Welcome to the 27th episode of “The Mediatwits,” the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift’s Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. This week we look deeper at the Groupon IPO, which briefly valued the daily deals startup at nearly $20 billion. Our special guests are Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget, as well as Yipit Data analyst Unaiz Kabani, both of whom have done a lot of thinking (and writing) about Groupon lately. In fact, Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson penned a 9,000 word epic insider story on Groupon that was turned into an e-book.
Plus, we look at the recent announcement of a Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble, an android tablet that will take on the Kindle Fire head-to-head, and provide more competition for the leading tablet, the Apple iPad. The Nook Tablet costs a bit more than Fire but is more open, letting people use more services outside the Amazon ecosystem. Will it be enough to drive sales in the Christmas shopping season, or will the Fire and iPad continue to dominate?
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio’s Music Alley.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
Intro
1:30: Rafat not a big fan of daily deals
2:45: Novelty wearing off for all the daily deals
4:30: Rundown of topics for show
Groupon IPO and tech startups
5:20: Details on Groupon IPO
6:20: Special guests Henry Blodget and Unaiz Kabani
8:30: Blodget congratulates company but wouldn’t buy stock at its high price
10:40: Kabani: Google, Amazon jumping into daily deals
15:10: Rafat on growing amount of travel deals
17:20: Nicholas Carlson’s insider account of Groupon’s rise
19:41: Blodget: dot-com bubble in ’90s was orders of magnitude bigger than now
22:00: Blodget: problem with Zynga is it hasn’t grown recently
Nook Tablet takes on Kindle Fire
22:40: Differences between Nook and Kindle
24:20: Competition is good for tablet devices
26:10: Consumers don’t care about open vs. closed
More Reading
INSIDE GROUPON: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company at Business Insider
Groupon travels ‘tortured’ road to Nasdaq at Reuters
The dreary details of Groupon’s future at Reuters’ MediaFile
Enjoy The Ride, Groupon Investors, I’m Outta Here!! at Business Insider
Congratulations, Groupon at Business Insider
HERE’S WHAT GROUPON IS NOT TELLING INVESTORS: Its Core Business Is Shrinking… at Business Insider
After Groupon, IPO Pipeline Is Thin at WSJ
Nook Tablet: ‘Hands Off’ First Impressions at Wired
Barnes & Noble unveils Nook Tablet at $249 as Kindle Fire rival at LA Times
Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet Battle for App Supremacy at PC World
Weekly Poll
Don’t forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about what you think about daily deals:
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+