These are great vouchers that are good for any city in Virgin’s route map. They are good for last minute trips and are in Main Cabin Select, which includes extra legroom, unlimited free food and alcohol, unlimited premium movies and priority security and boarding.

As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Virgin and fly them whenever I can.

Here are the high level terms:

• Good for last minute trips. I’ve used some of my vouchers for trips that otherwise would cost $2,000.
• Must complete all travel by June 15.
• Only valid in Main Cabin Select.
• You are responsible for taxes. For U.S. trips, this is about $14 for a non-stop. Cabo, Cancun and Puerto Vallarta taxes are about $90.

I’m asking $400 each. (Which is roughly what I paid, plus transaction costs.) You can pay me by paypal and I will send you the code that you can use to redeem on Virgin’s Web site.

If you are a friend and are coming to visit SF, you also get a place to stay in my guest room.

Interested? Email me at redesign@agrawals.org.

It’s not because Groupon suddenly proved that I’ve been wrong for the past year. To the contrary, Groupon’s earnings report reinforced everything I believe about the company. Since earnings, I’ve bought even more puts against the company. I believe that the markets continue to misread the company and that the company takes very deliberate actions to confuse the markets. There are a number of intricacies of accounting that come into play. (In this case, unlike in the past, Groupon isn’t doing anything wrong.)

The primary reason I didn’t write up my analysis is that it doesn’t help small businesses or entrepreneurs. It would primarily help professional money managers and hedge funds.

My goal all along has been to help small businesses and entrepreneurs. The byproduct of that has been helping professional money managers. But professional money managers can afford to pay for my analysis; many of them value it and already do. It’s counterproductive for me to give that analysis away.

This situation illustrates the two markets for financial news: the consumer market and the professional market. Over the past year, a number of people have told me that I’m providing professional-grade analysis in the consumer media market.

Unfortunately, the two markets also pay vastly differently. It’s incredibly hard to make meaningful money in consumer media. You need a lot of scale. But if you have unique information in the professional markets, it’s worth a lot of money.

Tiering of information is very common. Bloomberg and Reuters are two of the world’s highest quality news organizations. But they fund their news operations with the massive profits they make from their professional products. I was talking to someone earlier this week who told me, “If there’s one thing we can thank Wall Street bankers for, it’s funding two high quality news sources.”

There’s another challenge with writing sophisticated financial analysis for the consumer press: many people don’t understand it. Then I have to deal with comments and personal attacks from people who have no clue what I’m talking about. That provides a negative value for me. When I’m talking to hedge funds and mutual funds, at least I know they understand the core of my argument. (Even if they don’t always agree.)

Going forward, I’ll continue writing about business models and elements of the story that affect small businesses and entrepreneurs. I want to help both of those groups succeed.

Stakes: loser buys dinner at restaurant of winner’s choice when we’re in the same city.

• Be out there. Reporters often get story ideas or thoughts for sources by doing Google searches or looking through blogs. If you have a strong presence elsewhere, it increased the odds that a reporter will contact you.
• Follow up. If you’ve engaged with a reporter, be sure to offer help along the way. When I was in New Orleans recently, I wanted to do a piece on how cell networks deal with large surges in demand. Verizon loaned me several devices. After I had a day to play with them, Verizon’s PR team checked in to make sure the devices were working.
• Details matter. Verizon PR knew that I was going to be testing the devices at Jazz Fest. They pre-loaded the Jazz Fest app on both devices. That was a thoughtful touch that I definitely noticed.
• Don’t email links to the exclusive you just gave a competitor. That’s a pretty surefire way to ensure you won’t get coverage.
• Pay attention to what’s going on in other news. If Facebook updates their S-1 on the day you had planned to talk about your product, you might want to re-consider your launch. It may not seem fair, but that’s life. Chances are that your story won’t see the light of day.
• Pay attention to reporters’ schedules. If there are specific reporters you are targeting, follow them on Twitter. I’ll tweet out when I’m traveling or on vacation. Those are generally not the best times to reach out.
• Pay attention to reporters’ own quirks. Many people tweet out their pet peeves about PR people or what they look for in stories. Be on the lookout for those.

