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James Packer’s $80 million investment in local group buying site Scoopon could affect its legal battle with international rival Groupon, according to the US-based site’s legal counsel.

Groupon filed a lawsuit against Scoopon last year, accusing the company of registering the Groupon.com.au URL and trademark. The Chicago-based company wants both of these back, along with the Scoopon.com.au domain.

Earlier this year, Scoopon – founded by Melbourne brothers Hezi and Gabby Leibovich – secured an $80 million investment from a high-profile consortium including Packer.

Packer invested in the company via his Consolidated Press Holdings vehicle, taking a minority stake in the business.

Groupon now believes the investment will complicate the court case, and says questions need to be answered over whether consortium members will be introduced as witnesses.

“What’s happened recently is that our ‘friends’ have sold the Scoopon business to a new entity, which has become the fifth respondent, and so that involves a new round of pleading,” Groupon counsel Adrian Ryan said.

The Leibovich brothers, who also own Catch of the Day, appeared in the Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday for the first hearing in the dispute.

While introducing Packer into the fight may make the situation more complex, it may also give Scoopon the necessary funds to defeat Groupon if the case continues for some time.

Groupon has argued that Scoopon’s use of the Groupon.com.au trademark had confused some customers, and that its rival is attempting to gain sales as a result.

In its claim, Groupon said the Leibovich brothers “have conspired together for the purpose of appropriating to themselves... the reputation of [Groupon] in Australia or for the purpose of preventing [Groupon] from exploiting its reputation in Australia”.

The Leibovich brothers have also engaged in “passing off”, according to the claim.

“Passing off” occurs when a company adopts a similar name or packaging to a competitor, which could confuse consumers about the product’s origin. It is considered misleading and deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act.

If Scoopon is found guilty of passing off or misleading conduct, the Leibovich brothers could be stripped of their entitlement to the Scoopon and Groupon names, and be forced to pay damages.

Scoopon has filed a cross-claim to have its rival forbidden from operating in Australia using the Groupon name as it is too similar. The case will be back in court next month.

Group buying has hit Australia, and the world, by Storm! Group buying sites, offer local coupons and can save you 50-75% but only honour them once a minimum number of people purchase them. They encourage you to use your social networks to spread the word about the daily deal so it reaches that minimum amount and the "deal is on."

These coupons offer amazing, unbeatable deals for local attractions, services, and businesses. They can only be purchased that 1 day, but you don't have to redeem them right away. Each coupon has an expiry date, details exactly what the coupon can be used towards, and any exceptions if applicable. In Australia, various group buying sites have offered coupons for salons, restaurants, tourist attractions, ice cream, yoga, and make-it-yourself wine shops.

So why has group buying become the newest phenomenon in Australia? Maybe because it leverages the power of Social Media! They make it easy to tweet and post Facebook updates of their daily deals, and then the power of "word-of-mouth" and referral marketing takes over. Many group buying sites will even offer cash for referrals!

How to buy coupons
Group buying is a great way to save money and try new things. Many coupons offer savings of at least 50%, but most can save you closer to 75% off normal rates for that product or service. You can sign up for a daily email with their current coupon, or check their website each day. When you see a coupon you like, click the buy button, enter your credit card information, and your coupons are electronically delivered to you.

Refer others to the deal with your unique referral code and when they purchase their first coupon, you get a referral fee that can be used towards your next coupon.

Benefits for businesses
The benefits for the consumer are obvious. But why would a business want to offer such high discounts? First of all, it is great exposure and cheap advertising. Group buying websites take a small portion of the coupons actually sold. The advertiser sets the minimum and maximum number of coupons they are willing to sell. People will use social media and word-of-mouth to promote their business

Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour". The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition.

As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a familiar cliché, but when combined with "computing," the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including conventional outsourcing.

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.

Cloud computing is at an early stage, with a motley crew of providers large and small delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. Yes, utility-style infrastructure providers are part of the mix, but so are SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging.

We are monitoring the progress of cloud computing's integration into the market place and will continue releasing articles featuring it's advances...stay tuned.

This is the Facebook story according to the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires. It’s the somewhat embellished, heightened-for-the-big-screen tale of how Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook, and how his best friend, along with several others, ended up sueing him for millions.

