Ben Benner’s Blog

I wish I could claim to have been the one to coin the term Freemium. Per Wikipedia, the phrase is attributed to venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

Freemium is a business model which works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. The word freemium is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: free and premium. The business model has gained popularity with Web 2.0 companies.

I wanted to write  this post a little while back, closer to when it happened, but cest la vie.

This post is about Kindlefeeder.com.

My wife has been an avid fan of Kindlefeeder for almost as long as she has owned an Amazon Kindle. It is a very cool service that pulls in the RSS feeds from the blogs (or news sites) that you want and packaged them up into one document. It then emails that document to your Kindle’s email address.

There are a few different services out that there that do this type of operation, some of them are web based, some are desktop software packages you install. I think that the web based ones like Kindlefeeder are the better way to go.

The web based ones are representative of a centralized system.  Whereas, the desktop software packages are representative of a distributed system.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds. In my opinion though the centralized way is the better way to distribute such a service, to the masses (particularly when you are doing it as a freemium). The main factor behind this is, desktop software requires a certain level of technical sophistication that you don’t normally find across the vast majority of “the masses”.

With a desktop software model you will need to push changes out via software updates, which HAVE to be installed to work. There is also the factor that your software organization will need to be prepared to support the different operating systems that exist.

The web based system on the other hand means that you can push out changes immediately and all users will see the new graphics or benefit from the bug fixes. While you still have multiple ’systems’ to support, the browsers are all fairly uniform.

But I am getting off topic here. Let me bring this back to Kindlefeeder.

Kindlefeeder is a service that sends a compiled document of all the RSS feeds that you want to your Kindle email address. You manage your account via the Kindlefeeder.com website. And the behind-the-scenes software processes there go out and get the RSS data and compile the document per the schedule that you choose.

Beautiful!!!

Of course, getting back to the centralized vs distributed comparison. A distributed software service, is typically cheaper to operate. Because the distributed service will use the software of the local machines where it is being run. Also, in the case of the Kindle these software services typically transfer the documents to the Kindle via the USB vs email (which saves the Kindle owner money).

The centralized software service requires that you have servers, bandwidth, disk space and if your service gets really popular you sometimes have to exponentially increase all of those things. At the Web 2.0 conference a few years back, one of the original architects of Digg.com stated that they were adding several servers a day. He also stated that they started with only one server, that in the beginning they optimized the heck out of it.

Kindlefeeder.com was registered in September of 2008, but on March 10th 2009, Kindlefeeder put out a notice stating that there would be a change in their service.

Because of the money and time required to keep Kindlefeeder afloat and improving has grown considerable, I am now asking for a small monthly subscription payment from higher-volume users and voluntary donations from others to help support this website.

So from now on there will be two types of service: free basic and unlimited.

Free basic: just by having a Kindlefeeder user account, you can subscribe to up to 5 feeds and use all the features of the servie for free.

Unlimited: For $5 a month, you can subscribe to an unlimited number of feeds.

From the first moment that Gina pointed the Kindlefeeder service out to me, I wondered when the shoe would drop. When would Kindlefeeder reach that critical mass point of either such severe popularity that the owner would NEED to start charging for the service because of the costs associated to supporting the service or because they felt that they could start to charging because of the fact that it was just such a useful utility.

This means that it took approx 6 months to reach the point where Daneil Choi, owner of KindleFeeder.com felt the NEED to start charging.

To me this transformation from a simple free service to a freemium service means that there is a potential market. That there might be room for two or three different paid kindle oriented feed services.

In terms of a looking at a free service and trying to apply what one might call traditional market logic, the ‘URL Abstraction’ market is one that is a bit saturated, particularly with free services. And yet there appears to be room out there for at least one freemium provider. Budurl.com turned up their freemium version a while ago.

From what I have heard, their ‘analytics’ package was drawing quite a crowd. I have also heard that once they started their freemium offerings, they lost some of their following.

In a related note, an article about what I am calling ‘URL Abstraction’ hit on TechCruch hit my radar recently. The article lists five different companies that ’shrink urls’ or what I would call ‘URL Abstraction’. The reason for the article is that apparently Bit.Ly recently received $2M in funding.

To that the article speculates that TinyURL, should be worth approx $46M. The interesting bit though, is that TinyURL doesn’t charge any money, they do not appear to have any direct monetization in their business model. Bit.ly does not have a direct monetization strategy either, yet. That begs the question, how did they get $2M of investment? Will we see them pump out a monetization strategy similar to BudUrl or will they take that money and produce some other kind of service.

Only time will tell.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology, business, kindle, newTechnology amazon, Bit.ly, freemium, kindle, kindlefeeder, techCrunch, tinyurl

I do not follow many blogs, nor do I repost or comment on others blogs here much. I guess I am a bit anti-social even on the web. I am endevouring to change this, but that is not the topic of this post.

One of the few blogs I follow, Anil Dash, had a really good post yesterday, the title was ‘re:Vision’.

“…is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off? My sense is that we’re more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.”

Those closing lines of Anil’s re:Vision post, are what made me feel compelled to comment on his latest article. I have been paying more and more attention to product design over the last couple of years and I don’t just mean the style of the design, i.e. how cool something looks.

I have started asking myself whenever I come across a new product (or service), “What problem does that solve?” Because, a great product should solve problems (or at least more problems than it creates).

Rarely, have I thought about “is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?”

I think to looks a product/service and be able to really answer that question, you do need to look at the vision, move beyond what is quite frankly just the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem”.