For the first time this week, we saw Groupon drop below 50% of its initial IPO price of $20, closing the week just below $10. Anyone who invested at the IPO and help (are there any of these people?) would have lost half their money.

This coming week, I’ll be in San Francisco. To make up for my lack of Groupon writing the last two weeks, I’ll be doing one Groupon post each day.

My work

GrubHub is bringing restaurant ordering into the 21st century – GrubHub is giving restaurants converted Kindle Fires to confirm orders. This is making it easier for restaurants while at the same time reducing customer service costs. It’s the kind of smart thinking I like to see in local.

Why Yelp is the Digg of local – Yelp has essentially failed to innovate in the last three years. It’s using an old publishing model that doesn’t make sense. But for consumers, it’s delivering one-size-fits-all results that really fit no one.

Top sales talent leaving Groupon as its woes mount – Many Groupon deals these days are seeing really low volumes. This breaks the overall Groupon model, which was predicated on selling thousands of units to cover the extremely high cost of sales. As volumes drop, salespeople can’t earn enough money on commissions and the best ones are leaving for greener pastures.

Silicon Valley needs to end its snobbery about computer science degrees – In the wake of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s resume scandal, I take a look at Silicon Valley’s snobbery around computer science degrees. I want to be clear that I’m in no way defending Thompson. He lied and there should be serious repercussions, both from Yahoo! and the SEC. (Otherwise, what’s the point of having CEOs certify statements to the SEC?) But I think that Silicon Valley ends up getting tunnel vision because of the focus on C.S. degrees for roles that don’t need them.

Me quoted elsewhere

When Yelp advertisers yelp at rates – CBS MoneyWatch takes a look at Yelp advertising. I continue to believe that Yelp local advertising is a terrible deal and no advertiser should ever run ads at the rates Yelp charges. (I’m rarely this absolute — even with Groupon, I can think of cases where running a Groupon makes sense. I can’t think of a case where I’d recommend Yelp to a business.) I found more examples this week that I’ll write about soon.

I spent the first part of the week in Chicago chatting with current and former Groupon employees and with the folks at edo Interactive, Braintree and GrubHub. GrubHub has a very interesting product that will be announced on Tuesday; I think it’s an important step in the market. I spent the second part of the week in New Orleans for Jazz Fest.

I will have plenty to say about Groupon based on my Chicago conversations in the next few weeks.

Although I didn’t write, I was quoted elsewhere.

Me quoted elsewhere

3 On Your Side: Daily Deal Fatigue – I talk to CBS Philadelphia about the consumer side of Groupon and how consumers can protect themselves. Actually, I didn’t talk to anyone in Philly; they just recycled video from an interview I did with CBS San Francisco. (I don’t think SF has aired it yet.)

Sonos at 10: Speakers command attention — I talk to USA Today about Sonos, a company I really like.

Surviving The Road Wars Of Economy Travel — I talk to Forbes about why air travel sucks. It’s mostly because vast majority of consumers aren’t willing to pay for it. If people were consistently willing to pay more, we’d have higher quality.

Other interesting nuggets

May 20th has been set as the date for my monthly wine and cheese event. DM me for details.

My work

Secrets of Facebook’s success: Virality — Facebook’s photo tagging feature was an important driver of its growth. Traditional marketing approaches aren’t as effective as products that are designed to take advantage of the social nature of people. Google+ misses the basics. While Google spends millions running beautiful Oscar ads, they ignore very basics of product design necessary for social interaction.

Can Twitter and Yammer fix our broken patent system? – Twitter announced a new agreement with its employees that Twitter will only use patents for defensive purposes and will not become a patent troll. Employees who invent for Twitter will have a say in how Twitter can use the patents. As an inventor, this has a lot of appeal. Could this be a sign of more sanity in patent battles?

Chicago Tribune talks to Groupon chairman Lefkofsky; asks the wrong questions – A Chicago Tribune business columnist sat down for an extended interview with Groupon chairman Eric Lefkofsky and failed to ask the hard questions, such as: Why did you take so much money off the table pre-IPO? How is it that you made so much money on previous companies and investors were left holding the bag.

