Groupon has been eying China for sometime. But fierce local competition, failures of other online services (e.g. e-bay.cn,  google.cn) and culture issues may have prevented a Shanghi office from opening. So after months (if not years) of toying around with the idea, Groupon is finally opening shop in China with the brand GaoPeng.

Came across a cool SaaS tool called WeMonIt. It allows you to monitor your web-app for downtime. If the app doesnt respond in a timely fashion, WeMonIt sends you web alerts (through email, text or push notification).

I found a great video explaining how search engine work to return relevant results.

I read an interesting article from Boston Innovation that perhaps SCVNGR has surpassed 1 million users. If thats true, that’s totally awesome and good boost for Location based apps. Last year brought geo-loco to the forefront, with Facebook Places and Foursquare leading the way. Back in November, 4sq had 7 million users with a (debatable) evaluation of $250 million.

This is a gem of a video from Computerphile that describes how phone buttons got arranged they way they are now.