Tenacity And Persistence Pays Off

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From Fred Wilson:

I have known Scott Heiferman since the late 90s. He was one of the early NYC web 1.0 entrepreneurs. We were quite friendly with Scott but we were not early investors inMeetup, the company Scott started right after 9/11. Scott and I were at an event together and when asked about something he replied that he viewed Meetup as “a twenty year project.” He said that it would take at least twenty years for Meetup to achieve all that he wanted from it and possibly a lot longer. And that he was patient and committed to that timeline.

As Fred commented, Meetup is in its second decade and just passed its one hundred millionth booking. It seems that Meetup has been part of the web since there was a web. It has weathered many competitors. I have a ton of respect for people that have a dream, a vision, and stick to it for years and years. Congratulations to Scott Heiferman and the Meetup team.

Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera

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Fascinating article about police officers wearing cameras and the impact on police-community interaction:

THE Rialto [California] study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

Even the ACLU is in favor!

What I kept thinking about is what happens when technology becomes so cheap it is basically disposable. In essence, these cameras are so cheap that every cop can wear one, memory is so cheap that he/she can record hours of video, and batteries are powerful enough to cover an entire extended shift. We are at an amazing tipping point that I think few of us can really fathom. And as with all massive technological shifts, these changes usher in an era of good and bad. The trick is figuring out how to control the latter without destroying the former.

Freemium Lies

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Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, on a fantastic new podcast called The New Disruptors:

“When we first started we were one of the first freemium companies. When we first started we had a free trial. You could use Basecamp for free on one project. If you wanted more than one project, you had to pay. But when we launched the brand new Basecamp which we re-did from scratch, we decided we were no longer going to give away anything for free, other than a trial.”

Freemium, although the term is maybe a decade old, is not a new idea. It means, simply, that a certain amount is for free and more stuff is for pay. In fact the term is exactly that, the melding of free and premium.

The problem with Jason Fried’s statement above is that Basecamp is still freemium. His “free” portion is just time now, rather than projects. And if you want more time then pay for it.

Freemium is a decades old approach, in software or outside of it. Free samples at the grocery store. Free car wash with a fill-up. Get one free if you buy one. Even free trials, a staple of software for decades, is free for a limited time. These are all models that have a sense of freemium. Get something for free, get something for pay.

More from Jason:

“A lot of these companies that give away everything for free and later on they are going to pull the revenue lever and figure out how to make money off people. It’s very difficult to do that when people are used to getting stuff for free, first of all. It also sends a message that when your stuff is free, it’s not really worth that much. You don’t give things that are valuable away for free. No one does. Last, a lot of people use these free products and then the company goes away because it’s not sustainable. What a bummer.”

We all give away our time and I can’t think of a more valuable thing to give away. A product can be valuable but pales in comparison to this. Free is marketing, that’s all, and there are different ways of leveraging free marketing. Some companies have done very well with this “free to use forever with restrictions” model. Google launched Docs this way. Flickr hosts billions of photos this way. Evernote has over $100 million in revenue because of it. Now, 37signals has backed off freemium and so has Google Docs. That’s fine. That may be a smart business decision and don’t deny Jason the opportunity to do that with 37signals. But I find it disconcerting that Jason wants to forget that this model was critical to his success. Freemium is part of why 37signals is where it is today.

Oh, Jason, and if you are only giving a product away for free? That’s not called “freemium.” That’s called “free.” And I wouldn’t trust that to be around, either.

Open Season

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I have been thinking about Facebook Home but haven’t quite gotten the right words together. If you are unfamiliar, Facebook Home is an app that brings all of the Facebook functionality front and center on an Android device. App, though, is too simple. In short, installing Facebook Home means giving up control of your device to Facebook. Facebook Home takes over the entire thing. If you understand Facebook’s business model (selling you) and care, this should scare the crap out of you. Everything you do on that phone will be tracked by Facebook: every call you make, every place you go, every text you send, every app you use. Facebook will know it all. It’s The Police’s Every Breath You Take (lyrics) for the modern era.

As I said, though, I wasn’t certain what to write. There is so much to consider here. What I wrote above was the first thought. The second was the implications to Android. The third was the implications to Google. And then I read Matt Drance’s piece on the topic today and thought I might as well just link you to him. Incredibly well put:

Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an “open” system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.

Read the entire article, available here.

Nothing Stands Still

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Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, is credited with saying, “Nothing is permanent except change.” And thus it is on this blog and within Infinity Softworks.

Since January 1, 2012, when I made a commitment to write every day excluding weekends and a mini-vacation between Christmas and New Year’s, I have written 321 posts. That’s over 325 total week days during that time period.

For most of it I was very happy with the experiment. My goal was to only include posts where I could provide some accompanying commentary. But in the past few months, as constraints on my time have increased, I feel that has gotten harder to do and the strain of churning out a new post every day has caused me to get sloppy. As we were figuring things out last year, posting every day was a critical piece of my learning. But now, as we move from discovery to execution, the need isn’t as strong and the topics are harder to come by.

So I’m giving myself permission to stop writing every day. While this may mean I post more than once per day, it more likely means that there will be days when I don’t post at all. And if there are articles that I want to share but don’t have specific commentary, I might just save up a few and post them together like I did last week.

I hope you will continue visiting me here, reading what I write, and commenting more often!