Today, Groupon will meet by conference call with its board of directors to decide its fate regarding the rumored $5 billion-plus acquisition by Google, according to The Wall St. Journal. But the potential acquisition hasn’t slowed the company down one bit – it has just expanded into four more countries in Asia thanks to the purchase of three websites in the region: uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost, which serves Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan.

In addition, Groupon announced, by way of company blog post, what it plans to launch next – features called “Groupon Stores” and the “Deal Feed.”

Why Groupon?

The biggest news surrounding Groupon comes from the now numerous reports of its impending acquisition by Internet search giant Google. With the price point for the purchase rumored at $5 billion or more, this would be Google’s largest acquisition to date. (In 2007, Google paid $3.1 billion for online ad provider DoubleClick, its largest acquisition so far).

Why Google’s interest in bargain shoppers’ favorite site? Because Groupon practically reinvented local advertising. Instead of just offering coupons or sales, advertisers don’t have to pay for marketing until customers arrive at their retail establishments, Groupon in hand. Details of how this, and similar systems work, were explored more thoroughly in Wired’s latest article on “The Coupon Rebellion.”

“

What we buy at Groupon… is the right to buy all that stuff at a huge discount, so long as we all act fast,” wrote Wired’s Matt Schwartz. “In other words, what Groupon sells (as its clever name indicates) is coupons, but with a social twist… Groupon makes money by turning its audience into bargain junkies. Every day, customers check their email or the Groupon website to find out about the daily deal in their city.”

He continues, “what Groupon represents is something far bigger. It’s the mainstreaming of a new current in American consumerism, an attitude born of the Internet’s DIY ethos and nurtured by the hard economic times. One might call it retail hacking: the reconception of shopping as not just a full-time job but a contact sport, a scrum in which consumers increasingly refuse to buy on the terms dictated to them.”

Simply put: Groupon was a genius idea, at precisely the right time.

New Features

Given all the hubbub surrounding the company, it was almost surprising to see it casually introduce upcoming features by way of a company blog post yesterday. Aren’t they a little busy with other things over there?

Groupon says that it will soon launch something called “Groupon Stores,” which allow businesses to create and launch deals whenever they want. Merchants will be able to setup permanent and free e-commerce presences on Groupon and submit deals for promotion to Groupon subscribers through email and the new Deal Feed (see below).

The Deal Feed lets Groupon users track all these deals, in a stream-like interface where you follow merchants and the deals they post. In the future, Groupon will add Facebook integration to this feed, so you can receive updates on what your friends are doing, where they shopped and more. (This may explain why Groupon’s Facebook app is demanding access to your check-ins, we figure).

For all the hype surrounding Groupon as of late, it’s worth noting that not all merchants have been happy with the service. In September, Groupon acknowledged there were some complaints via a blog post entitled “Too Much of a Good Thing?” In the post, the company reminded readers that most businesses aren’t burned by Groupon sending them too many customers – that’s usually a good thing.

Update: Shortly after publishing, news that Groupon has acquired San Mateo-based Ludic Labs, the local marketing services startup behind offerfoundry.com and diddit.com, is being reported by TechCrunch.

Applications are open now for Amazon Web Service’s Startup Challenge. This is the fourth year that AWS has run the competition, designed to help recognize startups that are using (or planning to use) any of the paid Amazon Web Services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, or Amazon Mechanical Turk. Prizes include up to $100,000 in cash and credits.

Startups that have yet to generate more than $10 million USD in gross annual revenue or outside funding are eligible to enter. Startups must be located in one of the 22 eligble countries across America, Asia, and Europe. And AWS will recognize 5 regional semi-finalists from each of the 3 regions, 6 finalists, and then select one global grand prize winner.

The global winner receives $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. The 6 global finalists will receive $10,000 in AWS credits. 15 regional semi-finalists – 5 in each of the 3 regions: Americas, Asia and Europe – will receive $2,500 in AWS credits. In addition, all eligible entrants that complete the application form will receive $25 in AWS credits.

Applicants will be judged on the following criteria:

• implementation and integration of Amazon Web Services
• originality and creativity of the business
• likelihood of long-term success and scalability
• effectiveness in addressing a need in the marketplace

Past grand prize winners include GoodData (2009), Yieldex (2008), and Ooyala (2007).

Deadline for entry is October 31.

Never underestimate the importance of having a good story when pitching your startup to potential investors, clients, partners, and journalists. As Seth Godin writes in his 2005 bestseller All Marketers Are Liars, “Either you’re going to tell stories that spread or you’re going to become irrelevant.” Godin’s book addresses a shift in marketing – away from simply presenting factual information and towards telling great stories. As Godin suggests, these stories make us want to believe – in a product, in an idea, in a company.

As you craft a story for your startup – whether it’s to be used in marketing, in a pitch to investors, or in conversation with friends and family – here are some things to keep in mind.

