GigaOM Pro

GigaOM Pro readers focused on big news items affecting the consumer market this week. The most popular research content on GigaOM Pro mirrored some of our most popular stories on GigaOM: Groupon’s continued downfall, Apple’s attempts at disrupting the television space, and reactions to Twitter’s newest batch of API restrictions.

First, David Card casts a skeptical eye on Groupon’s future in “Groupocalypse: Groupon loses its way.” Instead of relying on retail revenue, the company should be focusing its efforts on becoming “the operating system for local commerce” (in the words of CEO Andrew Mason) and developing the tools and analytics that could make it a true marketing force.

Next, in “Apple TV 2.0 comes into focus,” Paul Sweeting takes a look at the new Apple TV, or at least predicts what the new device will look like based on the 29 newly granted patents for Apple, published this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. While there are no great surprises, Sweeting provides a few major highlights of what the patent diagrams reveal: The new Apple TV will “support set-top, mobile and networked implementations.”

Last, in “Flash analysis: Is Twitter on the cusp of building a business?” David Card compiles the results of our reader survey, which was posted last week as Twitter announced its new restrictions about how third-party developers could use its new API. Overall, Card states, “GigaOM readers either think more highly of Twitter than of Facebook or believe Facebook set its own bar too high (we ran a similar survey about Facebook shortly before its IPO in May).”

Also popular this week:

Virtualization trends, 2012–2013

Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era: challenges and best practices

Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud