Beakinoftruth: Forum Making Money

What to do with those coupons that you impulsively bought off of Groupon, Living Social, Ideeli, or any of the many other discounted ‘deal of the day’ sites? Sell ‘em!

That’s right, there’s a site for everything these days, and selling coupons, while initially relegated to online bulletin board sites, such as Craig’s List, have established their own re-sale sites and are open for business.

In case you’re not in the know about these daily deal sites, they provide a great, affordable way to discover what a city has to offer by selling heavily discounted deals for services and products in your area or online - With deals like Living Social’s Amazon price buster, offering a $20 gift card for $10 and surpassing one million gift cards sold, there are sure to be some “miss-buys.” You thought you wanted, or needed it, but in the end it was something you were never going to use.

After doing a little investigation, I came up with several names of deal for “resale” businesses, with a few emerging as the leaders of the pack. DealsGoRound, CoupRecoup, and Lifesta are suddenly making an impact in the market.

Yael Gavish, co-founder of Lifesta, says she saw a need for a forum focused on the aftermarket. She had a friend visiting her in New York, who had purchased a Groupon certificate. Unfortunately, when the friend arrived, they discovered the restaurant was closed for renovations. Her friend was out the money, but the idea was created.

"People buy daily deals and they all work on the impulse buy," explains Yael Gavish of Lifesta.com. "So you think you're definitely going to this, but then, it turns out that 20-40 percent of these daily deals are never really used." Their site has seen a monthly growth of 50 percent, mainly through word of mouth.

A great solution for “buyers remorse” if I ever saw one!

The well-connected Cairo industrialist Shafik Gabr warns Lloyd Grove that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are trying to destabilize Egypt and the country could descend into anarchy.

Egyptian industrialist Shafik Gabr was in Davos, Switzerland, when the revolution began. It was January 26, the second day of protests in Tahrir Square, and from 1,600 miles away at the World Economic Forum—teeming with financiers, celebrities, and heads of state in the crisp, Alpine air—it didn’t look much like a revolution.

But by the time Gabr arrived in Cairo on Friday the 28th—having cut short his schmoozing to rush home on his Gulfstream 200—the planet’s most populous Arab country had changed forever.

Shafik Gabr at home in Cairo, Egypt on February 28, 2009. (Credit: Jason Larkin / Getty Images)

And not necessarily for the better.

“The stock market is closed, the banks are closed, transfers are delayed. The economy is in paralysis,” Gabr told me this week from Cairo, where he is chairman and managing director of the ARTOC Group, a real estate-engineering-consumer products-media conglomerate that employs 3,500 Egyptians. “I am a person who has always believed in the importance of orderly transition with law and order, because the minute you lose law and order is the minute you enter into a dark tunnel, a vicious circle…. If we do not have law and order—which as of yet we do not—then Egypt will become a very complex, dangerous, fluid place.”

The 58-year-old Gabr—who speaks idiomatic American and has degrees in business and economics from Cairo’s American University and the University of London—is a suave and gregarious world traveler. He is supremely well-connected, not only on the Egyptian power grid but also in Washington, where he boasts contacts in the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

Except when it comes to making money, Gabr is a committed incrementalist. He has become a near-billionaire while walking a fine line—making friends and influencing people in the regime of deposed President Hosni Mubarak while insistently pushing democratic reforms and economic empowerment for ordinary Egyptians.

Now gradualism had given way to anarchy. The peril was apparent as soon as Gabr landed.

“Coming from the airport, I saw people in the street throwing stones, carrying weapons,” he said. “When I came back, my daughter was at home with her grandmother, and for six and a half hours I basically walked the entire neighborhood of Mokattam”—where his family lives in a fabulous hillside mansion overlooking the city—“just to make people appreciate how dangerous things were.”

Gabr went on: “People were starting to pack things to run out of their houses. So we started civil patrols, like Neighborhood Watch, with teams of neighbors walking through the neighborhood at all hours. We had machine guns fired at us. My speculation is that the criminals broke out of jail and some of them took weapons out of police stations.”

It was obvious to Gabr that there was method to the madness.

“If we do not have law and order—which as of yet we do not—then Egypt will become a very complex, dangerous, fluid place.”

“There was a serious plan to scare the populace, no question about it,” he said. “There was a huge number of police stations that were torched all at the same time, all in the same manner. I cannot attribute it to any party. I can say very honestly that there were factors playing a major role beyond the youths in Tahrir Square, to torch, attack, break cells in the prisons for prisoners to be released, to steal police uniforms, to steal armaments, in the very same exact manner across Egypt, not just Cairo. And that requires planning. It’s almost like one of those movies where you have sleeper cells.”

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Beakinoftruth

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Forum Making Money

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