FocuSoft Tech Blog |
- Is Free The Future Of Enterprise Software? Yes And No.
- They’d Have Been Better Off Stealing Two Cans and a String [Thievery]
- Want To Give Pinboard A Try? You’ll Have To Pay $2.84
- Favstar.fm Makes The Twitter “Favorite” Less Of An Unwanted Step-Child
- iPod Dock stacks on interchangeable gadgets
- Young nerds rejoice! Electronic playground coming to Layton, Utah
- ‘Power-Line Exploit’ Logs Your Keystrokes Using Outlets, Lasers [Security]
- Neoluxiim demos solar-powered e ink display
- Insect Cyborgs Could Replace Smoke Detectors, Rescue Earthquake Victims [Cyborgs]
- The Philips SpotOn Motion Sensing LED Light
| Is Free The Future Of Enterprise Software? Yes And No. Posted: 12 Jul 2009 04:30 PM PDT
There’s now a lot of buzz debating the business model of “Free” with the release of Chris Anderson’s new book. Most of the conversation has focused on free media and free consumer services, but ultimately the effects and expectations of free in our consumer lives will begin to emerge within our business lives. Today, there’s no shortage of examples of free or “freemium” business software, from commercial services (37Signals, PBworks, Google Apps) to open source (Mysql, SugarCRM), yet, there’s still a great divide of SaaS solutions selling their software with an “older” format (Salesforce.com) and even some with a really old model (SharePoint). Simply judging by the relative market caps of companies pursuing each model, no one in SaaS has built up a substantial enterprise business yet with the model of free or freemium alone. Mysql only got to $50M in revenue before it was acquired, and the majority of freemium enterprise service providers are still in the tens-of-millions range, with few exceptions. Mark Cuban brings an interesting point to the debate: when you live by your free service, you die by your free service. There’s certainly merit in this argument if your business model is an advertising model based on pageview volume alone or if you’re holding up solely because of venture capital. When your uniqueness and flavor dries up, so may your users, and thus your revenue and funding. This was generally Mark’s concern when we introduced the free version early in 2006 (he was an early investor in Box, with no current stake): Why would people ever pay? How do you avoid just eating up a ton of costs with no revenue to supplement? What about when someone else comes out with a version of your service that’s also free with more bells and whistles? How will you remain competitive? To put one main argument to rest, we’ve learned that there is no business model in Free alone (duh), while there may just be a large business model in Freemium in time. There are a few reasons why the freemium model has enabled new software products to grab significant market share while also build a strong enterprise business in the face of dozens of startup competitors and giants like (both free and pay). This model allows you to surface your service to a much wider customer base (cross vertical, geography, function) and learn from and efficiently attract all types of users onto the service. And – more significantly – maintaining a free version of your service for a single user or small group is a very efficient way to get users to eventually actually pay for your product: customers can quickly try out your service without a lengthy sales pitch and users with limited requirements can get by for free, but recommend the business version to their company when the time is right. Take a look at Google Apps for a great example of this model done right. You can use as much Gmail and Calendar as you want as a single user or small group, but if you want the real business version on your domain, it’s time to pay up (see their 15,000 seat Genentech deal). Instead of spending large amounts of money on marketing that tells people about a product, create a community of free users and create evangelists in the process. It also helps avoid the risk of competitors coming in and undercutting your costs – fun fact: when in a sales “bake off,” Box.net loses the largest amount of deals to ourselves, not to another service. Let me emphasize that in case you missed it: Not everyone will find the same value in your product or service. For those that don’t, why not keep them as users and turn them into evangelists? Freemium allows the actual consumer of the technology to make decisions in an unprecedented way: if the product doesn’t solve their problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. Instead of focusing primarily on the purchasing party (often an IT or department manager), the model is inverted, with more power being put in the hands of the end-user of the technology. Onerous contracts and deep sales relationships don’t keep them there. This means your product has to rock, and it has to constantly be asking and answering the same fundamental question: are we providing the best valuable possible? If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay. Freemium is also great strategy for products that have high switching costs – why not allow me to start using a free version, get hooked, and begin charging me when I hit a threshold of activity? Every day, in our own business, we have to make budget decisions on new software which can ultimately hold up the purchase by months; whereas if we were able to start using the product immediately we’d quickly hit a usage threshold, and we’d be more convinced about the solution at the point of purchase (no more buyers remorse). Instead, we end up doing a price bake off between multiple solutions, and whoever has the better sales rep and “story” essentially wins. What if Salesforce.com gave you the first 100 contacts for free, then you start paying once you need more? Once my first 100 leads are added into SalesForce, I’m not going anywhere else. If your service offers true ROI once implemented, why not let me implement it for free and charge me once I achieve some success? These strategies will reduce the sales friction of any service, allow businesses to be more competitive, and expand the potential market dramatically. The great news is that because software distribution and sales models are adapting with the times, the number of people that can now access and afford your product has gone up exponentially in the past decade. Given the fact that we can now develop and deliver software much more easily and cheaply (distribution over the web vs. hardware and software sales), and thus reflect these cost improvements onto customers, we can now go after much larger or harder to reach markets more efficiently (small businesses, for instance). With the right product, reaching 10 million potential business users and customers is now trivial. Imagine doing that 10 or 20 years ago. And with an addressable market in the millions of users, it becomes a lot more practical than ever before to make a meaningful business just selling to a subset of that base. So what to take from all this? Here are some quick lessons we’ve learned from “Free” in the enterprise:
