Netizen

Monday, July 06, 2009

Bleak Job Numbers

The job numbers for June came out and they were not looking good at all. The worst recession since the Great Depression is not over yet, but I am on record saying the bungee jump phase is over, and now we are in the plateau phase. And I don't think the plateau phase will last as long as the bungee jump phase did.

The Plateau Will Last Less Than Nine Months

The pain many people are feeling is very real. Many people appear clueless as to what future might have in store for them.

In Book Advertisement

All Books Need To Go Digital

Amazon Applying For In-Book Advertisement Patent http://bit.ly/JTypW

From The Netizen BlogRoll

Free vs Freely Distributed
Making a John Q Public account on Google
Celebrities - social objects or fake friends?
Freemium and Freeconomics
Watching People Come of Age
Journalistic narcissism
A Different Kind of Independence
I Believe Mark Cuban is Right
How the SF Giants saved a million bucks with telecommunications upgrades
Breakdown: 3 Ways Brands Are Earning –and Buying– Followers on Twitter
How to Build a Successful Blog

In The News

Spiral Jetty, earthwork extraordinaire

Blog: Blog: Is 'Buy and Hold' Still Best? BusinessWeek
The Sandwich Generation is SmushedVideo
Rethinking Retirement: What's Your Plan?Slideshow

Obama's Russian Business Plan
AT&T's Wireless Ambitions
What Will the Energy Bill Cost?

Economics Unbound: Merrill Lynch's unfortunately timed upgrade on U.S. economic outlook
The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems

The Palin I-Quit-arod: A Defining Trait?
Tough Times Lead to Local Currencies
Avigdor Lieberman: Politically Incorrect
Ban Ki Moon Leaves Burma Disappointed
Palin Bow-Out: Boon to Her Book Sales?
Trying Times for Russia's Nesting Dolls
Ice Age vs. Transformers — It's A Draw!
The Battle Over Michael Jackson's Legacy

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo. ....... For Google, who lives and dies by free, we dont know who their BlackSwan company will be. But we all know it will happen don’t we ? The only question is when..... The same will happen to Facebook, Twitter, pick any company who lives off of free. ...... Their better choice would be to run the company as profitably as possible, focusing only on those things that generate revenue and put cash in the bank. ........ ecognizing that they have a better chance of beating Facebook by investing in a company they think can pre empt Facebook than by trying to reconfigure MySpace to be that company.
Free vs Freely Distributed

First, there is no free. When you make money from ads, you are still making money. TV shows are free, but they run ads and make money. Is that free? I don't think so. If you are making money without directly charging your users, I think that is a tremendous business model.

And then there is free as in free but in the process you help build a brand. Step one, build a brand. Step two, monetize. Later. That is not free. As in, it is not business stupid. You don't make money on day one. But you make gobbles of money later.

Free is good. You get to cast your net wider.

People pay with their time, their attention. They give you mindspace. They pay, just not with money.

Google Search is free, but last I checked they were making ridiculous amounts of money. Are they stupid to not charge me two cents for every time I conduct a search?

Free is smart. But free is also the future. Free will win. The best offerings online will be ad-based. New forms of ads will emerge. For example, I take it for granted that Twitter will some day go public and will have a market valuation in the billions. You can bet it is not going to run banner ads like Yahoo in 1998.

And as a user I have no desire to pay for Twitter. Go figure.

Free is how Google beat Microsoft. Free is for winners. Free is smart, free is good, free is for the ages.

Free makes for a lean and thin business machine. It is a hassle to have to collect money from millions of people. It makes so much more sense to collect money from a few (or many) advertisers.

Or you can offer something for free, get a lot of people to use it, and sell it to someone else who might attempt monetization. You still made money when you sold. Why are you complaining?

Free also means you can go global, instantaneously. That is what the web is all about. The Internet is not America online. It is the humanity online, it is the World Wide Web. Pay attention to the first word: World.

Free means you don't have to deal with many currencies. Free means you don't have to worry if a user might have a credit card or not. As long as they come online and use your service is all that matters. Free is sweet.

There is free and then there is super cheap, and then there is below cost price, and then there of course is free free. You should be able to sell something below cost price for the same reasons you can offer stuff for free.

Mindfood - books, movies, music - is best served free, I think. Run ads, but offer them for free. And the web is the best distribution mechanism ever for mindfood. Technology has run leaps and bounds ahead of business models. You can't fight free, but you can make truckloads of money going along with it.

Free is the future. Hear me, Mark Cuban.

