About Groupon

I am not surprised about all the hoopla around Groupon (www.groupon.com). they were featured in Bloomberg, front page on Forbes Magazine. The idea is amazing. The Groupon Deal of the Day: today it offers a $50 dollar, "The Gap" coupon, for $25 dollars. The coupon must be bought before the end of the day. This idea of leveraging the massive power of the cloud for marketing is catching up.

In a similar fashion, another company, Ziiple (www.ziiple.com) offers great deals on things to do. Find local savings at your favorite places. Use its search site to find discounts, coupons and specials on places that you frequent... Hot deals in Miami, Chicago, New York, Boston and many other cities. For small business owners that can afford big marketing budgets or don't have the name to make it into Groupon, Ziiple is the answer. The distribution of the coupons is different: for groupon the consumer must print the coupon while for Ziiple, the consumer receives the coupon via a text message (SMS).

It will be interesting to see which company escalates better..

Picture with Jim Goodnight at the Qualex Booth SGF Seattle

It was great seeing Jim Goodnight and Jim Davis at SGF Seattle! Another first class event from SAS.

Teradata Qualex Luncheon at SAS Global Forum Seattle

Here are some pics from the lunch.




The lunch turnover was great; 30 people confirmed Ximena's email invitation and 26 people showed up for lunch!! =) The logistics worked perfect (food, room, signage). We discussed how to use the new Teradata SAS architecture to enhance performance, reduce data movement, and exploit parallel processing for indatabase analytics. The meeting was very interactive with many questions well handled by Bill, Frank, Rob, Yuri and me. We discussed a phased deployement strategy and we also reviewed benchmark results for performance comparisons between this new architecture versus traditional implementations.

Meeting is ending today.. time to go back to sunny Florida!

I am at the SAS Global Forum in Seattle. It feels good to catch up with all the colleagues and SAS enthusiasts. As expected the co9nference is a great success. SAS employees, SAS customers and SAS partners love SAS and it shows. Jim Goodnight and Jim Davis visited our booth at the Alliance Cafe and Ximena and I had a picture taken with them. Today we will host a luncheon for 32 organizations in partnership with Teradata. We will focus on performance optimization for analytical environments. I will keep you posted of the outcome. Have a great day!

What a great evening! I attended the first of a five series on french cooking with Chef Jean Pierre in Fort Lauderdale. He was very entertaining. Lots of laughter! one can bring a wine.. i brought a Carmen Merlot from Chile. The chef essentially focused on the reasoning behind certain cooking methods and dispelled a bunch of myths! I was particularly impressed by the thorough explanation about how to slice an onion ("oonion"). I am looking forward to the next class. We will learn how to cook vegetables. Have a very happy and peaceful day!