One way Groupon hopes to gain an edge is by using software to learn about its members so it can deliver more relevant offers: my wife will get the manicure-pedicure deal, but I'll get an offer on fly-fishing lessons. The key now is execution - delivering great customer service and keeping everybody happy on both sides of the transactions.

Daniel Lyons

Categorized in : Service Great Happy Wife

My theory is that in the age of the internet, it's what you write, not where you write it, that matters.

Daniel Lyons

marketing age writing

Obama needs Facebook to help him get reelected. Facebook needs Obama to keep them out of trouble with Congress and countless government agencies.

Daniel Lyons

agency government needs

What TV was to John Kennedy, Facebook is to Obama.

Daniel Lyons

john-kennedy social-media tvs

People who write about technology love to huff and puff and hyperbolize. The fate of the entire world seems to hang on every move made by Microsoft or Google or Apple. Every new smart phone gets billed as a potential 'iPhone killer,' while every new product from Apple represents the dawn of a new era. It's ridiculous - and exhausting.

Daniel Lyons

technology love people world

Confining a resume to a single page is good advice for anyone.

Daniel Lyons

good good-advice single advice

I used to be a pretty hard-core iPhone fan. But over time, I grew more and more frustrated with the lousy service on AT&T. My iPhone simply could not reliably make and hold a phone call. Not just in New York and San Francisco, where I spend a lot of time, and where AT&T's service has been notoriously bad for years.

Daniel Lyons

phone-call phone service time

Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.

Daniel Lyons

new try look people

To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can 'see' what's around it.

Daniel Lyons

fly see you car

The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, though, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. Our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers or gaming Google's search algorithm or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message.

Daniel Lyons

someone gaming people world

Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the 'One Laptop Per Child' organization - the so-called $100 laptop - was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.

Daniel Lyons

child internet organization enough

I wanted to write a book about what it's like to be 50 and trying to reinvent yourself - that struggle. There are all these books and inspirational speakers talking about being a lifelong learner, and it's so great to reinvent yourself, the brand of you. And I wanted to say, you know, it's not like that. It's actually really painful.

Daniel Lyons

yourself you struggle inspirational

The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can't just be work; work has to be fun.

Daniel Lyons

like google work fun

Even in the business department of a magazine, tech was a backwater.

Daniel Lyons

magazine even tech business

Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers.

Daniel Lyons

mountains legal intelligence work

To be sure, robotics are not the only job killers out there, with outsourcing stealing far more gigs than automation.

Daniel Lyons

more only job automation

Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.

Daniel Lyons

small big being different

Android is the kind of runaway smash hit that techies spend their careers dreaming about.

Daniel Lyons

android spend about kind

What if the Big Three automakers made products that were simple and easy to use - imagine a car with a user interface made by Apple - while also constantly trying to push the state of the art? What if they constantly sought out new technologies and ideas, and incorporated them into their products?

Daniel Lyons

car simple ideas art

The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone with the phone part taken out, which is fine - since making calls is the one thing that the iPhone doesn't actually do very well.

Daniel Lyons

iphone phone touch fine

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'

Daniel Lyons

face looking cool technology