Donuts and the Red Cross Provide a Lesson in Freemium Pricing
If you are offering or thinking of offering a Freemium type of offer the lessons outlined in the attached blog posting are worth reading. Freemium offers definitely need to be layered offers with the paid offers providing additional value. Starting to charge for previously free services can cause significant customer backlash.
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The results are now available for the Future of Cloud Computing survey sponsored by Northbridge Venture Partners. I was surprised to see that 75% of respondents expect to use a Platform as a Service for software development by 2017, a substantial increase since the last survey. This will have a significant effect on the development skills required and on anyone providing platform software or software development tools. It looks like PaaS will be a good market to be in!
You can see the results here and make sure you read Michael Skok's view of some of the technology areas enables by the cloud including mobile and ecommerce/payments.
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Google Compute Engine
Google announced their new Infrastructure as a Service offer on June 28th. The press and the comments on Google Compute Engine have been positive and Google is positioning this as a strong competitor to Amazon.
This post from GigaOM describes the offer and ReadWriteWeb gives their view on Google Compute Engine. For some hands on testing experience you can check out Information Week's article.
So what are the implications of this? Clearly Google has been running a lot of very cost effective infrastructure for a long time and has the technical expertise and money to change the cloud computing market dynamics. They have also lined up a lot of the right partners including RightScale, Puppet Labs, Opscode and others. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. Here is GigaOM's view on the implications to the cloud market.
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