The Long Tail: The three kinds of FREE (23)
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Chris Anderson (161)
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The Long Tail (142)
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One of the themes of the book is untangling the confusion over different kinds of free,which can range from a simple marketing gimmick to a radically new economic model. I've taken a quick pass at doing this visually, but we'll really have to pretty these diagrams up (perhaps with cute restroom-style figures for the various parties, rather than the Ps and Cs below?) Here's the first, which dates back more than a century. It's the ...
Why haven't we been arrested? (1)
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Everyone's Blog Posts - DIY Drones (4)
1 day, 11 hours
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Autopilots are export controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which is why it's very difficult for US manufacturers to sell abroad without incredibly complicated guarantees about security procedures put in place by the buyer. That doesn't just apply to autopilot hardware; it also covers autopilot software, groundstation code and other technology in digital form such as schematics. And "export" doesn't just mean physically sending boxes abroad, it also covers "export by electronic ...
Michael Moore to release his next film free online (8)
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Chris Anderson (161)
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The Long Tail (142)
1 day, 20 hours
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[My take: I'm not so sure that Moore is giving up tens of millions of box office revenues on this one, as AP suggests. Getting theatrical distribution for a documentary is hard, even for Moore, and it maybe this one just didn't look like it was going to sell well enough to justify that. So it may really be a case of free online vs straight to DVD. And for Moore, for whom political impact ...
37 Signals: Charge for your products, Dummy! (8)
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The Long Tail (142)
2 days, 9 hours
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[File under respected opposition] David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried’s business partner at 37signals, begs to differ with the notion that Web companies shouldn't charge for their products. In a very entertaining speech (video below), he makes his case: Forget using free to go mass and hope you'll become Facebook (or be bought by them). Instead, he says, focus on a small market and charge money. There are many ways to have a price in web ...
Geekdad invents the best Lego Sumobots ever (2)
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Geekdad (103)
2 days, 11 hours
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This is what the ill-fated Lego Spybotics should have been. Master Lego Mindstorms builder (and geek dad) Steve Hassenplug has come up with the easiest-to-program sumo bots ever. Use the new Mindstorms RFID sensor, he's created cards with pre-programmed attack and defense moves on them. The kids just decide which cards they want to use, pass them over the RFID reader on each bot, and they're ready to fight. It's like Pokemon but with real ...
Hal Varian: 14 Free business models (33)
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The Long Tail (142)
2 days, 23 hours
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I had a great interview today with Google's economist-in-residence Hal Varian on the economics of free. He pointed me to a 2004 paper he wrote on the changing economics of content and copyright in a digital world. It includes 14 business models that allow content creators to make money even if they cannot stop the content from being distributed for free. Here they are: "Most information is born digital and that digital information is typically ...
Microblogging random examples of free (6)
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The Long Tail (142)
3 days, 14 hours
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I'm back from the family vacation (the beach at Stinson was perfect aside from the 12ft Great White) and am now entering the last two months of crunch book writing. We'll be launching a blog redesign tomorrow, and the focus will shift to mostly FREE material (although the name of the blog will remain the same--there's too much Googlejuice there to give it up). To replace the sidebar in current blog, I'll be microblogging random ...
Buy the phone, get the music library for free (3)
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The Long Tail (142)
4 days, 2 hours
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From Silicon Alley Insider: Next month Nokia will launch its "Comes With Music" subscription service in the U.K., ahead of 2009 launches in Europe and Asia. Your new Nokia phone comes with a "free" year's worth of music -- an all-you-can-eat selection of 2.1 million songs, which is about 25% of Apple's iTunes library. After that, you can pay to keep using the service, or cut it off and keep your original song files. Unanswered ...
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Jon Price said:
so, like, you can just make sure to have downloaded all the available music before your subscription runs out and you'll have one gigantic library free and clear!?! cool... hope they'll approach iTunes catalog size quickly! ;)
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (8)
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Chris Anderson (161)
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Wired Top Stories (1372)
1 week, 5 days
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"All models are wrong, but some are useful." So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they ...
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Rakesh said:
Isnt it more like a new heretofore impossible methodology?
The Long Tail: You may be on Facebook, but the money's in the Long Tail (2)
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Chris Anderson (161)
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The Long Tail (142)
2 weeks, 4 days
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I've argued before that social networking should be a feature, not a destination, and that the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform. It turns out that it's not just the experience that's better on the smaller, more focused sites: the economics work better there, too. Yesterday MySpace's parent ...
Why Technology Hasn't Saved Us From Inflation (but still can) (20)
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The Long Tail (142)
2 weeks, 6 days
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I have a piece in the Aug 11th issue of Newsweek International, but Newsweek's website does such a poor job with magazine content that it's practically unfindable (it's actually on the seventh screen of this series of perspectives from economists and other experts). So here it is: Unleash The World's EngineersChris Anderson believes that the price-cutting power of technology can still bring nations relief if only bureaucrats will allow it to. Technology can be a ...
