular individual from ever doing damage. That is why Goodell's response is so apt. With this punishment the NFL has had its Pete Rose moment. And when you talk to baseball players one thing becomes abundantly clear. They'll do a lot of things wrong before they even consider betting on baseball.

That's what the NFL is banking on these next few years — hypocrisy, basically — as more stories emerge about the tortured lives of retired players. Many of them can't walk, sit down or remember anything. Some battle debilitating headaches and gulp down pills like they're peanuts. A few weeks ago, Jim McMahon confessed in an interview that his short-term memory was gone, then admitted he wouldn't even remember the interview as he was giving it. You hear these things, you sigh, you feel remorse, you forget … and then you go back to looking forward to the next football season. Gregg Williams crossed the line; he won't be there. I just wish someone would decide, once and for all, where that line really is.

I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.

The goal of SummerQAmp is to introduce Quality Assurance (QA) as a potential career path to American youth (ages 18-24) who are unaware of the opportunity by allowing them to gain valuable work experience as summer interns at software companies. During the SummerQAmp internships, we will provide participants with fundamental understanding of how software works and give them access to an educational resource to assist them in preparing for a potential career in software development.

So if you’re still figuring out how to make Google+ part of your content strategy, it might be helpful to take a look at a couple of examples of popular and engaging Google+ pages. I’ve chosen Dell — which has embraced Google+ and is doing some really interesting stuff with its profile — and also “Wired” magazine. Unlike Dell, “Wired” produces content as its core business; but like Dell, it has invested time and resources in its Google+ brand page and has quickly built a large following.

"I would feel very differently about this whole case if our fair use laws weren’t as they are today, but courts have told us that “personal archiving” is a legal activity. As such, it’s legal — and perfectly moral — for a company to create a service which makes personal archiving easier whilst charging a monthly fee for it. That Readability sees a future in which personal archiving may hurt publisher revenues and pushes forward an experiment to counteract those effects should be applauded."

One of the best words you can internalize is “satisfice“ — in other words, “done enough” given a certain goal. There is no absolute measure of “done.” It’s up to you to decide, because all projects can go on forever. The best way to determine when you are done is to again lead with design, where the function of design is to reach a solution to a problem. When the problem is no longer a big enough problem to matter, you are done.

Brier deals with this question every day. Brands haven’t yet figured out (or acknowledged) that they are different things to different people and that they need to establish a voice beyond rote brand-message points. To do that, a brand can use the social Web to curate information to its audiences and add perspective. Percolate steps in to help the curation process through its algorithmic filtering layer and publishing client that sits on top of it.

The team at Philter Phactory, however, argues that while Weavrs are bots, they're not spambots, and can be useful discoverability agents. Despite accusations that they have used Ronson's name for publicity, they created the Weavr in direct response to a video Ronson made about spambots on Twitter as part of his series about "people trying to control the internet", called Esc and Ctrl.

I think it’s the rate of change. It’s the fact that there aren’t any right answers. People realize that perhaps the kind of stone tablets that were passed on saying ‘This is how advertising works’ we now know by and large aren’t true. It means people are looking for different ways of creating work and for different ways of working. I also think the great thing about the internet is that it has reduced the cost of failure to nearly zero, and that means we can now really truly experiment and try and work on what works and what doesn’t work. I think that kind of openness is exciting.

An app for just the two of you.
Texting, sharing videos, photos, sketching
together and more.

People would misspell their email addresses and be unaware of it, resulting in a delivery failure and a lost user. And it got even more interesting - most of these invalid email addresses were a result of a misspelled domain; “hotmail.con”, “gnail.com”, “yajoo.com”. A clear opportunity for improvement.

In order to build a truly disruptive and highly valuable company delivering enterprise software for digital advertising, the new solution has to be an order of magnitude better than the existing systems.  It is not enough to deliver an incrementally better version of the existing systems (primarily doubleclick and homegrown technologies).  If there is to be a resurgent disruptor in the advertising technology space it has to change the game.  It must attack the white space, and it must do what GOOG/DCLK, Yahoo/RM etc. have been unable to do.  Further, the key white space here is a UNIFIED exchange for PREMIUM/N0N-PREMIUM advertising space.   No one is actually close to delivering this, and no one will beat Google/DCLK in this space without this.

To that end, it has rolled out Groupon Scheduler, an online calendar that enables small businesses, like spas and salons, to book appointments online.