Archive: 2011 October

It’s an exciting day for us here at Rearden Commerce as we announced our partnership with Google to source hyper-local deals from Deem Offers and HomeRun to Google Offers. We’re thrilled to provide Google customers with high-quality and highly-relevant local offers, and to drive fresh demand to the merchants in our network by efficiently connecting them to targeted consumers. News headlines from the past few months might lead you to believe that the daily deals industry is over-saturated and over-hyped. Doubts about the industry’s viability, questions about whether...

According to Conway’s Law, “organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” So, conversely, in order to achieve a system design, it would stand to reason that you should create a nimble organization that reflects that design. Creating an adaptable team with leadership that empowers engineers, increases innovation and functionality in production, and encourages each team member to lean on their individual strengths to find all of the possible product problems and...

Despite the many privacy flare-ups we’ve seen surrounding Facebook and other websites that track user information, there’s no doubt that online consumers, now more than ever, are willing to share their personal data. In our last blog post we referenced a survey from Koski Research this past March that found that 92 percent of respondents were aware that some of their information was being tracked by online entities.  This week agency network McCann Worldgroup released study findings show consumers are not only aware of their private information being tracked, but...

Data breaches, hackers, identity theft, longstanding news organizations dissolved. These are headline-making events that share a common theme: violation of customer privacy. The transgressions are rampant – what’s a data rich society to do?  The headlines tell a grim story about privacy for sure. No one is safe, yet the reality is that consumers have been giving up their personal data for decades and are now more incented than ever to do so with the lure of airline miles, rewards points and daily deals.  And, even if the consumer is not inclined to willingly share...

In 1994, the emergence of Netscape allowed users to browse the Internet, find websites of interest through indexing (and subsequently search), and then transact through a safe online technology called the Secure Sockets Layer.  This early form of eCommerce enabled consumers to find content that was previously unobtainable, or that otherwise might have required a trip to another city, or a painful game of telephone tag. This weekend’s WSJ feature on Jeff Bezos is an entertaining read on the frenzy of the early days of a company that changed the face of ecommerce. For...

Long considered laggards behind other parts of the world in mobile adoption, apparently the U.S. has reached its own tipping point. This week it was announced that mobile devices are driving nearly seven percent of web traffic, as more consumers are becoming comfortable with accessing the internet from phones and tablets. This isn’t really surprising, given the news from CTIA this week that the number of cellphones now exceeds the U.S. population, but nonetheless it shows that we’re using our mobile devices more and more for news consumption (58% of us, to be exact,...

Like everyone in the technology industry, we were deeply saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs.  Losing such an accomplished, self-made man, in the prime of his career who leaves behind a wife and children who will miss him beyond imagination is sad beyond words. The images of condolences, from around the world, in newspapers, on TV and on the Web is truly remarkable.  I imagine that even Steve Jobs would be overwhelmed by the outpouring of sentiment and that he would be touched by the level of creativity expressed by people who have been inspired to “think...

It’s been a big year here are Rearden Commerce, especially recently with the launch of Deem, our recent funding announcement, and the acquisition of HomeRun. Growth and change in an organization are healthy and exciting, but they require individuals to change as well – which can be both a challenge and an opportunity. Einstein once said, “A clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it.” As an engineer, I’m used to both solving and avoiding technical problems – that’s my job. In the past year, however, the challenges I’ve faced haven’t been...