In the traditional television model, a producer puts together a television show and sells it to a TV network. Occasionally, the process works the other way around, but for the most part, someone pitches a TV show and then a network either picks up the show and gives it a spot in the lineup, or the show dies.

Television Follows Music Industry to Doom

Recently, however, that model has come under attack. It is still early, but television as it exists today is finished. It will take several years to play out completely, but the television stations and cable systems who once held control (and made all the money) are finished, they just don’t realize it.

Hulu recently created and began distributing its own television show called Battleground. Netflix, likewise, has created a program called Lilyhammer. And, word around Silicon Valley is that both Google and Amazon are close behind.

The reason all of these technology companies are getting into the original programming realm is because the cable systems and television companies have forced them to. It simply is more cost effective to make your own television programs. The high (and rising) prices charged by media companies for rights to stream their programs are only part of the cost. Once the rights have been acquired, there are all manner of restrictions upon how, where and when those programs can be shown.

For example, movie companies force their films off of Netflix when they are being shown during the month on a cable TV channel that bought different rights. Your average Netflix subscriber isn’t an expert on program licensing. To them, it seems that Netflix is an unreliable source of movies. All of this occurs AFTER the studios force Neflix to wait and increasingly long period of time before they are even able to show their films.

Check out good personal finance advice on the FinanceGourmet blog.

Television networks aren’t much better. CBS famously forbids its programs to be shown on Hulu at all, causing users to think of the service as only a partial option. Even shows that are allowed on Hulu come with restrictions ranging from delays in when they can be aired online, to how long they can remain online.

The rise of devices like iPads, Kindle Fire and even Barnes and Noble Nook, show that consumers aren’t interested in only sitting in front of their living room television to watch their entertainment. Yet, traditional television producers give them nothing but the run around in order to watch their shows.

Add all of it up, and getting traditional programming from the networks costs too much. The only solution is to create your own programming that you can show immediately, with no restrictions, reliably and for as long as people want to see it. If any one of these companies tastes even moderate success with their own programming, you can be sure that the growth of these shows will proliferate quickly. The death blow will come when Google, who has been stymied by traditional television (and Hulu, but at the orders of their TV masters) gets into the content game, buying up television shows and documentaries that can be shown without restriction on a Google TV. That may comes sooner rather than later with the technology giant looking for a way to gain a foothold before Apple TV launches and entrenches as the multimedia distribution leader like it is for music.

This stop, delay, complain business strategy worked out terribly for the music industry. One can only wonder why both the film industry and the television and cable industry insist on running the same losing playbook. One chapter will be significantly different. The television industry won’t be able to complain that piracy is causing all of their problems when the programs that are destroying them are actually original works produced by other, savvier, corporations.

Soon, it may be the traditional media outlets paying the online content providers to ensure that their shows get equal billing and availability, and the likes of CBS will be complaining that Hulu promotes its own shows over those from other networks.

And, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

Related articles

• Hulu and Netflix Begin Forays into Original Programming – TIME (techland.time.com)
• How Hulu plans to measure success of ‘Battleground’ without TV ratings (venturebeat.com)

Did Traditional Television Commit Suicide? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Black Friday Tricks

The oldest Black Friday scam in the book is the super-limited inventory scam. This is the same scam that car dealers use in their advertisements. Sure, you can get a 2012 Ford F-150 for no money down and just $99 per month, the thing is, there is only one make and model and options package that gets you that price and there aren’t any of them left. How would you like a new truck for $2,500 down and $299 a month instead?

It is illegal to advertise items that the retailer does not carry or never has in stock. These laws are the result of the old, now illegal, bait and switch scam where retailers would advertise an item that they did not ever have any intention of selling in order to get suckers customers into the store. Then, the shoppers would be offered a different, more profitable item in its place.

However, those laws are easily circumvented by having a very limited inventory of sale items. Some stores go so far — out of legal obligation or otherwise — to mention just how few of an item they have in stock. Many ads will say something like “Minimum of 4 per store,” or something like that. In other words, unless you camp out, get in the front of the line, go straight to the items without getting waylaid, and grab them right away, you cannot get that price. Some retailers only have ONE of those items in stock.

Here comes tax season. Check here for the 2011 standard deduction and other tax information.

When a store knows there will be demand for HUNDREDS of the item at that price, the only reason to have so few in stock is to ensure that only a handful of customers get the items. The next week, after the sale ends, there will be dozens in every store, or easy availability for ordering online. This turns the sale into a lottery where only the lucky few can “win” the sale price.