But by free I don't mean stolen: TechCrunch Has Linked To A Blog That Stole My Material.

mark

i’ve been writing a lot about this topic over the years and posted my thoughts on gladwell and anderson’s recent efforts yesterday

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.html

i’m a big fan of free, freemium, and business models based on some form of free access to web services.

i agree with you that technology is a fast moving industry and there is always a company around the corner who is going to take you down.

but i don’t think that free makes you more vulnerable.

in fact, i think paid makes you more vulnerable.

craigslist hasn’t done much in the history of the company on its platform and UI and yet it continues to beat all comers in internet classifieds. why? because its mostly free.

if it was mostly a paid service, i think it would be way more vulnerable to new entrants.

i’m a big clayton christensen fan and he talks about how the companies that are going to take you down always come up from below. there isn’t much below free

fred

Comment by fredwilson — July 5, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
Big fan of your blog Fred. I agree there isnt much below free. And that Craigslist, for now, is a stellar example of free working. On the flipside, MicroSoft and Oracle are longer term examples of companies who have battled free software for the ages. If you remember, MicroSoft Office, was all but free whenit was first introduced. You could upgrade from competitor products for nothing and buy the whole suite for 99 dollars. Then they evolved to paid and have survived. This of course could fall into your category of firms that live off of paid upgrades. Which IMHO, is the best model.

Im a big fan of give them a free taste, then make them pay for upgrades. It is why I am still involved in a nicely profitable company, Filesanywhere.com, which competes with a company I used to be involved with, Box.net. Both offer online backups. One charges and uses that revenue to differentiate with upgraded services and customized services. The other used to charge (which is why i got involved), but now is facing the challenges of being primarily free.

There are companies on both side of the argument, but I would rather be invested in a company that can afford to continue to invest in their products without depending on advertising, incredible volumes of traffic or raising more money.

m

Comment by markcuban — July 5, 2009 @ 9:28 pm

Fred Wilson

TechCrunch Has Linked To A Blog That Stole My Material

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter

97 Comments

by MG Siegler on July 4, 2009

140 Characters: Enough (Thief)

The Original: 140 Characters: Enough

http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/2490632053
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/2618862974

140 Characters: Enough

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter TechCrunch You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough. ....... they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less. ..... I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication. ..... With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist. ..... It’s a limitation that is liberating.

Tweets are building blocks to many things. 140 characters are quite enough to say something to someone in conversation mode. You say then you listen. But the real magic of tweets is that you can insert a shortened URL into those 140 characters. That is what has been the game changer. That is what led to the concept of real time search. If a tree fell in the forest, but noone was there to witness, did the tree actually fall? Tweets have challenged massive data centers on Google property. Twitter is saying they don't need to index the websites. They just need to see what sites and pages people are visiting at any one point in time.

Twitter has nowhere close to attained critical mass, but it is only a matter of time before it does. So, yes, postcards are cool, SMS is handy, and Twitter is all the rage.

I know of people who don't blog no more, they tweet. They check email less often, they tweet. There are people who don't do RSS no more, they tweet. Twitter is where they place their bookmarks.

Atoms are building blocks. They, by definition, are small. Tweets are building blocks.

I think there is an underlying logic to the 140 characters limit we have not pinned down yet.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

The Future Is Multilingual

The Internet is the future. And that future is multilingual. This is the Internet century, and this century is multilingual. This world was always multilingual. But in this century, for the first time, we will see that lingual diversity celebrated as the natural order of things instead of a nuisance or worse. America is Europe, the Internet is America. The Internet is the new country. The Internet is the new frontier, the wild wild west. The Internet is the new moon to reach out to.

You could learn new languages if you wanted to but you don't have to. You don't have to wait for all the world's knowledge to get translated from English into your local language by really smart human beings who put out tomes of translated literature. Machines will translate on demand in real time. That changes things.

You should be able to chat with someone in their own language without learning their language, in real time.

All knowledge is local. All local knowledge is global. And that too in real time. That is the Internet way.

Communication and creation/consumption will go unhindered. Languages will not get in the way. The idea that the smartest people in every culture need to learn English first, that is passe. That is so 20th century. Many still might, but not because it is demanded of them.

I love the English language, but I love linguistic diversity more. Linguistic diversity is the humanity flowering the way it is meant to flower. Each human being is unique just like each snowflake is unique. Each sentence each human being naturally speaks is unique. Is that something or is that something? Finally we have the technology to map that uniqueness. The Internet is mapping software.