After obsessing over the SteepAndCheap and Woot business models last year (and let’s not forget the insane and terrifying Swoopo), this year has given us something new to chew on: GroupOn and its group buying clones (this spreadsheet lists a ton of them). These are great businesses. Clear value proposition: deep discounts. Kept simple: one deal a day (basically). And they’re making money hand over fist. Love it. Naturally, my entrepreneurial friends and have been asking: Should we start a clone—doing something that improves on...

I’m going to kick a horse while it’s down. Last night at 9:23 pm I sent a friend who was at the Yankees/Red Sox game a text—I couldn’t make the game as expected but wow, what a nail bitter.  Just now, at 12:28 pm—the day after—I get his reply: “That is too bad. It is a great game. Fans r very rowdy.” 15 hours: 5 minutes later. He was sitting in the bleachers, under the giant AT&T advertisement, texting me from his iPhone. I would have liked to have gotten his message last night. Maybe we would have trad...

Looking at the opening still of this video, I began to rant to myself about the lame-ness of trying to replicate real world environments on the computer screen, but this “3D” tablet “desktop” goes beyond that and showcases some interesting touch screen innovations (the standard conventions of, oh, two weeks now are just getting so stale). It will be interesting to see if Google, who just bought the company that developed this interface, will integrate some of this behavior into their tablet project—or maybe make it the tablet’s ...