Crappy Black Friday Sales

Retailers know that customers want to nab great deals on Black Friday. Some shoppers are naïve enough to think that every Black Friday sale is a great Black Friday sale. Retailers prey on these unsavvy shoppers by advertising items at the normal sale prices, that is the sale price that was available last month, and will probably be available again within a few weeks.

Be sure to at least check the price of the item at a competing store or online at a major retailer like Amazon.com before leaping to buy that “cheap” television set on the front page of that electronics store ad. Chances are good that the price isn’t that great after all.

Black Friday Item Replacement Tricks

A favorite in the electronics and computer industry, with this scam retailers sell and item that is similar but very different from the item you think you are getting. Computers with less memory, or RAM, than would typically come inside of that level of computer are one good example of this scam.

Another favorite are television sets that have similar make and model numbers but that are just different enough to be cheaper thanks to inferior or missing components. Something like a 65″ Sony LCD TV  that has the previous model’s insides but the current model’s case and remote would be one example.

Some retailers and manufacturers go so far as to make different model numbers for each retailer in order to be as devious as possible. Instead of the highly rated and well reviewed MSC99381D model, store will offer a lower quality, cheaper MSC99381O model on Black Friday where unsuspecting customers will purchase and assume that they got the same item for a great price.

Avoid Black Friday Sales Scams

The best way to avoid Black Friday sales scams is to research before heading out to go shopping. Many retailers have released their ads online this year to avoid having them leaked by internet deal websites. Google your holiday items and be very careful to not the exact model numbers to avoid any surprises. Also, check the pricing on Amazon to be sure you aren’t getting a phony sale price. Finally, check out deal websites like slickdeals.net or gottadeal.com to find out what deals are really hot and which deals are no.

Black Friday Sales Scams is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Getaround Business

If you have ever tried to rent a car from a rental company for a single day, you know that it is not worth the expense and hassle. Don’t even think about trying to make it worth it to rent a car for a few hours. It isn’t really a scam or conspiracy on behalf of the car rental companies, it just doesn’t make sense for their business model. Between reserving, delivering, returning and cleaning the car, the costs are just to high to be able to offer a reasonable hourly rate.

Getaround gets around this (Hah!) by not doing any of those things. Instead, Getaround signs up car owners to rent out their cars rather than buying and maintaining a fleet of cars. No Getaround personnel are involved and the company has no responsibilities during a problem-free rental. Nice low overhead.

If this sounds like a lot of risk for the car owner, you’re thinking. The company works around this issue by doing two things. First, ever rental includes full coverage car insurance including comprehensive and underinsured coverage. Second, the company offers a kit that is installed in your car that acts as a monitor and, if you have an iPhone, can even handle the rental and drop off without any face-to-face meeting with the renter.

Theoretically, if a renter gets in a car accident or you car gets stolen while someone is renting it, you are covered. Of course, that isn’t much comfort if your car gets totaled by a renter the day before a big job interview. Much more likely, than losing your car or having it wrecked, however, are those little things that aren’t quite so obvious. Was that scratch on the door before the rental? How about that flat tire? What about the chain-smoking renter who says that they never smoked in the car? Those kinds of things might be problematic to collect on and/or prove.

The biggest risk for renters, is those unseen things. While most renters are reasonable drivers, even when renting from Hertz, there are always those who view a rental car as a chance to squeal the tires and punch it from every red light they hit. Think of the guys joy-riding the car in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. They don’t wreck the car in anyway, but it certainly is worse for the wear when it comes back.

The company relies on the standard internet quality mechanism, user reviews, as its guard against such things. Until there are a lot of regular renters, however, this will be little help. Most renters will be first-time (and likely only one time) renters during the startup period.

Getaround Rentals

For the renter, the risk is lower. In fact, at first, the toughest part is probably finding a rentable car. The company says it has thousands of cars available, but they aren’t available at all hours of the day because their owners are using them some times. As a new techie-type business, rental offerings are sure to be clustered in certain cities like San Francisco, Austin, and other high-density, high-tech cities.

The service might prove especially tough to take advantage of in less compact cities. Here in Denver, for example, you might need a rental just to get to your rental.

Of course, the included insurance helps, but there is no guarantee that a rentee won’t claim that you did something to their car while you had it.

Getaround Insurance and Local Laws

The biggest potential problem with Getaround, however, isn’t what happens between the company and the renters, but how this all flies in the event something goes bad.

