Posts Tagged with ‘business-model’

I am still trying to get out some posts out with my impressions of the startups that we have seen launched early this week at TechCrunch 50 and DEMOfall. I have not attended any of the two events but that gave me certain freedom of tracking what was going on and reading everything other bloggers and journalists had to say.
And it is very difficult to express my surprise when I saw Yammer announced as a winner of TC 50. I [...]

Today there’s a story on ReadWriteWeb about a new look and feel of the Bloglines beta site introduced by the company along with finally making its web-based feed reader ad-supported. True, may of us have already decided that Bloglines has no chances to survive in the competition with Google Reader, the most prominent feed reader as we tend to believe.
To tell you the truth, it was rather a surprise to me to find out that according to Hitwise Bloglines still [...]

There's a lot of chatter about decentralizing Twitter, claiming it's now too valuable to rely on an often flaky service with an API so open that it's destroying the service. What no one seems to want to examine is that giant elephant in the corner: if Twitter is so valuable why isn't anyone willing to pay for it?
Regardless of whether or not Twitter will ever become mainstream, for early adopters, the 250, and the majority of the Web 2.0-addicted populace [...]

 
Rambler Media issued a universal press release late Thursday, stating that Prof-Media has obtained regulatory approval to take control of the company. Rambler Media is a diversified Russian language media and entertainment service that operates several internet entities. Rambler maintains the leading internet portal and search engine rambler.ru, broadband ISP Rambler Telecom, and various other media outlets.
PM Invest Company Limited, the holding company for Prof-Media, will obtain an additional 6% of Rambler shares in January. This will give Prof-Media 55% [...]

Do you always end up broke every month? But you just can’t understand where the heck have they all gone to? And the worst thing was, you have tried your best to save every penny that you can. You get the idea of what I am talking about, don’t you?
So, what you need to do is actually to track your daily expenses, and you have a lot of options on how to track it. You can either write it down [...]

The presence of a revenue model doesn’t ensure profitability; if the charges, usage or number of users has been overestimated, or the cost structure scales up faster than revenue growth, new ventures burn up their startup capital faster than expected, needing infusions to keep up the pace of growth. Bootstrapping or angel investors can only take it so far; the burn rate forces tough choices.
In some ways, venture capital is easier to obtain these days. The excesses of the dot [...]

Transaction or subscription based models don’t have to be services targeting businesses. Consumers can and will pay for web services that meet their needs. A prime example is TheFamilyPost – a web service that gives families the option of storing photos and videos, creating an online scrapbook or presentation, a family website and chatroom, and more.
Sure, there are plenty of services online that offer some of these for free. You could always try using multiple service offerings to get similar [...]

Per user payment models work fine when usage doesn’t vary significantly between users; usage being clustered close to an average. It starts to break down if some users can benefit much more than others; heavy users then get subsidized by light users, leading to two possible outcomes: either the light users break away to another less expensive alternative, or begin to waste the resources in a bid to redress that inequality. Both of these are inefficient options, driven by inefficiencies [...]

As we saw yesterday, a “free plus ad supported” model makes most sense for consumer oriented activities; where the presence of a “non-free” offering means that most first time viewers will choose to stay away or opt for other free offerings instead. For businesses, however, the ad-supported approach may not make sense; a subscription style offering may be far better. Following the success of Salesforce.com and other web based services, a number of Web 2.0 businesses are exploring the subscription [...]