2012 100 - Networld Media Group

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GROUPON/LIVINGSOCIAL/ETC.
The exploding daily deal industry pioneered by Groupon has spawned,
by some estimates, more than 700 copycats. And who can blame them?
Barely three years after its founding, Groupon raised more than $700
million in an initial public offering, generating 30 percent more than
the company originally sought, then saw its value balloon to more
than $16 billion on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq. LivingSocial
is Groupon’s most logical competitor. Backed with hundreds of
millions of dollars in funding, primarily from Amazon (for which it
provides the deals for AmazonLocal), the 2-year-old deal-maker says
it expects to generate revenues of $1 billion in 2012.
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YELP
San Francisco-based user review website
Yelp filed to raise as much as $100
million in a 2012 initial public offering,
seeking to become the latest unprofitable
Internet company to go public.
Co-founded by former PayPal Inc. executive
Jeremy Stoppelman in 2004, the
website features more than 22 million
reviews created by its 61.1 million
users. “Investors are open to taking bets
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GAMIFICATION OF RETAIL
Boosted by the success of Facebook-supported games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars,
gamification is the latest innovation retailers are banking on to improve customer engagement,
build loyalty, strengthen their brand, and incentivize employees and business
partners for better productivity. Gamification is defined as the process of integrating
game thinking and game mechanics into marketing activities to solve problems and engage
users. According to Gabe Zichermann, CEO of Gamification Company, the key
to gamification’s success is drugs — “One important drug — dopamine,” he explains.
“It’s what we secrete in response to challenge and achievement. It is part of the core
group of behaviors that makes gamification and games powerful in changing influence
and behavior.” Data released by M2 Research set the current worth of the gamification
market at $100 million, with a projected value of nearly $2.8 billion by 2016. Gamification
vendors predict 197 percent growth through 2012, representing an increase of 42
percent over 2011.
on companies that are generating
losses,” says Tom Taulli, founder of
IPOByte.com and author of “Investing
in IPOs.” “No one knows how long this
window is going to last, so I think Yelp
is going to get out as fast as possible.”
Yelp faces competition from Google,
Facebook and Yahoo!, all of which sell
online ads to local businesses. The
wrinkle here is that Yelp relies on these
rivals to send visitors to its site. Google
alone accounted for more than half of
Yelp’s traffic in the first nine months of
2011. The search engine’s dual role as
both competitor and ally may put Yelp
in a difficult position in the future, according
to Taulli. “Their main source
of customers is coming from their
competitor.”
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