Many cities and states have strict rules and regulations when it comes to offer a car for hire, which this type of rental may very well fit into. Owners probably won’t get a visit from anyone while everything is working, but an unpleasant visit may occur if there is an auto accident. Sure, the car is covered, but are you covered for operating a rental business without a proper license and how big is the fine for not keeping proper maintenance records?

While Getaround’s insurance covers your car while it is being rented, does offering your car out for rental affect your own normal car insurance? Most specifically forbid activities such as renting the car out.

Finally, what about the tax implications? Is this a business? Do you owe taxes on the revenue? If you deduct car expenses or take the standard mileage deduction for your business, offering our your car for rent may cause you a big IRS headache down the line. (Of course, if you fold renting out your unused automobile into your business that is a different story.)

Getaround sounds like a great idea, and frankly, I hope it works out. I’d love to rent out the second car that sits in front of the house most of the time, but I’ll be waiting to see how it goes for a while before signing up.

On second thought, if someone in the Denver area is renting out a sweet car, I wouldn’t be above a fun drive around Denver and back.

Getaround Scam or Good Deal? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

When Google Chrome first came out, the first thing people noticed was how fast it started. The chorus of users claiming that Firefox had gotten too big, too bloated and too slow grew louder. Firefox developers worked hard to streamline the code and make Firefox faster and more efficient, but for some users, the improvements were not enough. Much like me, they began to use Chrome as their quick browser and Firefox as their power browser. Of course, the constantly running googleudatetaskuser process annoyed me enough to keep it from leaping to the front of the good resource usage pack.

It turns out that Firefox’s slower loading may not be its own fault. Users who load their browser down with numerous new addons and plugins are adding not just functionality but more code to run at startup as well. The result is a slow loading web browser that cannot be fixed by making Firefox faster.

No longer willing to take the blame for slow starting web browsers, Mozilla’s Firefox development team began calling add-on developers out by publishing a listing of the most popular Firefox addons showing how much they slow down the boot process of Firefox.

One popular developer plugin, called Firebug, slows the startup time of Firefox by 74 percent. Put another way, the load time of Firefox is nearly twice as long if you have Firebug running. This is sobering news, both for Firebug developers, and Firebug users.

As a website developer and freelance technology writer, I both publish and write for numerous websites. I have the Firebug extension installed on my Firefox browser because I occasionally need some of its features. For example, Firebug can show me which links on a webpage are nofollow links. It is also necessary to run Google’s Page Speed plugin which analyzes how quickly a webpage loads and provides suggestions to make it load faster.

I do not need to use Firebug all of the time, however. In fact, I only use it a few times each week. But, with Firebug installed, my Firefox browser starts slower, much slower. By disabling Firebug and only re-enabling it when I actually need its functionality, my browser starts much more quickly. (I have long disabled unused add-ons to make Firefox snappier, but I never suspected Firebug of being a big speed killer.)

With this new spotlight on add-on speed, developers may refocus some attention on making their plugins more efficient. As a result, Firefox will start faster and load more quickly. In turn, some users may find the startup time of Firefox so quick without numerous bloated add-ons installed that they don’t need a “quick browser” anymore and they can just use Firefox all of the time.

It’s a win-win situation for Mozilla and users. For developers, it’s time to re-evaluate how well their code is written.

Of course, this is only half the problem. Since Firefox is still the only major web browser that requires a full restart to enable or disable an add-on, users are forced to decide what functionality they want to enable ahead of time or wait for a Firefox restart when they change the state of a plugin. No matter how fast Firefox starts up starting (or restarting) it three or four times to get the right functions working makes is slower and less usable than its competition which already allow on-the-fly enabling and disabling of add-ons.

Firefox Calls Out Slow Loading Add-ons is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

What makes this new business strategy so interesting is that it completely cuts out the middle man companies that Warner Bros. currently depends on to rent it’s films. The idea is that instead of going to Netflix or Redbox to rent a movie, customers could do so directly through their Facebook account. Assuming the user already has Facebook Credits or a credit card linked to their Facebook account to do so, paying for a movie rental is as easy as clicking a button.

This is an important step because it prevents the possible hodgepodge of payment systems that would arise if each studio rented its movies directly from their own websites. Facebook credits are not necessarily used widely even by the the website’s own users, but Facebook is working hard to change that, and once a customer makes their first rental, subsequent rentals have virtually zero barrier.

The success of Warner Bros. Facebook gambit will be limited, however, because the studio refuses to face the realities of movie rental. Pricing is set at 30 Facebook Credits, or approximately $3, which is the same price for a DVD movie rental at the now bankrupt Blockbuster video stores.

