The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘subscription’

Late last week, news recommendation service reddit started soliciting users to donate i.e. subscribe to reddit gold in order to allow the Condé Nast-owned company to hire more people and buy more servers.

In a new blog post, reddit says approximately 6,000 users have donated to date. That represents less than 0.1 percent of reddit’s total number of users (unique visitors?), which comes in at roughly 8 million today, according to the company.

While only a fraction of its user base apparently made the jump, reddit has declared the feat a triumph, as the cash infusion enables them to add more servers to the fray, initially. This should benefit all users, not just reddit gold subscribers, the company added.

As reddit hasn’t disclosed how much money was collected in the pledge drive so far, and the subscription price was left entirely up to the subscribers in question, we’ll have to estimate.

Let’s say each user donated in between $10 and $15, we’re looking at roughly $60,000 to $90,000 to date. Six thousand subscribers may not seem like a lot, but it’s not a shabby sum to raise in just a couple of days, especially since the benefits of becoming a subscriber weren’t clear from the get-go.

Reddit does say it aims to grow reddit gold into a bona fide subscription service like Ars Technica, and the company is taking suggestions for which things to work on first.

You can follow the discussion on reddit here. Going over the comments, particularly those left by reddit folks, it seems like Condé Nast was really blocking the company in terms of resources for hiring purposes. Also, the company has only one sales person on staff, and she just started working there two months ago:

raldi
> They should be banging on the Conde Nast door begging for more cash
Did that. As we said very clearly in Friday’s blog post, the answer was “moar revenue”.

and

raldi
> How about spending 100% of the subscription revenue on hiring some sales staff?
Hiring is out of our hands.
> If your sales team…
Our sales team is one person, and she’s only been on the job for about two months.

Last but not least, the company ends its blog post hinting at a major new feature coming soon:

Oh, and there’s One More Thing coming soon that you guys are gonna love.

Any guesses on what this could be?

Listen, I hate forking over $100 a month for my TV, too. I also wholeheartedly agree with The Consumerist picking Comcast as the worst company in America. But they still get my money every month and just like the vast majority of people who pay for their TV, that’s not going to change anytime soon. There simply isn’t anything that replicates the experience and is free or low-cost. No one, not even Google, Hulu or Netflix, will cause America to part ways with the subscription-based TV model.

It can be argued that this has been the Decade of Piracy. Whereas media piracy existed as a scourge for millennia (Bach was totally pissed when PrisM posted the pre-release sheet music to the ‘Das Wohltemperirte Clavier’) the rise of the MP3 and other media compression formats – not to mention the release of the iPod in 2001 – brought piracy into the mainstream. I knew we were in trouble when, in 2002, a normally luddite professor of mine mentioned downloading lots of Bluegrass music from Napster.

It was also an unlucky coincidence that with the rise of piracy came a considerable contraction of the traditional distribution models for media and the Internet started eating everyone’s lunch. Users – and I mean all users and not just nerds – expected everything for free as in beer. While many will counter that users expect things to be free as in freedom, what they really want is free stuff and they want it all the time.

Read more…

If you’re looking to build a website or webapp for your business, there are plenty of options to get started. First, there’s a variety of fully hosted solutions like WordPress.com, which take away the headaches of managing software and server configurations at the cost of reduced flexibility. Another popular option is to get a hosted server from the likes of Rackspace or Dreamhost, which can give you much more flexibility, but also come with more things to worry about. Standing Cloud is a startup that looks to take the ease of use of the fully hosted providers and combine them with the benefits of having your own server space, with the added flexibility of being able to change between these cloud service providers in a few clicks.

If you’ve ever used a shared hosting provider that offers one-click installs of software packages like WordPress, then the basics of Standing Cloud should sound familiar. Generally speaking, installing an open-sourced application to your server involves some fairly advanced configuration — you need to upload the proper files via FTP and run installation scripts, which are tasks that are pretty daunting for your average computer user. Many hosting providers offer a solution to this, allowing you to install a pre-configured version of the software to your server space in a few clicks. But Standing Cloud CEO David Jilk says this comes at a cost — once you’ve set up an app this way, it’s a pain to switch to another service provider down the line. Standing Cloud offers a solution to this problem.

Getting started with Standing Cloud is pretty straightforward. First you create an account, which takes a few seconds (no credit card info required). Next, you’re presented with two options: you can either test drive one of Standing Cloud’s 50+ open source applications, which includes software like Drupal, phpBB3, and WordPress, or you can host an application. The first option will create a temporary install of whatever application you’re looking to try out, free of charge (data from the temporary application is deleted after a few hours). The second option, and the one that makes Standing Cloud money, is to manage a permanent account on RackSpace Cloud, AWS, GoGrid, or SliceHost (you can create a new account or import your old one). You can get a sense for this process in the video below.

