Alex's Current Event 3/23/12

Sorry for the lateness,

To sum up from earlier, Smart Drive is a company that makes technology for cars that help their customers (mostly transportation companies) cut down on cost and improve their driving skills and time. Smart Drive is claiming that DriveCam illegally stole their patents and charged them yesterday with patent infringement.

URL: http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20120322006104/en/Smartdrive/Drivecam/Event-Video-Recorders

Probing Question:

Do you think that technology has helped people to infringe on patents and in the future, will it be any worse as our digital age advances?

Article: A Groupon Alternative Aims to Offer Small Businesses a Better Deal

Source: New York Times

Constant Contact, an online business that has been around for over 14 years and specializes in serving small businesses, has recently released a new product called SaveLocal. SaveLocal is kind of a playoff of the popular website Groupon on which people buy coupon for group discount rates. During an interview with the chief executive of Constant Contact, the new service of SaveLocal was described as coupon-based deal marketing. This coupon based deal marketing was said to be very beneficial to the economy because it promoted consumerism, but also let the businesses control the price of their coupons to ensure that they were not losing money off of it. Also during this interview, it was made clear that Constant Contact had interviewed people about their experiences with Groupon in order to use their feedback and criticism to make SaveLocal the better version of Groupon. This way, SaveLocal would be able to compete with Groupon in the market. As we learned in class, competition is good for the consumers because it allows for lower prices due to the companies attempt to make their products better and more affordable. Also, competition between businesses ensures that there are no monopolies, when one business is in charge of everything in has a particular service.

As I said during my presentation, competition between businesses is good for the CONSUMERS because it allows for lower prices due to the companies attempt to make their products better and more affordable. Do you think that competition between businesses is good for the ECONOMY as well as the consumer? Why or why not?