David Fincher (Se7en/Fight Club) directs, The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin writes, lead roles are filled by Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin and Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker.

Through their combined effort, bound together with a pitch-perfect score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network snap crackles and pops its way onto the big screen so memorably, you’ll be in the next queue to see it again.

Its easy to jump on the critics’ bandwagon here, this film has received hefty praise from some heavyweight reviewers. Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers said the film “gets you drunk on movies again”. Former Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy likened The Social Network to Citizen Kane.

Our Strategix Interactive team are continuing their global search for exceptional web development and design resources to assist in our growth and mission to provide competitive business web solutions to our expanding client base in Australia. 

This recent search has landed our team in Brazil...

Beautiful women, gorgeous beaches and dreames of vacations aside – Brazil has become a strong element inside the web design company realm. Both freelancers and collectives alike are pumping out colorful and eye-catching web design work.

This was the day many people had been waiting and hoping years for… Google takes up the Open Source / Linux code base and enters into full competition with Microsoft in the operating system market. Now it is official, as Google announced on their blog yesterday. The “Chrome OS” will be, like Android, based on the Linux kernel and essentially a Google-sponsored re-write of the user interface over that to build a next-generation, cloud OS geared to run web apps. The most important point here is “browser” based vs. “desktop” based, because with that comes all of the potentialities of cloud applications, remote hosted drives, distributed computing, SaaS, etc. Since the Chrome OS is being specifically targeted at netbooks, many are also pointing to Adobe Air applications vs. traditional desktop apps as future standards. The last point though highlights the main asterisk to the announcement: the Chrome OS will be optimized for netbooks first, rather than desktop PCs, which most users and virtually all professionals & business users rely on.

Consider then a very methodical development cycle where Google moves from search, search advertising, apps & code / cloud offerings to launching 1) a mobile phone OS based on open source Linux code base, “Android” 2) a netbook OS based on Linux & browser, “Chrome OS”, to…. 3) full desktop OS (based on Linux) that is integrated with Google products and a direct competitor to Apple / OSX & Microsoft / Windows, (unfinished, but reportedly also pending as a next phase extension of the Chrome OS). The long range significance is that the leading IT company in the world is launching, progressively the open source movement into mainstream computing, and at every level providing free, open source software alternatives for both business and personal users to the proprietary offerings by Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, & other old school software companies. Again, this is great news for independent developers of web based applications, as it levels the playing field and allows for direct entry into the marketplace on the open source foundation following Google.

It can be argued that this is no big deal, Linux has been around for years, and still has only 1% desktop market share. But Google has 80% market share in search. If, by the law of averages, they can pull a 40% market share away from Microsoft & Apple in the next 10 years they can totally transform the popular foundation of computing a second time. Given the momentum behind Open Source at this time, changing consumer habits, and worldwide consumer trust in Google, I think there is a strong possibility in this.

The following posts include the initial announcement from the Google blog and the media reaction to the announcement:

According to research from AIMIA Retail Industry Group, most retailers in Australia will be forced to develop an online sales arm in the next three years.
The research found that Australians are looking to online offerings in order to find the best deal in the market. Robert Wong CEO of CCMedia and chairman of AIMIA’s Retail Industry Group explains:

“There is no question that traditional media such as press still reaches a lot of people on a daily basis, but there are simply more eyeballs to be found online.”

The research predicts an increase in online advertising expenditure for 2011, with 83% of retailers expected to increase their online budgets. To support this finding, a 2010 Nielsen Technology Study found that Australians spend more time online than watching television and consumers are finding websites as a way of sourcing up-to-date information on specials and deals.
Companies interviewed agreed that email marketing (67%), SEO techniques (57%) and online catalogues (47%) were the top online priorities for their organisations over the next 12 months.

Wong said that the amount of people browsing online cannot be ignored by marketing managers. Even if retailers don’t develop an online sales arm, they will need “a strong online advertising presence to ensure their messages about offers and deals are put up against the emerging clearance houses and discount coupon businesses to maintain market share”.

AIMIA’s research involved qualitative interviews with 21 of Australia’s top retailers, followed by a broad sample quantitative study with 128 major retail businesses.

As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

Why Google's patented PigeonRank™ works so well:
PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.
By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.

When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.

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