Since the founding of Facebook and Twitter; pundits, VC’s and entrepreneurs have been predicting the second tidal wave innovation to transform the e-commerce business as we had known it. “Social Commerce” was supposed to be the biggest thing since Jeff Bezos turned the web from a replacement for brochures & collaterals into a virtual store […]

Below is an editorial I wrote for MediaPost a few weeks back.  It was published today. It may be premature to talk about the “second act” of a company that just went public a few weeks ago and is the “fastest growing company in history.” But the data supports the theory that Groupon’s core local

Mobile Payment is quickly becoming as useless of a term as Cloud Computing. Companies across a wide spectrum of use cases and industries are quickly re-positioning themselves as a player in “mobile payments” in order to (re)capture some pixie dust. What exactly is mobile payments? Is it payment using a phone? Is it payments without

I did a lot of complaining last week on the hurdles of selling products and services to SMB’s. Typically, I hate people who spent most of their days trying to tell entrepreneurs why their business won’t work (“cause I’m so smart”) rather than working with entrepreneur on calibrating and sometime overhauling their strategies (“honest but

We are proud to announce our partnership with the team at Dreamhost. Together, we strive make it easier, faster; and dare we say it, cheaper to turn your ideas into reality. DreamHost, a global full-service web hosting company, has today announced its partnership with Los Angeles-based start-up accelerator, MuckerLab.  DreamHost will serve as the official

By my count, around 100 startups focused on local were launched between Q2 and Q3 of 2011. there are mobile apps, deals/offers companies, social relationship management dashboards, ad networks, merchant acquiring/ processing solutions and more. (Although the slow down in the last 30-60 days has been seriously alarming). By 2013, I doubt no more than

It was 1999, I was 23. If someone asked, I usually lied and claimed to be 25. 25 seemed so much wiser and smarter not only because it seemed like a nice round number, but that I imagined that in 2 years, I would definitely become much wiser and smarter. Unfortunately, BuildPoint didn’t have the

One of the most common questions I get from entrepreneurs is “how baked does my business model or monetization strategy have to be to 1. get into an incubator 2. raise seed money from VC’s or angels?” Of course, it is really hard to give a specific answer to a generic question (“it depends” is