Renting the movie is actually cheaper if you go through the middle men rather than buying direct, a completely upside down pricing system.

Warner Bros. is overvaluing the convenience of renting online through Facebook and charging a premium for it, rather than following the pricing model of every single successful online venture, which is to make it cheaper online. Customers have no incentive to rent through Facebook rather than through Comcast On Demand or other services, and customers actually have a disincentive compared to renting via Redbox or Netflix.

No doubt, the company’s strategy is to offer new releases directly to customers first, before they can be rented via Netflix or Redbox, thereby justifying the premium charged on the rental. Of course, in order for that strategy to be successful, Hollywood would have to generate movies that customers can’t wait 90 days to rent, and those don’t seem to be too common these days.

Warner Bros. Online Movie Rental Strategy

In the fantasy world that movie studio executives live in, they will be able to build up a large enough distribution channel for online movie rentals via Facebook that they won’t have to do business with Netflix or Redbox at all.  Unfortunately, in order for that strategy to work, the company would have to understand the reality of business strategy.

As everyone else seems to understand, the way you build a large base of users is to aggressively price your product. Only AFTER people have fully invested in your service and seen your full value proposition can you squeeze out competitors. Apple’s iTunes dominates because of its low-price and ease of use.  Amazon’s Kindle platform has grown to dominate the market by offering lower priced electronic books.  Google’s Gmail email service displaced established market leaders by offering more storage space at a lower price (free) than the competition.

At this price point, there is no incentive for customers who don’t already have and use Facebook credits to put the effort into learning about them and getting the setup, and for anyone who lives within a 5 minute drive of a Redbox, there is no incentive to forgo the quick trip to rent a movie in person, and there is most definitely no incentive for a cable customer to setup and use online movie streaming rather than just click a button for their cable company’s pay-per-view service.

With the current terms, the Warner Bros. online movie rental scheme will fail, but the revolution may have begun anyway. Smarter studios will offer their movies for lower prices and Warner Bros. may actually learn that they can make more money renting many movies for $1 per rental than they can by having 10 percent as many rentals at $3 per rental.

Until then, look for the real growth in online movie rentals to come from Netflix and Amazon. In the offline world, Redbox and the copycat Blockbuster Kiosks will continue to dominate.

Warner Bros. Revolutionizes Movie Rentals is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The complain was that it wasn’t fair to characterize Groupon’s deal of the day offers in this manner. The suggestion was that Groupon offers aren’t really like that anymore and that while there is an occasional skydiving lesson or massage in the mix that Groupon has diversified into many other areas.

In an effort to be fair, I went into the inbox of the email account I use to sign up for things online. Like many people, I use this account when a company insists that I give them an email address to use their service, but from whom I don’t really want to actually be getting emails on a regular basis. That way, I can go check that email account when I hear about a good deal or am curious, but I can just ignore it the rest of the time. I’m not the only one who does that, which does call into question how valuable all of those so-called “registered users” on Groupon might actually be worth.

However, that is not why we gather today. Today, we look at what kind of daily deal offers Groupon offers up currently, thanks to the long list of undeleted (unread) emails in my shopping/rewards email inbox.

These are the deals for the Denver area. That is where I live and where I signed up to get deals. Ironically, it makes for a pretty solid test case. Denver is major city, but not one of the biggest. It typifies the kind of market that supposedly makes Groupon so hard to replicate because it is far away from both coasts and other big cities, so if you want to sell local here, you have to deliberately make the effort to but boots on the ground (or calls on the phone) in an area that can’t just be gathered under the wing of the sales force from a nearby area.

The groups are pretty self explanatory.

1. Gym = Memberships, fitness classes, and personal training
2. Nails = Manicures and Pedicures
3. Hair = Haircuts, laser hair treatments, and waxing

What Kinds of Groupon Deals Are There Currently

• 1/20/11 – Restaurant
• 1/19/11 – Dentist
• 1/18/11 – Car Wash
• 1/17/11 – Symphony Ticket
• 1/16/11 – Restaurant
• 1/15/11 – Gym
• 1/14/11 – Hair
• 1/13/11 – Boat Show Ticket
• 1/12/11 – Restaurant
• I don’t have my emails for 1/4/11 to 1/11/11 – Apparently, I did delete some
• 1/3/11 – Nails
• 1/2/11 – Restaurant
• 1/1/11 – Hair
• 12/31/10 – Yoga
• 12/30/10 – Coffee
• 12/29/10 – Hair
• 12/28/10 – Restaurant
• 12/27/10 – Poster
• 12/26/10 – Photos
• 12/25/10 – Stock Show Ticket
• 12/24/10 – Tanning
• 12/23/10 – Restaurant
• 12/22/10 – Gym
• 12/21/10 – Restaurant
• 12/20/10 – Knitting Class
• 12/19/10 – Gym
• 12/18/10 – Restaurant
• 12/17/10 – Teeth Whitening
• 12/16/10 – Restaurant
• 12/15/10 – Paintball

I have a lot more, and based on scanning subject lines, there are no skydiving lessons to be found. In fact, the number one category is restaurants, followed by some form of hair, nails, or tanning. Maybe it is diversifying.

Do you thing Groupon offers a variety of deals in your area? Does it feel like something is offered a lot? Too often? Let us know.

Are Groupon Offers Worth It? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I get the AMC channel on my cable subscription, so there is no problem there. The show has been on the air for a while and several episodes have been shown. Since I have never seen the show before, I figured I would start by watching episode number one and seeing if I was interested enough in watching it to set up a recording on my DVR. The show is not on Hulu, which is annoying, but not unheard of. Instead Hulu redirects me to AMC where I can read all the promotional material I want, and where I can watch promotional “behind the scenes” stuff and commercials for the show that I already wanted to watch.

What I cannot do, is watch episodes of The Walking Dead online at AMC or anywhere else.

Now, I am not naive. I know that television channels make money from commercials that they show when their air their programs. Which is why I fully accept that CBS, for example, does not show full episodes of its shows until the day after they air on regular TV. I also fully accept that when watching those shows online they put some commercials in the show.

However, AMC offers no legitimate way for me to watch a show that first aired months ago online. Instead, I guess I’m supposed to watch an “encore presentation,” which is TV marketing speak for re-run later this month.

So, now instead of this user watching the first episode of the Walking Dead on AMC’s own website, where they could earn some money showing me ads, and more importantly, maybe make me into a fan of the show such that there will be more people watching and producing higher ratings, I’m rolling my eyes, writing a blog post, and trying to not wander over to one of the dozens of places I know I’ll be able to find episode one.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t really bother trying to pirate video anymore. It is just so much more convenient to use the legitimate sources when they exist. Of course, if you give someone a big enough push they might just keep going. After all, if I find episode 1, chances are I will also find episodes two, three, and four. I might even get so comfortable with getting those shows from somewhere else that I won’t bother ever watching them on AMC at all.

In other words, AMC thinks it will make more money by encouraging people to locate and watch pirated copies of their shows than they would by allowing them to view older episodes online. Good luck with that.

P.S.  “Hey, AMC. Do you think that people who find and download reruns of your hit shows are more or less likely to bother buying the Season 1 DVD when it comes out?” If you make it worth it for people to do the wrong thing, they will.

Hollywood Encouraging Piracy? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The real question in my mind was whether Groupon was worth all of that money that Google was offering in the first place.

How Much Is Groupon Worth?

The company recently filed paperwork to sell up to $950 million of preferred stock in Groupon. (What is preferred stock?) This filing would give Groupon a valuation of $6.4 billion according to VCExperts. That number is on target with the offer Google was making to buy Groupon. In theory, this is confirmation that Groupon is "worth" $6 billion, give or take. However, keep in mind that the $950 million amount is an "up to" number and the actual amount raised may be lower.

The real question is, "Why does Groupon need the money?"

During the negotiations with Google, insiders supposedly said that the company now has annual revenues in the $2 billion range, which was up sharply from earlier estimates of $800 million annually. A company generating that kind of revenue should be turning a healthy profit. Yet, Groupon is raising more money instead. Is that just smart company strategy?

On the one hand, Groupon is currently the "it" company in the venture capital and web media, which means that there are a lot of investors who are very eager to put their money into Groupon at terms that are very favorable to the company. That makes raising more money under these circumstances simply the smart business move for Groupon.

For example, if someone thought your house was so amazing that they would give you a zero percent interest, $1 million mortgage in exchange for a percentage of the sale price when you eventually sold the home (went public), you should take it even if you didn’t need the mortgage.

On the other hand, if Groupon is generating so much revenue, it should be building up piles of cash. Unless, of course, the company is spending so much money to generate that revenue that it isn’t making any real profit at all. In that case, the investors in Groupon are hoping that the company will eventually grow itself into profitability somehow down the line. And, Groupon, itself, needs the new infusion of money in order to keep from going bankrupt or deeply into debt.

