David Fredh : Blog and Pictures

The Economist started a really interesting discussion.. . again… when they said that we are heading against the end of free lunch – again. The free services around you will be changed to other business models (paid or freemium) due to the financial crisis according to the economist.

Some services have changed their business models from completely free to “cheap”. Last.fm is one example. They changed to a freemium-model recently. I hope that they will survive. It’s a huge difference between free and “cheap”. Last.fm is competing between a big number of music services with free content (iMeem, iLike, Spotify…) and of course they are loosing visitors by charging them… Loosing visitors means loosing buzz.. .Less posts on twitter, blogs and so on…

We shall not forget that people are willing to share!
Compare the number of professional photographers with the number of amateurs with “good enough” cameras (or camera equipped mobile phones). The professional photographers wants to get paid for their images and the amateurs are sharing them for free on flickr… Who is getting the money? Yahoo (they own flickr).

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money – Chris Andersson, Wired

When it comes to newspaper industry, and the never ending discussion about blogging vs. newspapers, I stumbled upon this site discussing the “free meals” in news industry. Actually the industry have already lost a couple of battles agaist the free content on the webb. I agree with the article and think that they are far from loosing the war. Newspaper industry vs. blogging is almost like paid software vs. open source.

The Buzz, trends and Twittering is growing as never before and nobody knows where we are heading. It’s a goldmine for trend-searchers and it´s totally free.

I am a bit worried that the big giant companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will buy a lot of companies during the financial crisis… I guess that time will tell… Maybe Google will start by buying Twitter tomorrow.

The free vs. non free discussion is exciting

If you have 5 minutes over, I recommend the following video:
About why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

Chris Anderson has published the book, “Free, The Future of A Radical Price” that is very interesting. It is about this subject and can be downloaded for free (as audiobook or ebook) here