On today’s episode of TechCrunch NOW, investor Jeff Clavier and CloudCrowd founder, Alex Edelstein, joined us to discuss Apple’s ambitious plans for China, BuyWithMe’s new round of funding, and Twitter’s latest product, Earlybird.
Aside from Steve Jobs’ world domination plans, we focused on the hyper active daily deal market. Jeff Clavier, who has invested in 81 consumer internet companies as of this Wednesday (he just wrapped up his another investment last week), is no stranger to this space. He recently invested in Townhog— a collective buying site launched in 2009 that also features local promotions. Despite the flood of investment dollars, Clavier says the daily deal market is still in it’s infancy. He predicts that ultimately, personalization will be the key to dominating this sector.
“Inventory is tricky because by definition..there are only so many sushi offers and manicure offers that you can put on the table and really at the end what matters is personalization. What sort of offers will matter to me as a consumer is what I want to see at some point, the issue is that we’re at the infancy of the market…It’s going to develop in interesting way, there might be a shakeout at some point, but we can see many players being successful, I think.”
Meanwhile, CloudCrowd’s Edelstein is keeping an eye on Twitter’s Earlybird. Although there’s no clear evidence the new product will directly compete with the likes of Groupon, he says Twitter is a credible threat: “They’re arguably late to the party but they’ve got a lot of huge advantages in this space…I have a Twitter account but I don’t have a Groupon account and if Twitter can establish what locality I live in— which isn’t that hard to do if I think there’s something in it for me— than it’s very easy for them to start messaging deals to me.”
For more on Apple, the daily deal market and how competition will affect those rich profit margins, see the video above, or check out previous episodes of TechCrunch Now here.