That changes the above example. In that case it would be more like if you had a home but could only afford to make payments for a few more months before you ran out of money. In that case, you had better go out and get the biggest zero percent interest mortgage anyone would give you so that you can keep making payments until you figure something else out.

Is Groupon a Good Investment?

Some analysts have suggested that Groupon needs the money for expansion, apparently overseas where this particular business model may or may not be accepted by consumers or business owners. That’s a pretty big gamble and runs the risk of distracting management from developing its current business model into a long-term profitable enterprise.

Others have suggested that Groupon needs even more sales employees to keep things running. This is the scariest of all the prospects. It may be that all of the low hanging fruit has been picked and that there just isn’t enough demand from business or consumers.

As numerous people have noticed, Groupon’s deals are heavily tilted toward certain types of business like massage, sky diving, personal training, and the like. How many of the people who buy those deals are likely to keep buying the same deals? After you’ve taken one intro to skydiving class, how many more will you buy?

If Groupon needs even more sales people to keep it’s model afloat, that isn’t a good sign.

As Techcrunch suggests, this current round of financing may be used to cash out existing investors.

That is a very real possibility. I know that if I had invested $1 million in Groupon (or any company) and that investment would have paid off for $25 million if the Google buyout had gone through, I’d be pressing for a way to cash out at least some of my investment, no matter how well the company was doing. That is just smart investing. Only a fool leaves all their money on the table after making a big profit in a speculative investment.

If this is just an orderly exit for savvy investors, then the new round of financing is just business as usual.

The question is how many of those investors (who get to see the real inside numbers, not just speculation) want out now, and how urgently do they want out?

In other words, do those with skin in the game want to cash out because they don’t see a happy future where Groupon dominates for years in a very lucrative market?

Google executives have suggested that they were buying certain companies because they didn’t have the time to build a similar enterprise. Having been unsuccessful in acquiring Groupon, Google has all the time in the world to build a competitor, as does Microsoft, Apple, and untold other companies.

Groupon executives have said noted that they are still number one despite numerous new competitors who have tried to duplicate what the company is doing. However, none of those competitors has been a deep-pocketed, established technology company or advertising company.

The Groupon model is easy to copy. As Groupon’s management has pointed out, it has already been copied many times by small startups with very little investment. The model is not easy to scale, however, which is why Groupon is still the king and everyone else is a niche player. However, if that is the only moat around Groupon’s business model, the company is in for a very rude surprise when one of the 800 lb. gorillas come to town.

The even bigger threat to Groupon is that its model is easily diluted. In order to work, Groupon’s deals must be "big deals." Businesses can only offer so many big deals and still make a reasonable profit. A merchant who rings up thousands of 50 percent discounts one month may not be able to offer such a deal again for several months, taking a potential customer off of the table, whether the deal gets sold by Groupon or a competitor.

Even worse, becomes the competition between deals. Right now, only certain shoppers know about Groupon. Even fewer know that there are other alternatives. However, as that number grows, people will be looking not just at the Groupon deal, but the deal at other deal of the day sites, whether local or national and choosing between them, which dilutes the "wow factor" that Groupon deals currently enjoy. When the email from Groupon is just another sales email you get every day in your inbox and not a must view, then the company is finished.

Groupon may still get bought out by another tech company for a big amount, or it may be able to make it all the way to an IPO. Groupon is not a sustainable long-term enterprise. If it is sold or taken public fast enough, then it will be a good investment for those who got out in time. If not, then Groupon will eventually shut down or become a shell of its former self. Either way, the clock is ticking.

Groupon Raises More Money is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

HootSuite is a web-based service that you can use to manage multiple Twitter user streams. It also works on several other services as well, although I really only use it for my numerous Twitter accounts.

HootSuite was a free service that allowed users to manage several streams at a time. It allowed a user to setup columns on a dashboard, allowing one to peruse several Twitter feeds from different users at the same time. Then, each individual user could be clicked on an those columns turned into a customizable view of a particular account where one could monitor not only their stream of incoming tweets, but also their sent tweets, mentions, replies, and re-tweets.

The feature of Hootsuite that I used most often was the ability to schedule tweets for a future time. That coupled with being able to manage multiple Twitter user accounts at the same time meant that I could create a useful, consistent Twitter stream for followers in such a way that there were three tweets per day spread over that day’s time, rather than three tweets back to back.