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fesja said:
no stoy nada de acuerdo con chris, no podemos sacrificar cualquier cosa con tal de ahorrar dinero y hacerlo más barato
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (3)
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Wired Top Stories (1372)
3 weeks
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King Gillette's 1895 disposable blades made good freebies to help sell other products. Companies use his business model today to create demand for their goods: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games. Now, the underlying technologies that power the web are making
The surprising derivation of the word free (8)
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The Long Tail (142)
4 weeks, 1 day
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In English the word "free" is fraught with ambiguous meaning, which is why the open source world has to make the distinction between free as in speech vs. free as in beer. In Romance languages, such as Spanish, French or Italian, the meaning munged into the English word "free" is split between two words, one derived from the Latin "libre" (freedom) and the other from the Latin "gratis" (zero price). In these languages, "libre" is ...
Thirteen words that lose their meaning when the denominator approaches infinity (27)
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The Long Tail (142)
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When you think about it, a lot of the English language is really about ratios within a finite set. So you can say "most Americans" and that's meaningful, because the number of Americans is approximately known and relatively static. Likewise for "few" or "many"--these words are implicitly ratios, and they assume some common agreement on what the denominator is. The world we grew up in was full of bounded sets--relatively well known and static populations ...
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Ben said:
How are you supposed to demonstrate any sort of rule or law if you cannot use grouping words? Saying "my cat is black" tells you nothing, other cats can be owned and black.
When should a kid get an Airsoft gun (if ever)? (1)
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Geekdad (103)
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My 11-year-old has been bugging me all summer to talk his mother into letting him buy an Airsoft gun (I am, of course, an assumed yes). When I was a kid I had a BB gun, as did most of my friends. We promised to be careful, and then we shot each other in the butt and accidentally put some holes in windows. But nobody lost an eye, and it seemed like just part of ...
Mod your kid's Star Wars toy into an awesome prop/nightlight (1)
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Wired: GeekDad (81)
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Huge respect to geekdad Peter Clute, who bought a Hasbro Millenium Falcon for Pete Jr, and then went to work. End result: an insanely detailed, weathered and fully LED-bedecked toy that looks awesome hanging from the ceiling or, well, anywhere. Loads of pictures like the below in the Gizmodo coverage of this:
I wish people would stop using economy as just a smart-sounding metaphor (23)
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Chris Anderson (161)
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The Long Tail (142)
1 month
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Economists use incentives to explain human behavior. In traditional economics these are mainly monetary incentives, but the expansion of the field to behavioral economics in the 1970s introduced other factors, such as risk minimization and social rewards, that weren't directly tied to money but could influence actions all the same. The current vogue for all things economic has encouraged the Freakonomics crowd to use the same language to explain the emerging online world: today we ...
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Ben said:
Just so long as we continue using words like "incentivize"...
The time/money formula of free (51)
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The Long Tail (142)
1 month, 1 week
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At some point in your life, you will wake up and discover that you have more money than time. And you will then realize that you should start doing things differently, which means not walking four blocks to find an ATM that doesn't charge a fee, driving for miles to find cheaper gas, or painting your own house. This same calculus is the foundation of a big part of the "freemium" economy. We see it ...
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Brian Oberkirch said:
You can build a good business on this model, as Limor Fried (AKA LadyAda, picture above), has shown with her electronics kit retail/design/community AdaFruit Industries. She and her business partner, Philip Torrone, explain the economics and tactics in a presentation here (good summary here).Short form: 1. Build a community around free information and advice on a particular topic. 2. With that community's help, design some products that people want, and return the favor by making the products free in raw form. 3. Let those with more money than time/skill/risk-tolerance buy the more polished version of those products. (That may turn out to be almost everyone) 4. Do it again and again, building a 40% margin into the products to pay the bills. As Torrone said in an email, "I can't imagine doing a book, a video, a magazine unless I had a community that would rally along the way. In the end it always seemed to be about a story, people like to see the beginning, middle, end and plot of something -- and if there's a buy button somewhere, they sometimes click it and reward us for working hard."
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iAdramelk said:
At some point in your life, you will wake up and discover that you have more money than time. And you will then realize that you should start doing things differently, which means not walking four blocks to find an ATM that doesn't charge a fee, driving for miles to find cheaper gas, or painting your own house.
There's a Lot of Money to Be Made in the Free Economy (2)
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SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page (22)
1 month, 1 week
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Chris Anderson submits: Here's a question I get all the time: How big is the free economy? That's harder to answer than you might think, for both definition and measurement reasons. But here's a first past at doing it anyway. (Note: I'm just using US figures below, unless marked otherwise)Complete Story »
How big is the free economy? (37)
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The Long Tail (142)
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Here's a question I get all the time: how big is the free economy? That's harder to answer than you might think, for both definition and measurement reasons. But here's a first past at doing it anyway. (Note: I'm just using US figures below, unless marked otherwise) There are at least three classes of free: The first is the use of "free" as a marketing gimmick: "buy one, get one free", "free with purchase", "free ...
