The article written by German Lyutajev is about current trends in Ukrainian graphic design.

Ukraine. Just Unforgettable

Ukrainian design now is in a rather unstable state and evokes mixed judgments. Many specialists suppose that one of the problems of the professional Ukrainian design is a brake between “old” and “new” specialists. While new techniques and instruments have being come into service, most young people have to master themselves because instructors of the “old guard” are not always familiar with these techniques. In reference to quality design, the competition level there is quite low, a lack of understanding of design significance being terrific.

So if you have an interest in the graphic design you are welcome to read full article

The battle between Scoopon and Groupon over groupon.com.au domain and related trademark seems to be over. It’s reported in SMH  that the parties reached settlement and US group buying giant got domain and TM for undisclosed compensation.

Industry experts believe that that the deal value is at least not less than $289K (the sum, which Scoopon founders brothers Hezi and Gabby Liebovich asked).

Despite of the deal groupon.com.au domain still leads nowhere at this moment. It’s be interesting to see how fast Groupon will change branding of it’s Aussie venture currently called StarDeals to Groupon.

Author of one of most popular web servers for high load websites, nginx, Igor Sysoev wrote yesterday at his website that he is creating a company to foster nginx development.

According last Netcraft survey nginx is used for over 7% of million busiest sites

Up to date Igor Sysoev has been working in big Russian Internet company Rambler.Ru and nginx was developed as an open-source project while used for Rambler as well.

It’s promised in Ihor’s post that new company will keep nginx open-source.

For now it is unclear will Sysoev combine this new business with employment in Rambler and what will be a revenue model for new company.

Today probably most popular resource for small business owners in Australia, Flying Solo published interview with Altima Interactive Principal Alex Levashov.

Alex told about Altima’s approach to business, proudest moments in the life, business secrets and more. Link to the interview: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/spotlight/alex-levashov-altima-interactive

Recent research conducted by Professor Utpal M. Dholakia from Rice University contains facts that are not very pleasant form currently booming group buying industry:

• just a bit more than half (55.5%) of businesses recorded a profit after group buying promotion, more than quarter (26.5%)  made losses and the rest broke even
• less than half of businesses that ran group buying promotion are going to do it in the future;
• almost 3/4 of merchants have no loyalty to group deal provider and ready to switch

So the conclusion that the researchers made is not very positive for group buying industry especially for websites that provide deals: the little loyalty, low rate of interest to repeat purchase from merchants and increasing competition will lead to the erosion of the current healthy margin and make the life of group deals providers harder.

The research collected data from 324 US businesses operating in 23 markets that used group buying promotion in 2009-2011.

(more…)

According to official press-release published today at eBay web site, auction giant acquired rest of share in Magento Inc, the creator of Magento e-commerce – one of the most popular open source e-commerce platforms. Last year eBay already bought 49% stake in Magento and today announced the full ownership purchase.

According press-release, Magento will be used to build new product from eBay, X-commerce:

X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open commerce platform group, is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes

It’s interesting to track how the situation will develop and what happen with Magento open-source solution. It would be pity if eBay decides to shut it down.

As Techcrunch reported US group buying industry leader Groupon filed SEC registration statement (S-1 form). Groupon plans to attract $750M of capital . Unfortunately from the article and SEC filing it is not clear what number of shares and the percentage of ownership will be offered, but rumored valuation (according SmartCompany and Wall Street Journal) is around $20-25 billion.

There are some interesting financial data about the company performance till 1st quarter (ended March 31) of 2011. I put the most important numbers in the table below (all numbers are in thousands):

(more…)

As ITwire reported, Groupon Australia (trades as StarDeals.com.au) declared last week that just in few months after launch Stardeals.com.au web site managed to acquire more web traffic than any competing web sites (biggest competitors are reportedly Scoopon, Spreets, Cudo, JumpOnIt/LivingSocial). Representative of US based pioneer of group purchases industry refers to Hitwise traffic statistic.

However competitors, namely Cudo, doubt that this statistic reflects the reality and Hitwise data has several major flaws: limited coverage (no Telstra and Optus for example), traffic is measured at providers (not users) so it is easier to use bots and tricky ads to inflate the statistic.

In my personal opinion these doubts look reasonable.

Professor Utpal M. Dholakia, Rice University, the guy who made probably the first academic study about group buying promotion published a new paper – “A STARTUP’S EXPERIENCE WITH RUNNING A GROUPON PROMOTION”. He did this job with Gur Tsabar from Gourmet Prep Meals (GMT), a start-up that participated in the study.

GMT is a start-up business from Texas that sells ready-to-cook food sets online. After couple months of operation GMT launched Groupon promotion and share with researchers all the data from their accounting system to analyze the effect of group buying promotion to GMT business.

Key fundings:

1. Groupon promotion definitely boosted the revenue;
2. The overall profit was not affected significantly before the end of promotion, taking in account coupons that were not used the effects is positive;
3. The margin dropped during the promotion;
4. Peak loads with most active redemption of coupons were the start and the end of promotion time, heavier at the end, just before coupons expired;
5. Group buying customers are especially useful for start-ups, since help to test the business model and provide valuable real feedback

Full report is available at Dr. Holakia’s page: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/

SmartCompany reported today that Catch of the Day (a venture of Leibovich brothers which Scoopon is a part of) received $80 million investment from James Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings, Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat and American hedge fund Tiger Global. The Catch of the Day founders will keep controlling stake, but Tiger’s Lee Fixel and Seek’s Jason Lenga will join the board.

Scoopon is the last from three leading group buying web sites in Australia that was acquired or got external funding. Two others are Spreets (now part of Yahoo!7 and JumpOnIt – was purchased by LivingSocial).