Evolution of coupon sites

Coupon websites such as Groupon Inc., LivingSocial Inc. and local variations had a lot of buzz last year.

Maybe too much buzz.

“It’s inevitable during these booms — you’ll get a flurry of particular types of companies, and this time around it’s the Groupon clones,” said Christian Renaud, principal at StartupCity Des Moines. “So what will happen in 2012, is there will be a Darwinian selection process where the vast majority will get weeded out of the pool. Right now there are too many of them in Des Moines, and in Iowa, for the amount of population that is here.”

There aren’t enough businesses to justify the number of coupon websites that exist right now, he said. He predicted that companies that do work with the sites will figure out which ones work well and which ones don’t, and choose their partnerships accordingly.

What will be interesting, Renaud said, is to see what the second and third generations of daily deal sites have in store. That could include more specialized iterations that encourage people to eat local food, for example, or even partnering with existing organizations to add elements of the daily deal sites to the product or service they provide.

“We’ll have a little bit of that with the second-generation couponing sites, locally, because this is a really good test market for that,” Renaud said. “If you’re in New York, there’s no way you could do stuff like this because you’d never get heard.”

Touch the future

Drew McLellan, “top dog” at McLellan Marketing Group and a Business Record columnist, predicts an evolution of businesses utilizing touchscreen technology.

In a December IowaBiz blog post, he linked to a video from Corning Inc. that shows a futuristic view of just how far touchscreen technology could go, from being implemented in televisions to pulling up an email message on your bathroom mirror.

That might seem a little “Jetson-esque,” he said, referring to an old TV show, but things aren’t as far from that as people may think. For example, the technology already exists through devices such as smartphones and Apple Inc. iPads.

“It’s not so much about this new magic technology that we can’t imagine what it is; it’s really about how do you leverage the technology that is becoming pretty mainstream?” McLellan said. “Pads are becoming pretty mainstream today, whether it’s an iPad or one of the PC versions, so how do you create value to the customer?”

He predicts large companies will be the first to utilize touchscreens in a “big, splashy way.”

Upgrades in the technology will have obvious marketing implications, and also will support changing work habits by helping employees stay connected outside the office.

High tech nears a tipping point

2011 saw the growth of technology start-up Dwolla Corp., the launch of incubator StartupCity Des Moines and the formation of the StartupIowa organization.

Larger companies are also expanding their technology work force, said Leann Jacobsen, president of the Technology Association of Iowa. All of that leads to what she feels could be a tipping point for the technology sector in 2012.

“There is obvious momentum growing in Iowa’s tech scene, from the start-ups that we see all around us … as well as just technology companies at various stages,” Jacobsen said. “I think we’ll look for really strong hiring in the sector, and we’re seeing signs of that right now. There’s a lot of need for high-tech workers.”

She said she has noticed a tipping point in her own organization, which will host six Pitch & Grow events where tech start-ups can pitch their idea to a panel of judges, and will hold a TechBrew networking event every Thursday somewhere in the state.

Christian Renaud, one of the principals at Startup- City Des Moines, said 2011 was a year of building out infrastructure in the tech start-up community; or as he refers to it, the tenor clearing his throat at the beginning of a performance.

“Now that all those infrastructural pieces are in place, (A) how well are these musicians going to play with one another to make good music, and (B) how are the big companies and small companies going to utilize these resources and how is that going to change the playing field locally?” Renaud said.