Paring up HootSuite with automatic tweets from WordPress made me a consistent enough presence on Twitter to build up a small but worthwhile group of Twitter followers.

We interrupt this post for a gratuitous link about Citibank reward catalog point redemptions.

(As a freelance writer I not only have to work on paying projects, but I also have to make and receive calls, take occasional meetings, and the like. I don’t have the ability to sit around tweeting all day just to ensure maximum social networking value. I can only imagine that people with more structured jobs and lives have even less ability to do the same.)

Today, when I went to HootSuite, it offered a HootSuite Pro upgrade.

I’ve seen this before. An online service moves from free to a free plus a premium offering so that they can make money without eviscerating their user base, which by and large, exists almost solely because the offering is free. I certainly do not care about Twitter enough to pay for a service to manage it.

Unfortunately, when I clicked on the link to stay free, I was informed that free accounts cannot be used to manage as many "social streams" as I am currently setup to use on HootSuite. We aren’t talking about 50 users or streams or anything, it’s only eight or nine. Nonetheless, the maximum social networks you can manage in the free version is five.

The Pro version costs $5.99 per month, or almost $72 per year. There are mission critical services and products I use that don’t charge that much.

In reality, I don’t use most of what HootSuite offers. I don’t have any "team members" and other than the convenience of being able to schedule tweets for Twitter accounts for multiple websites, I don’t even need HootSuite.

What makes me bummed about the whole thing is that I really like how HootSuite started, grew its features, and upgraded. When there were some users who wished that re-tweeting could be done the old way after an upgrade was released, the company responded quickly with a way to do just that. I like that kind of user focus.

Unfortunately, there is no way I can justify that kind of monthly expense for what I use HootSuite for, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. Chances are that HootSuite has set the bar between free and pro a little too low here and may be killing off a big chunk of its following. The one thing the company may have not taken into account fully when coming up with this new business strategy is the number of other services and applications, which while not exactly the same, do enough of what HootSuite does to be considered comparable by most users.

I’ll be heading over to MakeUseOf.com or LifeHacker.com later today to find out which Twitter management platforms to test out next and be migrating to the winner in the near future.

Good luck HootSuite. I hope you get bought out soon, because I’m not sure what the other long-term viable business strategy is after this move.

HootSuite Pro Release Kicks Off Free Users is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Woot.net offers one “deal” every day. When that deal is sold out, it is all gone and you can’t get anymore. No new deal takes its place until the next day, when there is once again a new deal for the day. Sometimes the deals are amazing, and sometimes the deals are pretty much the same kind of price you would be able to get anywhere if you just looked around a little bit.

One thing that Woot does on a fairly regular basis is offer refurbished or reconditioned products. A refurbished item is one that has gone from being new, to getting back into the manufacturer’s hands where it is fixed or looked over, and then sold again. Since the device technically is not new, it is labeled as refurbished.

Theoretically, a refurbished item has been restore to “like new” condition, but this is an obvious falsehood since no manufacturer offers the full “like new” warranty on their refurbished products. They know as well as you do that a product that had to be fixed is more likely to have other problems than one that was fine right out of the box the first time. So, you get either no warranty at all, or a much shorter one than normal.

Depending upon what you are buying and how likely it is to break, buying refurbished can be a good way to get a great deal by paying much less than a new product costs for one that is likely just as good. On the other hand, some products aren’t very robust in the first place and paying less for one with a virtually useless warranty is not a good idea. Saving money requires only buying the right kinds of things when they are refurbished. The catch is that it is not always easy to tell which is which.

That brings us to the Refurbished iRobot Roomba. Frequent users of Woot like to joke about how often reconditioned Roobmas show up on the website. It seems that the iRobot Roomba 530 Robotic Vacuum with Virtual Wall seems to show up the most often. When refurbished Roombas show up in a Woot-Off, they bring the special multi-deal day auctions to a screeching halt while it takes hours to sell out.

In fact, I would guess that Woot has to hold off the iRobot folks lest their products fill the site several days each week.

Which begs the question, is buying a refurbished cheap irobot roomba a good idea? Or, are refurbished Roombas a scam?

Unfortunately, the answer is that iRobot Roombas are great little carpet sweeper vacuums when they work properly. However, they are incredibly fragile. The problem is that doing what the Roobma does actually requires more expensive hardware, but people won’t pay more for robot vacuums. That means that iRobot has to try and make do with the fastest manufacturing processes and the cheapest parts.