Your story should be short. Your story doesn’t need to start at the birth of your idea and move through every detail of your startup’s history – from inception to launch. . Crystallize the most interesting part so that your story is succinct.

Your story should be easy to tell. Avoid stories that have convoluted plot twists, intricate details, numerous characters, epic history — you aren’t relating War and Peace here. Avoid a story in which you’re likely to stumble over names and details.

Your story should be memorable. You want to have a story for your startup that is compelling as people listen, of course. But you also want to tell a story that people will remember. You want your audience to walk away with some nugget of information about you, and while facts, figures, statistics can be interesting, they are sometimes more difficult to recall (or recall accurately) than the gist of a story.

Your story should make an argument. Your story should help make your case with your audience, whether it’s an argument for the great opportunity it’ll be for investors, or an argument for the strengths of your company, or for the need for your product or service. My academic background here – and I do apologize – compels me to add Aristotle’s classifications of rhetoric. According to Aristotle, there are three modes of persuasion: ethos – making an appeal to your credibility, logos – making an appeal to reason, and pathos – making an appeal to emotion. Consider your audience as you weigh how best to make your argument.

Your story should be strategic. Think about what you want to communicate to your audience, and craft a story that will help you do that. Do you want to highlight your vision? Your background? How your product was created? How has it helped meet a customer’s needs?

Your story should be relevant. This seems obvious, perhaps, but don’t let the pressure to tell an entertaining anecdote sidetrack the actual purpose of your presentation.

How to Tell a Good Story

Ira Glass, whose radio show This American Life is one of the best examples of compelling storytelling, offers this advice: a good story has the momentum to keep your listeners interested. But is also contains some reflection: what it means, why it’s important.

You startup should have a good story. Try telling one. If it doesn’t work, tell a different one. And if your story does work – if people “buy it” – make sure your startup lives up to it.

The Xbox 360‘s new motion gaming peripheral will be called “Microsoft Kinect,” replacing “Project Natal,” the old development name, USA Today reports. There are also some new details about the games that will be available for the device.

As we reported earlier today, one of the games will be a white water rafting simulation. It turns out that game (River Rush) will actually be part of a suite of games called Kinect Adventures. Another suite titled Kinect Sports will take on — yep, you guessed it — Nintendo’s Wii Sports. That package will include bowling, boxing, track and field, volleyball, table tennis and soccer/football.

A separate game called Joyride will be a bit like Nintendo’s Mario Kart or Sony’s ModNation Racers, but you’ll control your car by holding an imaginary steering wheel that you’ll push forward or pull away to control the throttle. No casual gaming lineup would be complete without pets, so Microsoft will also launch a game called Kinectimals, in which you’ll be able to play with or train 20 kinds of cats using motion controls.

Finally, MTV Games is working on a dance competition title called Dance Central, and franchise games featuring characters and settings from Disney and Star Wars movies are set for launch as well.

Stay tuned for pricing and exact release date — both will probably be revealed this week at the E3 games conference in Los Angeles.

As a side note, we’ll mention that an Italian video ad featuring the Kinect brand also mentions a new, slimmer version of the Xbox 360 console itself. That hasn’t been announced officially, but it seems likely since the leaked ad called the Kinect name too.

[via Kotaku]

In this short analysis, we take a snapshot of a handful of key American technology leaders and what they stand to gain from virtualization. We believe that this trend is becoming a building block for dynamic infrastructure deployments for the enterprise and wanted to check in with some of our favorite technology brands to see what they are doing to grow the space.

Instead of looking at the virtualization software vendors themselves, we’ll look at what drives the current virtualization momentum of companies like Intel, Cisco, and IBM that are already entrenched in the data center .

Investors in VMware

Several companies have vested interest in the outcome of virtualization through their direct investment in VMware and involvement with the VMware board of directors. We’ll cover them first.

Intel seems to be gaining a lot on all sides of the virtualization trend. The Intel architecture is being relied on by Macs that run Windows and Windows hosts that run Hyper-V. It’s also dominant in the virtualization options being deployed en mass including VMware, XENServer and KVM, which is shipped with many Linux distributions today. The processor is finally free to flex its muscle, and it is clear that its fluent in many languages and customs. Intel is investing in core technology to increase the ability for virtualization to be deployed in high reliability settings.

Cisco Systems is positioned as a dominant networking provider in the core of many data centers and in telcos around the world. Optimizing networks and network management around deployment of virtual hosts is a clear benefit to Cisco.

Who Else?

Cisco may be in a position to drive even more power into the network with the ability to further streamline the connections between data, processing, applications and network. In a world where a company can spin up new hosts at a whim, it is clear that network management and configuration is key to success. Cisco maintains a virtualization blog to share its progress in bringing this technology to networks.

