Marco quoted the following paragraph from an article on MacUser. The article bemoans users expectations that web services and software be free. See the quote:
Despite the recent advent of ad-supported programs, people have been paying for software for years. And developers put no less time and energy into writing software than a woodworker [...]

I have noticed a meme in the constant conversation about revenue models for web services recently. People are proposing a version of the “freemium” business model with the following twist: a product has slightly intrusive (but contextually relevant) ads baked in that users can remove by paying a small monthly fee.
I understand the [...]

I had an itch to build something over the weekend, so I wrote a little Twitter toy script. I call it TwitterSnooze. It allows you to hit the snooze button on your Twitter friends. That means, you stop following them for a period of time, and then automatically re-follow them X days later.
Why use [...]

Anand Rajaraman, who is teaching a data mining class at Stanford, wrote up a great example of the power of a superior data asset. Anand instructed his data mining students to break into teams and create entries for the Netflix prize. Here’s what happened:
Different student teams in my class adopted different approaches to the [...]

Albert Wenger writes about the structural changes in both the firm and in web services that make a B2B marketplace more viable today than in the original dot-com boom. It’s a thoughtful piece that’s worth a careful read, and I want to add my $0.02 here:
Albert surfaces some remarkably interesting facts about how [...]

Here’s an interesting comment on software licensing from a recent article in Wired regarding the business of open source software:
“I think the software-license business model is archaic,” says Kevin Harvey, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, which recently cashed in on its investments in MySQL and the open source mail-client firm Zimbra, which Yahoo picked [...]

@msg went around and did short video interviews at SXSW asking people a simple question: WTF is Twitter? As one might expect (considering how amorphous Twitter is), the responses are all over the map. Go check out the project and @msg’s breakdown of each contribution for a deeper dive.
My favorite responses are @innonate’s [...]

A simple open question: what web services do you pay for online?
My answers are:
- Flickr: I have a pro account… $24.95/year.
- eBay: I have sold items on eBay, thus I pay them listing fees and a % of final sale. This has only been a couple dollars over many years of eBay usage.
- Akismet: This [...]

I had an interesting conversation recently with an analyst candidate at USV about the transport of bits (ie zeros and ones, coded information) vs atoms (ie physical goods, people, objects). It seems that the transfer of bits is largely a solved problem. But, we’re still figuring out the transfer of atoms…
Some big companies [...]