“It just works” rules – I’m launch a new feature on VentureBeat where I’ll be taking a look at brilliantly designed products. My goal is not to traditional product reviews, but to help product people learn from great design. Do you have a product that fits my criteria? Shoot me an email.

Staying connected with friends for frequent travelers – For someone who travels as much as I do, staying in touch with friends can be a challenge. Here’s a strategy I came up with.

Other interesting nuggets

The Perils of the Daily Deal Customer – A first person account from a merchant on her daily deal experience. The merchant’s experience is exactly the result I expect from the economic model of the daily deal. At their core, daily deals create unserviceable demand from untargeted customers at massive discounts.

I just finished the final hellish weeks of a Groupon deal I ran a year ago. I’ll probably never do one again. If enough merchants grow to feel the way I do — and many already do — Groupon and its countless imitators will wither and die because they will not be able to get enough businesses to participate in the deals you so enjoy.

Why aren’t we going back for more? Because daily deal customers are worse than normal customers in every way imaginable.

I recently came up with a new approach to help me stay connected to friends and family: I committed to hosting a monthly wine and cheese gathering.

This does a number of things for me:

• I get a fun evening with friends.
• It makes it easy to meet up with a lot of people at once.
• It forces me to clean my place at least once a month.
• It forces me to unpack my suitcase at least once a month. Too often, I’ve lived out of a suitcase, even when I was actually “home.”

Having this outlet is also good for business as it helps ward off loneliness when on the road.

At once a month, it’s not a significant time commitment and the benefit is well worth it.

I also try to time it so friends and business associates who are visiting from out of town can see my friends and connect with Silicon Valley.

Because it’s in my home, I don’t post the details. But if you’re a regular reader and are visiting SF, shoot me a note and I’ll see if I can extend an invite.

Back in the day, I used to like to tinker with software and set configurations and such. The picture above is me working on my Commodore 64 a long, long time go. Back then, I rocked BASIC. I even wrote a stock portfolio app that I submitted for publication in RUN magazine. (What a kid was doing writing a stock portfolio app… well, I was a dork.)

Now, I just want stuff to work. Out of the box. I don’t want to tinker. I have a life that I want to live and that doesn’t involve searching support forums or calling tech support.

To further that goal, I’m launching a bi-weekly column featuring products and services that just work. The column will run bi-weekly on VentureBeat. (Assuming I can find enough products to feature.)

Here are some high-level guidelines on what I’m looking for:

• Must be consumer-focused.
• Hardware, software and Web apps are fine. Bonus points for seamlessly blending all of them.
• Must be shipping or soon-to-be shipping.
• Bonus points for elegantly handling network connectivity.
• Ideally, it makes the complicated simple.
• An ordinary user can go from unboxing to primary use cases within 10 minutes. (I know I’m not an ordinary user, but I can play one when I’m testing products.)
• Bonus points for elegant visual design.
• If it’s a location-based product, I need to be able to use it near my home in San Francisco.

Here are examples of things that are likely to disqualify a product:

• Requiring users to enter things like hexadecimal codes or entering IP addresses like 192.168.0.1.
• Burying essential instructions for operation in a thick user manual.
• Requiring users to install software from a CD and providing no alternatives for downloads.

This isn’t designed to be the traditional product review. It will look closely at great products and what makes them great. It doesn’t mean I won’t criticize the product, but the point is to encourage great products and help designers learn from great designers.

Based on my experience, my sense is that products from companies like Apple, Square and fitbit generally qualify. Products from companies like Cisco (except the dearly departed Flip), Microsoft and Comcast wouldn’t.

Got a product like that? Shoot me a note: redesign@agrawals.org. Please don’t ship stuff to me without an OK — my apartment is tiny.

• If Groupon’s market cap falls below $6 billion on any day on or before June 3, I win.
• If Groupon’s market cap stays above $6 billion until after June 3, Paul wins.

Market cap is measured as the market cap at the end of trading on any day, as reported by Google Finance. Intraday dips don’t count.

$6 billion is the price that Google reportedly offered for Groupon.

Stakes: loser buys dinner at restaurant of winner’s choice when we’re in the same city.