“When launching the new version of Amazon’s book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” It’s a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device’s initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world’s biggest bookstore. “

The opening paragraph of Anil’s article. He quotes Jeff Bezos, who states the vision for the Kindle(2). I mean, in terms of solving a problem, if there is someone out there that truly needs access to every book ever printed and they need it in less than 60 seconds, then Amazon’s Kindle devices are going to likely be their best bet.

But, as I said, moving beyond the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem” the idea of being able to access any book in the world in less than 60 seconds (for a nominal fee of course) is amazing. It would seem like the stuff of the future just a couple of decades ago, only the futuristic worlds of the Jetsons or Star Trek would allow you to have that sort of information at your fingertips.

But thanks in part to many of the other companies, some of which were mentioned in Anil’s article, like Microsoft and Apple that dream of instant gratification has become a reality. After reading books like “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, “What the Dormouse Said”, “Accidental Empires” and lastly “Dealers of Lightning”, I would have to add companies like Xerox, IBM, Bolt Beranek and Newman, government agencies such as ARPA (later known as DARPA).

I also want to also mention Vannevar Bush for his idea of the Memex (proposed in 1945) having influenced J.C.R. Licklider who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science. Lick, as he was known to friends, wrote a fairly famous paper Man-Computer Symbiosis.

My point of all of that is that, the idea of being able to access man’s collective knowledge is something that has been around what seems like forever (in Internet time). And I applaud Amazon as taking up the vision where others have left off.

I am glad to see that there are companies out there that are doing more than just solving problems, they are trying to change the world. I know that the made for TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley comes to mind, in regards to a young Steve Jobs talking about how they are “changing the world, overthrowing dead culture” (paraphrased).

And of course, it just also happens to fit nicely into Amazon’s business plan to be able to give you access to any book in the world, with no physical delivery to deal with (or a warehouse, or physical returns, etc).

Latez

bdbenner Technology, amazon, apple, blogs, kindle amazon, anil dash, apple, kindle, microsoft, vision, xerox

My life that is, flashed before my eyes.

I went to turn on the Kindle yesterday morning and to my surprise, nothing. The screen save didn’t change, the silver dots did not dance, as a matter of fact the silver dots were abscenst altogether.

My first thought was that maybe it had “locked-up”, I sort of remember it doing that to Gina once. She fixed it by switching the power button on the back to the off position.

Nope, that didn’t help.

Troubleshooting 101: Reboot!!!

I found the reset “button” on the back, I grabbed a paperclip and pressed it into the hole.

Nope, that didn’t help.

Troubleshooting 200: Disconnect and Reconnect the battery.

This was a bit harder to do, it is locked in there pretty tight.

Nope, that didn’t help.

I searched the Interwebs for a few minutes and came to the conclusion that the battery was dead. Not broken per se, just out of juice.

When Gina gave me the Kindle the other day she mentioned that the battery needed to be drained. From what I could see the battery should have had between a 1/4 and 1/3 charge remaining.

I unfortunately had neglected to put the Kindle charger in my laptop bag and unlike Kindle2, the original does not charge via the USB plug. Kudos to Amazon for making sure that drawback was not passed on to Kindle2.

Grabbing the charger as soon as I got home, I quickly connected the Kindle. I immediately saw life in the Kindle, the little silver dots along the right hand side began moving up and then down, in a rhythmic pattern indicating that the Kindle was charging.

I gave it a minute, then woke it from it’s slumber.

A sigh of relief was released as I was able to see the list of books on my Kindle, meaning that my wife would not summarily end my life for breaking the precious gift she had so recently bestowed on me.

In other news, I finished reading the first Artemis Fowl book last night.

I need to go and get ready for work.

Laterz

bdbenner amazon, kindle dead battery, death, kindle

These were the sounds heard the other day as my wife made the purchase of her Kindle2.

Gina has had her current Kindle since October of 2008, during this time period she has raved about the marvels of this ingenious little electronic device. I don’t know this for a complete fact, but I am pretty sure she has convinced a few people to buy one of those buggers.

Did I mention that she is a bit of a Kindle fanatic?

At lunch we listen to the Kindle Chronicles, a weekly podcast debuting every Friday. The man’s voice that narrates the Chronicles has got this weird soothing aspect to it. Maybe that is what got Gina to make the purchase of the Kindle2.

Gina was not originally planning to buy the new model. She had, like many Kindle fanatics been reading all of the gossip possibly available. Reading about how it would no longer have a SD card slot or how the battery would no longer be replaceable.

But after reading all the hype and the transcriptions of the Amazon press conference, she decided that she had to have it!

Hence…

“Ohhhh, Shiny. [Click]“

The new Kindle is due to arrive  on the 26th. That is unless she changes her mind and pops for the overnight shipping. She is sitting here next to me, waffling on whether or not to spend the extra $20.

I won’t even get into the planning she has been doing on what to do for a new Kindle cover, given that her old cover (which is not really even that old) does not fit the Kindle2.

Of course, I have yet to mention the most important fact of all this hub-bub.

Gina gets a new Kindle on the 26th. This means that I should have my very own Kindle on the 27th. I figure it will take her about 24 hours to settle into the new unit.

I have had the opportunity read probably 30 pages worth of various books on it. I am honestly looking forward to having this cool piece of technology for myself, the ability to carry hundreds of books in something that is small and relatively light.

Gina is looking forward to us being able to read the same books, namely the books that she reads, as she finds my books boring. I am looking forward to reading some of the fiction that she loves.

I do need to note that this is one of the few, if not possibly first time that I have been gifted technology. In the past I have normally been the one to pass along technology.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology, newTechnology amazon, gina, kindle, kindle 2