by byamabe on November 18, 2010
I was a big fan of O’Reilly’s “Ebook Deal of the Day.” O’Reilly would pick an ebook from their catalog and sell it for $9.99 for the day. It was a great way to entice me to buy an ebook (I bought 4 or 5), it also trained me that a good deal on an ebook is $9.99. Now O’Reilly has changed their daily deal to typically be a 50% discount. Since the change I’ve bought zero of the deals and find it highly unlikely that I will in the future. This partially due to my perception that these deals aren’t so great anymore, but it really comes down to the fact that few O’Reilly ebooks are worth more than $9.99 to me.
O’Reilly used to be the goto name for technical books. Now I go first to the Pragmatic Programmers and Apress. O’Reilly puts out the encyclopedic overviews of a technology. The other two are more focused on using the technologies in practice. O’Reilly books don’t offer me more than concepts and big ideas that are quite easy to find on the web. The Pragmatic Programmers and Apress walk you through projects and techniques, some of which you may be able to find with some digging, but which work better when gathered and presented in a cohesive way.
I still follow the O’Reilly “Ebook Deal of the Day” imaging that one of the books will be a must-have, but I’m much more diligent about checking Apress’s Deal of the Day or informIT’s.
by byamabe on October 18, 2010
Fred Wilson is a well known venture capitalist who coined the term “Freemium” which is a business model where you offer basic services for free and make money through selling advanced services. His latest post is how Android will own the market in a few years because of its low price point.
I don’t follow VC blogs anymore because I have no interest in venture backed startups, but there is something very interesting in the comments for independent software developers in the mobile space. When talking about making money in the Android ecosystem here is Fred Wilson’s response:
we are not talking about selling software here
we are talking about web services, which are largely monetized with advertising
The takeaway is that if you want to sell software then the Android space is not the place to be. Building a company by selling software requires organic growth. This is antithetical to the current climate of VC business models. The current model is that you need a large and ever expanding user base with the potential for monetization (Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Flikr, del.icio.us). That monetization may never occur (YouTube, Skype, Flikr, del.icio.us), but the potential is there. You sell that potential to Google, Microsoft, or someone else with deep pockets and that’s where the VC and founders make their money. The business for the VC was in monetizing the company transaction not an actual product or service.
Hey, if that’s the way you want to play, I have no qualms. I’m just trying to highlight to developers and people interested in selling software on mobile devices that the iOS and Android ecosystems are two different beasts. If you want to develop a high quality app that you can charge money for, then you’ll have more success on iOS. If your application or service is geared more towards a free app with advertising then you’ll probably find more success on Android.
Has the TV Become a Personal Entertainment Device?
May 21, 2010I saw that Google annouced Google TV. The idea of searching my recorded shows and other sources to find programs to watch is kind of interesting except I have enough trouble keeping track of the 2 remotes and now I have to keep a keyboard laying around to watch TV? The final pitch was an [...]