Alert Blog Reviews

The move to trying to save more money online should come as no surprise to anyone for all the obvious reasons. With those reasons being so obvious we won’t belabor the point here (btw, for those wondering, the economy still kinda sucks). What is happening though, is the shift from the printed coupon to the online coupon is very real and is creating the same commotion in the heated online v. offline world as the news debate is. After all, many papers are clinging to the fact that their Sunday circulations remain OK because of the perceived savings offered by the coupons. NCH Marketing Services, a subsidiary of Valassis Communications is reporting an increase of 30% use in traditional coupons with an additional $600 million in savings by consumers. Unfortunately, we often measure just how hot an industry is by how many lawsuits it generates. Yahoo Finance reports : This past summer, Valassis won a $300 million verdict against News America Marketing (NAM), a subsidiary of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp. It accused the coupon powerhouse of trying to monopolize supermarket advertising. In July, following the verdict in Michigan’s Wayne County Circuit Court, NAM president Chris Mixson said the decision “rewards a company that turned to litigation as its business strategy rather than compete.” He said evidence barred by the court would have made a case that Valassis tried “to induce collusion when it announced its new pricing policy in a public investor call.” So as with most things, the offline world is busy navel-gazing in court while the online business is preparing to move in take control. While those two titans of paper coupons duke it out, another battleground is emerging. Although a study by Experian Marketing Services, a global information services company, assessed that 70% of households still clip coupons from newspapers, beleaguered print media companies are starting to lose their once tight grip on the market to online competitors. NCH says online coupon distribution rose 41% during the first 9 months of 2009 and RedPlum.com saw coupon prints from the site jump 51% so far this year. At year-end 2008, online coupons represented 4.8% of all coupons redeemed in the U.S., compared to 6.3% by mid-year 2009. I am still amazed at how slow and plodding the offline world is in most sectors when it comes to seeing the competitive threat that online services is. Hey, all of you folks in the printed coupon business here’s your wake up call. Google purchased AdMob to get into this business. And to prove they are serious Google has begun issuing 100,000 window stickers to businesses in more than 9,000 cities and towns. Each window decal has a unique bar code that can be scanned with the camera feature of most mobile devices. The code will then immediately load the browser with information about the business and allow access to related coupons and offers. You don’t need a printed coupon for that to work.

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Coupons Fast Becoming Online Faves

Google went a long way toward answering the naysayers of their Google Apps offering. How you ask? By winning a contract to provide e-mail and other Internet services to the City of Los Angeles. Nice get. While winning a contract is just the first step in proving that Google is a serious threat to the stronghold of Microsoft’s software business, it’s a pretty big step. This kind of deal will be felt up and down the left coast (that’s what we East Coast folks refer to the West Coast as). Starting in the great Northwest there will be some serious Steve Ballmer hand-wringing and maybe another Bobby Knight-like chair throwing moment or two. In NoCal (the Google Plex in Mountain View in particular) there may be some Tiger Woods-like fist pumps of victory. While in SoCal it’s likely that no one outside the people who made the decision will know or care because it’s not directly about them. Different strokes for different folks, right? Yahoo Finance tells us that while this is a victory for sure there are the typical concerns that still need to be overcome and there’s nothing like a financial penalty to overcome those issues. The Council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal with contractor Computer Sciences Corp. to replace many city computer systems with the so-called Google Apps services. An amendment added shortly before the vote makes the contract contingent on Computer Science agreeing to pay a preset penalty if a security breach occurs. The contractor’s project manager David Barber said he believed such an agreement would be reached. The city’s police officers’ union and privacy advocates had raised security concerns over the Google contract because it places data online rather than on individual computers under the city’s direct control. I bet dollars to donuts (there was a police officer reference after all) that Microsoft is assigning the task to someone to watch this thing like a hawk and to know just when and to what degree a security breach occurs if at all. This particular battle could be looked back on as a game changing moment as there is an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ theme. The big loser? Novell. The move will also end the city’s 7-year contract to use Novell Inc.’s GroupWise e-mail and record-keeping software, which city workers have complained is slow and crash-prone. Novell senior vice president said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free. That kind of ‘excuse based selling’ is not recommended and does not fly in today’s business world does it? My question is why weren’t they upgraded by Novell so they could at least have a shot at keeping the business? Silly me for asking such an obvious question, right? Meanwhile back at the Plex all is good with the world. “In our view, this can be a watershed agreement,” said Dave Girouard, president of the Google division that provides business services. “There’s a lot of cities and counties around the state and around the nation who were watching this.” Translation? If you are a Google rep and you are talking to any of the big government agencies you better set an appointment now to make it happen in a local government near you. So Google continues to expand far beyond the world of search. I’m not surprised are you?

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Google Wins Over the City of Angels