This discussion certainly isn’t over. We’re going through a major sea change. It happened to music, it happened to consumer services, it’s happening to newspapers and publishing, and it will happen to business software. The business models are changing. It means software businesses will need to be innovative and adaptable, but ultimately you’ll survive if people want what you have to offer, regardless of the price tag. Of course there will always be room for premium software to be pay-only, just like we still expect to pay a premium for a variety of content in the “real” world (movies, research reports, education, etc); but, for mass penetration the reality is Free and Freemium will you get there quicker, faster, and with less friction along the way. If that’s what you’re looking for, then it’s just up to you to figure out the actual business model if you want it to last. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Read more here:
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| They’d Have Been Better Off Stealing Two Cans and a String [Thievery] Posted: 12 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
Reports HuffPo:
Even though the hot goods are nearly worthless, detectives are still on the case, meaning these nimrods could eventually serve some jail time for their hollow plastic haul. [Huffington Post - Thanks, Scotland]
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| Want To Give Pinboard A Try? You’ll Have To Pay $2.84 Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:57 PM PDT
Last week I wrote about a snappy new bookmarking tool called Pinboard. The best way to describe it is Delicious before Yahoo mangled that product into an over-featured sluggish shadow of its formerly zippy self. Founder Maciej Ceglowski, a former Yahoo and Twitter engineer, noted a surge of new account request in a blog post, noting that he was putting new resources in place to take on the new users. Today, though, he sent out an email to people requesting accounts telling them they’ll need to pay a “small signup fee” to create a new account:
This is a side project for Ceglowski, so charging a fee for new users certainly isn’t a dumb business move. And if enough people pay to use the service, maybe it will signal to him to move this front and center on his priority list. I would have done things a little differently, though – let people in for free and charge them after a week or so or shut down their account. That lets people try it out before they open their wallet. Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 See the original post:
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| Favstar.fm Makes The Twitter “Favorite” Less Of An Unwanted Step-Child Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:32 PM PDT
One would assume you’re supposed to use it to start your favorite tweets, but I don’t use it like that, because what’s the point? Instead, I mostly use it to bookmark tweets that I want to find later. But a new service Favstar.fm hopes to take the Favorite functionality back to its roots, and make it useful. While the fairly popular Favrd service has revolved around favorites for a while, it is basically only useful to show the most favorited tweets across the whole network on any given day. You can find individual user pages, but it’s not very obvious how to do that, and results only go back for a few weeks. Favstar.fm wants to be the all encompassing Twitter favorites destination. The main page shows a recent leaderboard that can be set to show tweets of only a certain level (10 favorites, for example). If you sign in via Twitter OAuth, you get a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting. Also, by signing in it is easy to see who is favoriting your tweets. As we all know, a big part of Twitter is vanity, so many of us likely want to know who is favoriting which tweets of ours. With Favstar.fm, it’s easy to see that. Because it’s aiming to track favorites across the whole network for all time periods, Favstar works a little slower than Favrd does, developer Tim Haines tells us. But it seems like a fair trade-off to get all this data. And if you want your data quicker, Favstar.fm prioritizes those users who sign in via Twitter OAuth.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors View post:
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| iPod Dock stacks on interchangeable gadgets Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:30 PM PDT
With reading about concept designs, you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes they’re fairly reasonable and then there are others that are just far fetched and ridiculous. Then there are those you just hope the technology is out there to make it possible, because it would make things far more simple. Which is where this design would fall into. It is a dock for your iPod, but it allows for other things to be stacked along with it, besides just ordinary speakers. You could choose how many speakers you wanted, along with adding a couple of things you might not expect. Things like a light to give a nice glow along with your tunes, as well as an air purifier. Adding an air purifier to it would make it so that you didn’t have a separate purifier cluttering up your desk. The design was created by Sang-hoon Lee. It may never make it to an actual store, but it’d definitely be nice if it did. Source: SlipperyBrick Cool Gift Idea: Digital Picture Frames, check out our reviews. [ iPod Dock stacks on interchangeable gadgets copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
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| Young nerds rejoice! Electronic playground coming to Layton, Utah Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:30 PM PDT