EMC is clearly tied to the history of server virtualization with the purchase and subsequent spinout of VMware. Optimizing the data storage fabric to be ready to acknowledge and server virtualized data centers is critical for the management and concurrency of data across systems. Promoting virtualization is intrinsically tied to data resources and an ability to connect the two together seamlessly.

EMC has a set of products designed to help organizations manage and configure their virtual environments. Cisco, EMC and VMware have put together an enterprise cloud destination that shares information on the momentum of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, called PrivateCloud.

Industry Leaders Who Benefit From Virtualization

IBM with its massive investments in application servers, blade computing, open systems and Linux seems to be an obvious choice to benefit from this trend. IBM seems serious about helping enterprises focus their efforts on efficient and cost-effective data centers, and is positioned to benefit from its position in key technology trends that ride along side this movement. IBM shares information and white papers on their capabilities to lead the enterprise charge towards virtualization.

HP is benefiting from its dominant position in delivering hosts into the enterprise and its cozy relationship with both Microsoft and increasing relationships with Linux distributions. HP has recently announced its ambition to win network business from Cisco and is in a position to deliver turnkey systems for deploying applications. HP is leveraging its Proliant line of servers as a way to offer companies VMware enabled architecture that will save time and money. This can a huge win for companies who rely on HP today and want to jump into virtualization with a partner at their side.

‘Mac Hardware: Best Place to Run Windows’

Apple has been dipping its toe into the virtualziation game too by supporting VMware Fusion and Parallels in order to run both Mac OSX and Windows on Apple hardware. One of our favorite trends in computing is hearing users use the phrase, “Mac hardware: Best place to run Windows”. On a sidenote, Apple is also doing some interesting work in another area of computer core optimization with its release of Grand Central Dispatch in Snow Leopard. It’s designed to create high-performing systems for processing graphics and other computing functions by joining the massive power of the GPU to the CPU and optimizing the computing power of the OS based on the number of cores enabled in the hardware.

Microsoft is involved in both sides of the virtualization trend; on their site they ask, “How far will you take virtual?” One big opportunity for Microsoft has been booking more instances of Windows Server running on the same machine, whether under VMware or under Microsoft Hyper-V. More licenses sold equals more profit and happy customers. However, considering Microsoft’s strategic position as the dominant layer sitting on top of the hardware, the company is also working hard with both software and server virtualization to prove that it has a strong case to be a strong contender to VMware and other solutions in the market. Virtualization is making Microsoft stronger as a competitor and rippling across Microsoft’s approach to the enterprise.

In a surprisingly short time, all of these key technology leaders have embraced their offerings for a virtualized world. Through products, alliances and technology we will see even more support from them in the future.

In future posts, we’ll take a look at how these companies use the technology in their own operations. Also, we’ll be looking at other companies that will benefit from virtualization, including small innovators and dominant global brands such as Hitachi, Sony and Samsung.

Tell us what you think. Which companies are going to be the big winners in the virtualized computing world? Are there pieces that be overlooked by these giants?

Photo credit: miguelvieira

First Paris Metro, then Yelp, now London Buses. The newest is even selling database layers through in-app purchases.

It has been widely reported that the API required to display Augmented Reality (AR) layers of data on top of the camera view of a non-jailbroken iPhone 3Gs would not be publicly exposed until the launch of the next version of the iPhone Operating System, expected this Fall. Many developers are patiently waiting, but some have now found a way around the restriction. We just received word of the 3rd AR-enabled app hitting the iTunes store.

Earlier this week we reported on Paris Metro Subway as being apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then, this afternoon Robert Scoble discovered that the new Yelp app includes an AR easter egg that any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Now we’ve received an email from Presselite, the same company that made Paris Metro Subway, letting us know that its London Bus app has been updated to include AR overlays and is also live in the App Store.

The London Bus app is even selling data sets through in-app purchases. From its iTunes description:

It is now possible to add new Point of Interest (POI) databases to London Bus application via in-app purchase. These options allow you to activate Food & Drink POI, Leisure POI, Attractions POI and Accommodation POI all over the UK.

This AR economy is moving faster than we expected.

All three of these were existing established apps that received AR capabilities in an update, not dedicated AR apps seeking admission for the first time. We’ve been unable to determine how this was achieved technically (Presselite of course won’t say), but rumor has it that the apps may be leveraging a third-party code base called ARToolkit (or iPhoneARToolkit). Others point to software called ChromelessImagePickerController.

Can Apple now fairly deny other apps that seek to bring AR to the iPhone? We can’t imagine that they would shut down Yelp’s wildly successful app.

Presumably many developers will continue to wait, hoping that the software they’ve already built will be enabled as soon as next month. Others will probably try to get their apps in ahead of the official announcement of AR support from Apple. That’s got to take some wind out of the sails of those companies that have been waiting patiently.

They may only be the beginning and they may not be high-profile or officially supported by Apple yet, but it couldn’t be clearer: Augmented Reality apps have come to the iPhone.