As we are anticipating more regular Groupon-related blog content, we decided split up the blogs for The Point and Groupon. Groupon’s Blog (”Groublogpon”) is here. If you’re an RSS subscriber, make sure you grab the feed for your city, or you’ll end up with all kinds of stuff that will be completely boring to you.

-Filed in Uncategorized

If you’re interested in Groupon’s origins and how it evolved out of The Point, Crain’s Business explains it all (and more) in the following piece from their excellent Entrepreneurs in Action series. Past segments have featured our friends at EveryBlock and CrowdSPRING. Our thanks to Brandon Copple of Crain’s for the excellent work!

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

The Point has outgrown our office space! Yesterday, we moved down a floor of our building into a larger space. Here are a few photos I took of the move.

Ken and the tech team packing up

Alex grabbing some last things

Nick setting up the new phone system

Unpacking in the new space

Aaron and Ben in their writing sanctuary

Our new conference room

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

From last year’s Chicago New Media Summit (now the Chicago Convergence). I tried to fit a ton of content in 14 minutes, so its a bit fast – enjoy!

Watch Andrew Mason, The Point, Online Collective Activism in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

-Filed in The Point

After successful launches in Chicago and Boston, Groupon is coming to NYC, and we need some talented locals to help us make it happen.

In general, we’re looking for people who know and love New York City. Groupon is a fast-paced and fluid startup – you should be able to think on your feet. You have to be hardworking, self-motivated, blah blah blah, all that stuff that everyone says. Read on for available positions.

Outside Sales Executive

We’re looking for a full-time sales executive to help us get the coolest New York businesses featured on Groupon. Each day, you’ll call (and occasionally visit) restaurants, theaters, spas, dentists, and everything in between, negotiating unbeatable deals on behalf of Groupon’s customers.

You should have experience in outside advertising sales. You should be skilled at negotiation and relationship building. You should have existing relationships with bars, restaurants, and other local businesses.

Compensation is competitive. To apply, send your resume to jobs@thepoint.com.

Freelance Writers

We need freelance writers to compose positive, funny descriptions for the daily deal. Good write-ups seamlessly entertain the reader and communicate the value of the deal. Also, since Groupon is a community site, it should be written by someone who knows the community and can bring that perspective to their writing.

The tricky part here is that we’re looking for “funny” writing, where funny is defined as, “what makes our managing editor laugh.” The best I can do to elaborate is to offer a few examples of past Groupon write-ups: Kafka Wine; Lincoln Park Massage Chicago Chamber Music Ineeka Tea. A few things we think are funny: The Onion; Adult Swim (in particular, Xavier: Renegade Angel and Tim and Eric).

Compensation is competitive. To apply, email us a Groupon-style write-up for a restaurant in New York City that you’ve never patronized with a Yelp rating between 3.5 and 4 stars. We won’t consider applications without a sample write-up.

-Filed in Groupon

Check this out – Desire2Learn will donate $1,000,000 to charity if Blackboard drops a patent lawsuit.

I like this “you wouldn’t hurt a puppy, would you?” style of building support for a cause. But what if you don’t have a million dollars? You can raise a pot of money on The Point, which are only released if the offending organization does as you please.

This has already been tried on The Point in an attempt to get Bono to retire from public life by donating a lot of money to fight AIDS if he does. Hasn’t worked – yet.

-Filed in The Point

From the “you mean to say that you had a website in the year 2009 that didn’t have that feature?” department: now you can view and print your Groupons online!

Until now, we sent your Groupons as pdf attachments, which were difficult to keep track of. Now, you can login to your account on The Point to see/print all your Groupons and see when they expire.

What else would you like to see on your Groupon list? Send us your feedback.

-Filed in Groupon

We’re pleased to report that EveryBlock – the up-to-the-minute neighborhood news website – is now syndicating Groupon deals! If you haven’t used it, EveryBlock provides you with a news feed of crime reports, neighborhood news, civic information, business reviews, and now Groupons. Stop by and subscribe to your neighborhood’s news feed – be warned, it can be addicting.

We’re big fans of Everyblock’s work, and are proud to count the team behind the scenes as fellow Chicagoans. Stop by their blog to see what else they’re up to.

-Filed in Groupon

Groupon, Chicago’s deal-a-day site, is coming to Boston! And we’re hiring a resident editor / community manager to help.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Groupon Chicago to get an idea of what we do.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Help us find deals

We don’t know anything about Boston. We don’t even know how to fake the accent. You’ll help find cool places to feature, and then work with us to set each week’s deal schedule.

While sales operations will primarily take place here in Chicago, you’ll most likely be doing some sales as well.

Write

We write a positive, (arguably) funny description of the product or service we sell each day. Good write-ups hawk the deal without boring people to death. Here are a few of our favorites from Groupon Chicago:

• Kafka Wine
• Lincoln Park Massage
• Chicago Chamber Music
• Ineeka Tea

Promote

Help us build our mailing list by visiting campuses, attending events, and using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll also promote the daily deals using a variety of online and offline tools.