After signing up for a cloud hosting provider (or entering the information for your existing account) you can use Standing Cloud to start installing and managing new open sourced applications in a few clicks. The service’s special sauce allows you to jump between these different cloud providers at will, which Jilk says is fairly complex feat to pull off.

Standing Cloud’s service is free for now, aside from any costs you incur from your hosting provider, and will cost $19.95 a month some time down the road (though trial app installs will still be free). Jilk says that the company wants to build out more value-added features before it starts charging customers — features that will help users maintain their software installs on an ongoing basis (he didn’t get into many specifics, but said that there were plenty of features on the drawing board). The end goal, Jilk says, is to give users something they don’t have to think about.

Another player in this space is RightScale, which also offers cloud management services.

There’s always a hardcore market. But $50/year may be too steep for what they’re offering.

Read the original:
“Playstation Plus” – in which you pay Sony so you can borrow demos and PS3 themes

Gabe Newell arrived unexpectedly on stage at the Sony press conference to announce that Portal 2 will be coming to the PS3 — he says it will be the best version on any console. I was kind of hoping for more of a surprise

See the original post:
Portal 2 coming to PS3, does not appear to be in 3D or use the Move

Check out the online memorization tool at Memorize.com . You ought not have any problems remembering that URL. Built on Ruby on Rails, with a CouchDB backend and some JQuery magic, Memorize.com doesn’t do a whole lot, but what it does do it does pretty well

Originally posted here: 
Improve your memory with Memorize.com

We’ve written about Zuora, a SaaS startup that offers online services to manage and automate customer subscriptions and payments, and its impressive backing. Today the company has reached a new milestone; Zuora has signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue in the first quarter of its new fiscal year, which ended April 30.

Zuora’s cloud-based billings platform aims to alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions. The company says that its growth in revenue, bookings and cashflow is thanks to the shift to the “Subscription Economy” in both the consumer and enterprise world.

Earlier today, news broke that The New York Times was raising the price on its E-Edition from $14.99 to $19.99 a month. Now, Amazon has just told customers with Kindle subscriptions to the Times that they’re getting a price hike too: they’re jumping from $13.99 to $19.99 — an increase of 43 percent. Current Kindle subscribers will continue to pay $13.99/month for the next six months.

This is almost certainly in anticipation of the iPad launch tomorrow — Amazon just announced the release of its own Kindle for iPad app, which will be competing with Apple’s iBooks. And we’ll probably see the NYT’s iPad subscription at the same $19.99 rate. For comparison’s sake, earlier today the Wall Street Journal announced that their iPad subscription fee would be $17.29 per month.

Here’s the email Amazon is sending out:

Hello from Amazon.com,

As a Kindle subscriber to New York Times, you might like to know that effective April 2, 2010, the New York Times has raised its price to $19.99/month for new subscribers.

As an existing subscriber to New York Times, you will continue to be billed at the previous rate of $13.99/month for six more months (until October 2nd, 2010) after which you will be billed at the monthly rate then in effect.  We believe that the Kindle edition of New York Times continues to provide excellent value for customers with a free 14 day trial period, wireless delivery via Whispernet, no long-term commitments, and substantial savings vs. regular print subscription rates.

As always you are free to cancel your subscription at any time.  If you are still in the 14 day free trial period of your subscription you will not be charged, otherwise you will receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of your subscription.  To change or cancel a subscription, please visit www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle.

Sincerely, The Amazon Kindle team

If there’s one thing putting a spring in the step of publishers this summer and giving them just a little more impetus to initiate summer hours and “get away from the hustle and bustle of the city” by having their driver take them to their house on the Hamptons, it’s the iPad. Is there anything this thing can’t do? Absolutely not, because publishers are flocking to it in droves in an effort to save their falling circulation numbers.

To wit, the nut of this story is that the Wall Street Journal will cost $17.99 a month on the iPad, considerable savings over the $2 cover price. This subscription will presumably include all of the graphics and layouts that make the Journal famous as well as ads - lots of expensive, sweet ads. For example, “Unilever, Toyota Motor , Fidelity Investments” is paying Time magazine $200,000 for eight display ads in the iPages of Time magazine. That’s for eight issues, mind you, which breaks down to $25,000 an issue. $25,000 was probably the haircut budget for the ad staff at Time Inc. How can they buy a Ski-doo for their next Vail trip with that kind of money?