Groupon - hype or paid news?

As our team is developing GroupDeal, a group buying software that powers most of the groupon like websites, I have been following Groupon for a long time. Quite often, I'm amused by the news and visibility that the Groupon is getting on the media.

The recent buzz that Google May Acquire Groupon for $6 Billion, and It Would Be Worth Every Penny (!!!) and Groupon Turns Down Google’s $6 Billion Offer--and weird comments & noise posted over there--seems to prove my doubts that it's more of a hype or paid news.

If my doubts are true, there's a clear "success mantra" for every internet company!!

Comments

Converting PSD with PHP/ImageMagick

After seeing feature rich options in Imagick PECL extension at Mikko Koppanen 's (the author) website and also impressed with ImageMagick 's features, I have decided to use it for the PSD to XHTML conversion website that I'm architecting and managing. Since, the team wants programming help for converting PSD images, I have tried it (documentation is sparse on PSD handling) Converting PSD to PNG/JPEG/etc Note that, flattenImages() is needed for layered/multi-page PSD file. <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->flattenImages(); $im->setImageFormat('png'); $im->writeImage('test.png'); ?> Extracting PSD layers One by one <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->setImageFormat('png'); for ($i = 0, $num_layers = $im->getNumberImages(); $i $im->setImageIndex($i); $im->writeImage('layer' . $i . '.png'); } ?> Note that, there is a better version below In a single call with writeIm...

BehaviorS.js - An alternative to Behaviour.js, event:Selectors and Low Pro libs for unobtrusive JavaScript programming

BehaviorS.js yet another unobtrusive JavaScript library similar to Behaviour.js and event:Selectors but in implementation uses hash based lookup without extending elements; so presumably it should be faster than the rest. The original script and idea was by JLof ; I extended it for DOMContentLoaded support, optimized a bit to avoid scanning of more depths, and added new rules support. I wanted to document the plug a long time and just got time to do it. For the time being BehaviorS.js is available here Update (2006-09-11) : Coralized the link to BehaviorS.js so as to save the load on free brinkster.com webpage Update (2006-09-27) : If the coralized link to BehaviorS.js doesn't work, use http://www21.brinkster.com/guideme/BehaviorS/ Update (2025-06-07) : Now available in https://github.com/rrjanbiah/behaviorsjs

Cabals and cynic bossism -- destroy team

Like I mentioned before , I often used to say that "trust is the binding force and hope is the driving force". The things that destroy the team I have noted are: Cabals They are always opinionated, push themselves, bypass their reporting people/hierarchy, look for other cabals to understand the "shortcuts", etc. I find these people are quite damaging, they can never trust their reporting people--even though the reporting person is quite rational. Cynic bossism These people will never trust their immediate subordinates. They'll constantly spy their subordinates as they're panic and will try to see if they have better subordinate below their immediate subordinates. By doing so, they always damage morale of their subordinates, their spirit for the team, etc. Often these people will have their enemy within their own / peer level than from sub-levels. Though many times I have noted that these people are quite damaging, till now, I have no experience in ...