Today, ‘Why Free Plans Don’t Work‘ examines why removing the free part of your freemium strategy can actually improve paid signups. Ironic, coming in the week that Skype’s IPO filing revealed that all its massive revenues come from less than 7% of paying customers. By the way, how do you grow a social (“user generated content”) startup without… well, any user generated content in the first place? Here’s how.
In non-tech, Vanity Fair chronicles a day in the life of President Obama (‘Washington, we have a problem‘) in the context of a partisan, corrupt and shortsighted polity. In ‘China Swallows Obama Stimulus‘ on Bloomberg, we read how corporations will merely direct resources (in this case, resources via stimulus packages) to where they can be most efficiently deployed – fast-growing developing countries – and therefore will ultimately benefit people in these countries instead of America. Arbitrage in boomtime is, after all, the same as arbitrage in recessiontime. Finally, Dick Cavett in the New York Times wonders, angrily, how, in the Cordoba House case, Americans displayed the same religious bigotry they waged war against.