The subtitled message uploaded to YouTube on Monday has Mason saying that Groupon “really messed up” after it offered a deal for delivering “osechi,” a traditional New Year’s meal. Many of the 500 osechi sets that were sold arrived late while others were in “terrible condition,” Mason said.
It’s not all bad news in Asia for the young company, though. Groupon is meanwhile talks to partner with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, All Things Digital reports, citing several sources with knowledge of the situation. It is likely to involve some sort of co-branded joint venture effort between the two, the report adds. This is a key strategic move for Groupon, given the hard-to-penetrate-if-you’re-not-Chinese, Chinese market.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that’s helped kids all over the world cut and paste their homework, turned 10 on Saturday. Founded by Ayn Rand devotees Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the collaborative repository of information is the fifth most visited web site in the world. But will it last another ten years? The Economist recently said that Wikipedia’s English-language contributors dropped from 54,000 in March 2007 to 35,000 last September. But Todd Wasserman at Mashable points out that may just be because as the site gets more comprehensive, fewer entries need to be written. “I have no desire to go back to the days of printed Funk & Wagnalls,” he adds.
Facebook has announced that developers of its apps can now gather the personal contact information of their users, including home addresses and phone numbers. The news has left some wary of the potential privacy issues. Graham Cluley at Naked Security says he realises that Facebook users will only have their personal information accessed if they “allow” the app to do so, “but there are just too many attacks happening on a daily basis which trick users into doing precisely this.”
Mozilla has released its Firefox 4 Beta 9 web browser a month ahead of the planned launch of its full version in February. The release includes faster start-up time, bookmarking and a smoother look to complex animations, the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation says on its blog. It also features full support for HTML5, offering developers a chance to create features like WebM and HD video, 3D graphic rendering with WebGL, hardware acceleration and the Mozilla Audio API to help create visual experiences for sound.
Two major record labels have opened up a new front in the war against online piracy. Universal and Sony Music in the United Kingdom are making new singles available to download and buy on the same day they debut on the radio. Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale – a practice known as “setting up” a record, The Guardian reports. “Wait is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation,” said Universal Music’s chief, David Joseph. “It’s out of date to think that you can build up demand for a song by playing it for several weeks on radio in advance.”
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WordPress 3.0, the recent self-hosted version of the world’s most popular blogging platform, surpassed 30 million downloads Sunday morning, The Next Web reports. WordPress employs a counter on its website, counting each and every download of the WordPress software. The blogging platform is owned by Automatic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg.
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