LivingSocial首席执行官：Groupon抄袭成性

    在科技界中，现下恐怕没有哪个领域比团购类网站更能引起人们的热议。人们往往称Groupon是“世界上发展最快的公司”，它最近刚刚提交了IPO申请。不过据报道，美国第二大团购网站LivingSocial最近也挑选了一支承销商团队，说明这家公司也离挂牌上市不远了。

    不过在LivingSocial的首席执行官蒂姆•奥肖内西看来，仍有一个重要的领域是Groupon的短板——这就是创新。上周在科罗拉多州阿斯彭（Aspen）举办的《财富》科技头脑风暴大会（《Fortune》Brainstorm Tech conference）上，奥肖内西毫不客气地批评了他最大的竞争对手Groupon。

    以下节选了他的发言的精华部分：

    团购的概念就是把大量的买家聚集到一起，好从卖家那里获得折扣——无论卖家是大是小。团购这个概念自古有之，不是什么新鲜事物。不过近年来科技的一些发展，使得这种聚集可以在很短的时间里实现。哪怕就在五年、十年以前，你还上不了谷歌（Google），用不了Facebook的社交广告，不能通过网络在某个特定的市区里大范围地定位目标顾客。不过现在可以做到这一点了，因此聚集用户群成为可能。

    我们已经成立四年了。其中大部分的时间我们都在网上和网下开拓市场。（我们的团购业务则刚起步两年）。最近，我们推出了一款名叫“Living Social Instant”的即时团购服务，它可以让你买到便宜的午餐。围绕着这项服务，我们还开展了“一元午餐日”活动。

    在你住的地方，不出三个街区，可能就有30个消费的去处。但是现在没有特殊的激励因素让你特别想去其中的某一家。现在我们让商家具备了争夺消费者的能力。如果午餐的时候他们店里的客流量比较稀少，那么他们就可以即时推出揽客的措施。

    我们推出了LivingSocial Instant以后，Groupon不久也推出了他们的即时团购服务（Groupon Now），它完全克隆了我们的LivingSocial Instant。我们推出了旅游类团购服务LivingSocial Escapes，不久Groupon也推出了Getaways，完全就是我们的产品的翻版……也就是说，我们推出了LivingSocial Instant和LivingSocial Escapes，他们就跟风推出了与之竞争的产品。

    我们现在正在继续打造新产品，切实成为联系商家和消费者的纽带。最后，我们会非常关注如何拉近商家和消费者的距离。我相信我们能做到这一点。

    译者：朴成奎

    Few areas in tech are more buzz-worthy than the daily deals space right now. Groupon, often dubbed the world's "fastest-growing company," recently filed for an IPO, while LivingSocial, which reportedly picked a team of underwriters for its own public offering, isn't far behind.

    But as LivingSocial CEO Tim O'Shaugnessy sees it, there's one crucial area where Groupon lags: creativity. During last week's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo., O'Shaughnessy took a few a swipes at his biggest competitor.

    Here's an edited portion of his comments:

    The concept of aggregating a lot of people together in order to get discounts from a business, whether it's large or small, is not novel and has been around forever. But I think a couple of things have happened that have allowed this aggregation to occur in a pretty short period of time. Even five, 10 years ago, you couldn't go to Google (GOOG), you couldn't go to Facebook social ads and actually target people at scale in a particular metropolitan area. You can do that now, so you can actually aggregate that user base.

    We're about four years old. We've been playing around in the online to offline world for most of those four years. (From a daily deals perspective, it's been about two.) Recently, we did a dollar lunch day around a new product called Living Social Instant, and a real-time product where you as a consumer are going to go grab lunch somewhere.

    There are probably 30 places you could go within three blocks of where you live, and right now there's no incentive for you to go to one place over another. So we're providing the ability for merchants to bid for your business, and they can do it in a way where, if their lunch rush is slow, they can actually put something live at that point in time.

    So we launched LivingSocial Instant, and Groupon launched their clone of that later [Groupon Now]. We launched LivingSocial Escapes; they just launched Getaways, their clone of that, following that. ... We launched LivingSocial Instant and we launched LivingSocial Escapes, and they've since launched -- subsequently launched -- competing products.

    We're continuing to build new product releases, and really be that connective tissue, and I think at the end of the day, we're pretty much focused on operating and bridging that gap, and we can do that successfully.