"In short: nothing to see here, move along"

Consumers have a legitimate interest in the behind-the-scenes contracts used by companies. We want to know what they're up to. For example, Microsoft forcing OEMs not to supply any machines with Linux -- it's a contract between two companies, but consumers had a legitimate interest in knowing about it.

Gotta take that a step further...
iP[[ad/od]/hone]s

Of course a Kiwi can fly!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs

"Some frustrated users meted out one-star ratings for the album as their way of protesting Amazon's slow service"

Fortunately those people are morons so we can disregard their silly protest. Amazon should cancel those one-star ratings, but then they'd be accused of censorship, influencing the rating, etc. The whole thing sounds a bit silly to me.

lol

Similar to the trend list thing, here's another case of apparent censorship under fear. A newspaper identified one of the footballers, and that issue of the paper is missing from the online newsagent PressDisplay, even though PressDisplay is based in Canada, supposedly outside the reach of UK courts.

http://www.meejahor.com/2011/05/22/paper-identifies-injunction-footballer-scares-online-newsagent/

Twitter now appears to be censoring its trend list, in the UK at least, to avoid drawing attention to a particular footballer who is being talked about a lot.

http://www.meejahor.com/2011/05/21/twitter-censors-trend-list-due-to-super-injunction/

"Where do people go when they give up Amazon?"

A bookshop?

Tell you what Disney, when your executives are ready to put their lives on the line to kill terrorists, then you can have a trademark for whatever you call your elite unit. Unti then, just stick to making cartoons and mind your own business.

I'm afraid my humble blog has again yielded to the footfall of a thousand stampeding slashdotters. One of these days I really should move to a dedicated server, but for now here is the text of the article...

Beware of the Groupon piranhas eating you alive!

This is a cautionary tale for anyone who may think of offering a deal through Groupon, the group-buying site that promises great deals for customers and great exposure for businesses.

The idea is that, as a business, you offer a special deal on the Groupon web site. For example a restaurant may offer a meal-for-two worth £200 for the bargain price of £80. Groupon takes a 50% cut so the restaurant gets £40 which should be enough to cover the actual cost of the food, plus they've had some good exposure and, hopefully, the few hundred people who bought the deal will go back another day and pay full price. Maybe they'll even become regular customers.

But look at what happened to one independent photographer in Somerset:

He offered a £200 portrait package for £29, which was bought by 301 people.

Let's break that down...

Firstly the photographer will only get £14.50 because Groupon takes half. And if the client pays by credit card, which they probably will, then the photographer has to pay the credit card fee, so he's only getting around £12.

Each shoot lasts one hour, but it can be anywhere the client chooses within 15 miles of Bristol city centre. So let's suppose the total time for travel is half an hour each way, plus 20 minutes to set-up lighting and background and 10 minutes to tear it all down at the end. Already he's up to 2.5 hours so he's charging £4.80 per hour, not taking fuel costs in to account.

"Every photo taken will be put on CD or DVD in high resolution" -- this is fairly trivial, let's say 15 minutes work and £1 for the disc and case. He's now getting the equivalent of £4 per hour.

But the deal gets better! "20 of the images will be professionally edited and air brushed" -- now I assume this is nothing more than a bit of spot removal and some minor tweaks, because there's no way you can do a full retouching job as part of a £29 package, and there's certainly no way you can do 20 of them. So we'll estimate a super-speedy 5 minutes per picture and imagine that he somehow gets the whole lot done in 2 hours. He's now on £2.32 per hour.

Anything else included? Yes! You get "one 12x10 framed print, two 10x8 prints, two 8x6 prints, two 5x4 prints, two 4x3 prints, and two 3x2 prints" -- a total of 11 prints, with the largest one framed. I'd estimate the absolute rock-bottom price for producing those prints will be £8 plus another £5 for the frame if he's buying in bulk. That's £13. That's more than he's getting from each client, and he's got 301 clients to make his way through.

Even if this photographer is doing each job to a bare minimum standard, he has committed himself to nearly a year's work for no money. If that doesn't sound like good business sense to you then be very careful if you decide to offer a deal through Groupon or any similar site. What may at first seem like success could very easily put you out of business.