Layton, Utah is about to get the “first interactive electronic public playground west of the Mississippi.” The $500,000 project will feature three acres of land, tennis and basketball courts, and electronic “versions of capture the flag and tug of war” along with “a rocking balance piece in which children attempt to get an electronic dot inside a circle.” The park is an attempt to get children outdoors to play, with the interactive “ICON” pieces, being purchased from a company called Kompan in Denmark. There are apparently two similar parks already in existence; one in Philadelphia and one in New York City. The ICON pieces are interchangeable, allowing for easy upgrading and replacement in the future. Layton park with plug-ins [Standard.net via Boston.com] Here is the original post:
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| ‘Power-Line Exploit’ Logs Your Keystrokes Using Outlets, Lasers [Security] Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:30 PM PDT
The technique is a form of keylogging, which is nothing new, but in an interesting twist hackers have figured out a non-traditional way to replicate the process using nothing but the electric signals created with each keystroke. Oh, and even if you aren’t plugged into a socket, they they can still log keystrokes remotely using a laser. Called the “power-line exploit,” the two-part technique is outlined in a Network World article ominously headlined “How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data,” and will be but one of several nefarious data-stealing methods on display at Black Hat USA 2009 in Las Vegas later this month. Network World explains:
Which is precisely why I blog and work in a Faraday cage. In my underwear with stains on my shirt, naturally, as Best Buy revealed earlier. [Network World via CrunchGear]
Go here to read the rest:
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| Neoluxiim demos solar-powered e ink display Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:02 PM PDT
 We’ve been sort of wondering when we’d see a solar e-ink display, and here we are — Neoluxiim is demoing this panel for use in point-of-sale advertising. What’s interesting here is that the background appears to be in color while the text is black, but we’re assuming that’s just a fixed image behind the e-ink layer. Everyone ready for impulse purchasing to go high-tech? Video after the break. Continue reading Neoluxiim demos solar-powered e ink display Filed under: Displays Neoluxiim demos solar-powered e ink display originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| Insect Cyborgs Could Replace Smoke Detectors, Rescue Earthquake Victims [Cyborgs] Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:00 PM PDT
No, seriously, cyborg crickets. This is a good thing! Why? Simple. When a building collapses, say from an earthquake or a terrorist bombing, survivors are often trapped in the rubble. Sometimes they’re rescued, and sometimes, due to the nature of being buried alive under tons and even tonnes of rock (something we do lose sleep over), they aren’t. Enter the cyborg crickets. What the Pentagon hopes to do is make these six-legged pests into chemical sniffers and eventually even human sniffers when catastrophe strikes. They’ll do this by implanting electrodes into winged insects to control their wing muscles. The inaugural class of crickets, cicadas and katydids are already being worked on as I type this, so that their usual calls and communication will instead only occur in the presence of certain chemicals. Additionally, scientists would “install” an acoustic sensor on our new six-legged saviors that’s “designed to respond to the altered calls of other insects.” Ultimately, this final modification would ensure a cascade effect amongst the insects, so that their signals are eventually picked up by ground-based human-controlled transceivers. So the next time you’re trapped in a collapsed building, don’t crush that little guy who’s chirping madly into your ear. He may very well be trying to save your life. [New Scientist]
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| The Philips SpotOn Motion Sensing LED Light Posted: 12 Jul 2009 02:37 PM PDT
Most people have a few different areas that are just dark. Be it a coat closet that lacks a light or an incredibly deep cabinet that stays constantly pitch black, there are just bound to be those areas. Some are willing to grab a flashlight for those times when lighting is needed. However, if your hands are usually full when you’re dealing with a particular linen closet, it can be highly inconvenient. Which is where this Philips SpotOn light would come in extremely handy. It’s an affordable little light that is hung on the wall itself. When it senses movement, it just automatically kicks on. So you won’t have to worry about flipping a switch when your hands are already full. It’s a small light with a total of 3 energy efficient LED lights. It shuts back off within 20 seconds if it doesn’t sense any further movement. To keep it running you’ll need 3 AAA batteries. You can purchase it for $15.50 from Energy Circle. Source: BookofJoe Check out the Coolest Gadgets 2008 Gift Guides, Christmas shopping made easy. [ The Philips SpotOn Motion Sensing LED Light copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
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Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of ![f31fe75e5estring.jpg Theyd Have Been Better Off Stealing Two Cans and a String [Thievery]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/f31fe75e5estring.jpg.jpg "Theyd Have Been Better Off Stealing Two Cans and a String [Thievery]")
What is it with idiots and electronics today? First, some bone-headed German bargain hunters got swindled 
Here’s an innovative idea – charge users to beta test a product.
The “Favorite” is kind of like the unwanted step child feature of Twitter. Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use.
![2f0595df99yboard.jpg Power Line Exploit Logs Your Keystrokes Using Outlets, Lasers [Security]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/2f0595df99yboard.jpg.jpg "Power Line Exploit Logs Your Keystrokes Using Outlets, Lasers [Security]")
Thinking about plugging your laptop into one of those coveted airplane terminal power outlets while you wait for your flight to arrive? Be careful, because a hacker could be using those energy-giving wires against you.![c91bd49b1aatydid.jpg Insect Cyborgs Could Replace Smoke Detectors, Rescue Earthquake Victims [Cyborgs]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/c91bd49b1aatydid.jpg.jpg "Insect Cyborgs Could Replace Smoke Detectors, Rescue Earthquake Victims [Cyborgs]")
The Pentagon is known for its ominous pet projects, but here’s one we can honestly say doesn’t have us losing any sleep: Cyborg crickets.
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