Upkeep

You’ll load each day’s deal onto Groupon and schedule/maintain the newsletter. You’ll also run customer service for Groupon Boston.

REQUIRED ATTRIBUTES

You must know and love Boston. We need someone who can guide us towards offers that will resonate with the indigenous population.

You must write well.

You must be a participant in “Web culture,” i.e. you have a blog, use Facebook, Twitter, etc.

You must be comfortable in a startup environment where no one knows what the hell they’re doing. Meaning, you make things happen without waiting for people to tell you what to do.

WHAT TO SEND US

Email us writing samples and a cover letter explaining why you’re the right person for this job.

-Filed in Groupon

The project in a nutshell: develop a harmonious design language that can be shared by Groupon & The Point, allowing us to easily reuse ideas for both sites, while preserving a distinct experience and mood for each site.

Background

The Point, launched in November, 2007, lets anyone start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group, but only if the campaign hits a predetermined tipping point. By building a critical mass of like-minded people before taking action, The Point makes collective action easy and efficient. Learn more here.

All campaigns on The Point follow a general structure if X, then we, the members, will Y. We the members will give money or do something, but only if X happens. This basic model can be used for everything from arranging a party to boycotting a multinational corporation to organizing a fan-based bid for a major league baseball team.

In late 2008, we decided to step up a search for a business model for The Point. One of the options we’d been thinking about from the beginning was group buying – use The Point to offer a product at a discount, but only if a certain number of people sign up – enough people to make it worth it for the business to take lower margins.

We wanted the group buying experience to be dead simple. Campaigns on The Point can be used for a wide range of things – that’s nice, but it also contributes to a sense of “what is this place exactly?” that is a barrier to entry for casual users. We wanted to get all that stuff out of the way and create a focused experience for people who are looking for deals. For a number of reasons, we also decided to start with a narrow geographical focus – things to do in Chicago (our hometown).

Thus, Groupon was born in November, 2008 – a site that features a deal a day on something to do in Chicago. The guts of Groupon belong to The Point – you’ll notice all the action happens inside a The Point campaign widget that has been skinned in a Wordpress blog. We did it that way to get it running quickly, knowing we’d integrate it into The Point if and when it started to look like we were onto something – and that’s just what’s happening.

The Task

We’ve pushed Wordpress as far as it can take us. Now, we’re gearing up to integrate Groupon into The Point. We’re doing this for a few reasons:

• To take advantage of some of the features we’ve already built for The Point (discussion, invitation system, user-to-user messaging, Facebook Connect, etc.)
• To add new functionality to Groupon that would be foolish to add onto Wordpress – it’ll be easier and faster to add it to The Point’s codebase.

When I talk about “integrating” Groupon into The Point, I don’t mean they’ll “feel” like the same site. Groupon and The Point have different audiences – people looking for deals in Chicago, and (mostly) people looking to do good, respectively. Each site will maintain its own identity – we don’t want deal-seekers to be forced to contend with activism campaigns, and vice versa. While we’re pulling Groupon into The Point’s codebase, that is so it’s easier to add functionality; it’s a top priority to preserve Groupon’s focus and simplicity.

Looking at Groupon and the same campaign being displayed on The Point, you’ll notice that we’ve laid out the information differently on each site. In some cases, the variations reflect the requirement differences between Groupon and The Point. But in other cases, we just found a better way to do it on Groupon. We want to look at each difference between the two sites, and say, “is there a reason it shouldn’t be this way on both sites?” By doing so, we think we’ll be able to reduce the differences to a small enough number for a harmonious design language to be established.

If we can establish a common design language that is shared by Groupon and The Point, it will allow us to repurpose the elements that are shared by the two sites and develop both sites much faster. I’m speaking mostly of information architecture – can we reach a stylistic middle ground that allows us to reuse elements like user profiles and discussion?

The best analogy I can think of is Google. Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader are clearly different sites, but they use a common language that makes it easy for Google to repurpose page elements across the sites.

Who we’re looking for

Depending on how much background you have in UX, we’ll probably do the preliminary IA work in house, i.e. we will develop an initial “unified” wireframe for you to design against. Our familiarity with the model and all its edge cases makes it easier for us to put something together quickly, but we’ll be looking for your input on the overall sanity of our IA decisions.

We aren’t looking to do a major redesign of either site – just the minimum necessary to achieve our goals. This project will be limited in scope and time (no more than a week or two), but if we like working together, we have a lot of ongoing design needs and we’d like to have a trusty standby.

We’re looking to get this project started in February and wrap up by mid-March, at the absolute latest.

To apply, send examples of your work to andrew at the point dot com.

-Filed in Groupon, The Point