Frankly, the company has done an admirable job in being able to make a robotic vacuum with all of the features people want at a price they are willing to pay. But, in the end, Roombas are very temperamental and prone to breaking both quickly and often. The company stands behind its products with a one-year manufacturer warranty, which is good. However, since they break a lot, the company ends up with TONS of Roombas that it fixes and then has to resell as reconditioned Roombas or refurbished Roombas.

• If you want to see for yourself, check any of the Roomba forums and you’ll see many Roobma problems that are so common they have names. Do a search for roomba circle dance, roomba battery problem, and roobma cliff sensors, for several examples. (Hint: Ignore all results from ehow.com or fixya.com as they are usually worthless.)

• For an even more useful search include either roomba 4xxx or roomba 5xxx or even roomba 3xxx in your search. This is how Roobma owners and techies refer to the specific problems that plague each series of Roomba robotic vacuums. (The xxx is a place holder. Most problems that happen to any of the 4000 series Roombas happens to all of them whether they are Roomba 4100 Red, Roobma 4105 Sage, or Roomba 4210 Discovery.)

• Or check here for a very active Roomba owners forum where you can read for yourself about not only the issues with Roombas and how to troubleshoot roomba vacuums, but also the fixes which often involve one tiny component such as an internal LED, but renders the entire Rooba robot vacuum useless unless fixed.

Refurbished Roombas are sold with only a 90-day warranty. Basically, the company washes its hands of the ones that were broken by getting them working and shipping them back out with a short warranty that ensures they will likely not have to deal with that particular unit again, which is good, since plenty of new ones are headed back into the factory at any time. For consumers however, it is not so good. If there was a weak solder or connection on one part that is fixed, but the other another has not broken YET, it might also have a weak connection and will break soon, although probably after 90 days.

The question is whether or not this is a self-defeating strategy for iRobot and its attempts to build a market in robotic vacuums. While it may be true that there is no wiggle room in increasing the costs associated with making Roombas, reselling units that are more likely to have trouble than brand new units could very well be creating a population of Roomba owners who will

1. Never buy another Roomba again because the refurbished one they bought broke so quickly
2. Will recommend to friends and neighbors not to buy Roombas because they break too easily
3. Will be willing to buy a robot vacuum from a competitor when technology allows better, longer-lasting, roomba-type vacuums to be built for lower costs
4. And, of course, will tell friends to buy the other brand because it doesn’t break right away like Roombas do

As corporate strategies go, the one iRobot seems to be pursuing is one destined to fail. There are only so many consumers willing to try a robotic vacuum in the first place. Each one of them that is alienated by a faulty refurbished Roomba reduces that pool by one more. While Roomba is the only game in town today, people tend to have long memories of being burned, especially on higher priced items like the iRobot Roombas. That means that when they are easier to develop and sell than they are now, there are going to be plenty of waiting customers for new competitors.

Although it might cost Roomba more on the bottom line in the short-term, the company would be better served for the long-term by offering a full one-year warranty on its refurbished Roombas, just like it does on new ones. Doing so might even allow for them to be sold a higher price than they are now. More importantly, doing so would stop the creation of an army of Roobma haters who think that Roobmas are junk and buying one is just a scam. Perhaps, most useful of all, as refurbished Roombas came back in for service the company could learn what it is that goes wrong most often the second time around and perhaps preemptively “fix” the potential problems on every refurbished Roomba before it goes out the door, resulting in fewer warranty service requests on refurbished Roombas, thus negating the additional expense of servicing them for a longer time.

Of course, that only works if the company is not fully aware that all Roombas are just ticking time-bombs that the company needs to ship and get off of the service life-cycle as quickly as possible to avoid bankruptcy. In which case, there really is no valid strategy, other than to hope that people never wise up.

The author has owned two Roomba vacuums, a Roomba 4100 Red, which worked perfectly for almost three years before the battery died, and a refurbished Roomba 530 which developed the common Roobma problem where when turned on it keeps trying to backup because it thinks its bump sensor has been activated. The author still owns both Roomba, although both gather dust in the corner of the basement because replacing the Roomba Red battery is too expensive, and fixing the 530 Roomba requires near complete disassembly or paying as much as the purchase price to have it fixed. When asked, the author tells people, “When they work, they are pretty great, but they seem to break very easily, so it might not last very long.”

I’ve never seen anyone buy one after I tell them that, and I am not an iRobot Roomba hater. I just can’t justify buying a new one until I start hearing that they are much more reliable.

Are Refurbished Roombas A Good Deal Or A Scam? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC