http://www.geirfreysson.com Blogging about the web, running an Icelandic start-up and life in general Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:15:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, posted an article on Techcrunch today titled "The Facebook Imperative". In it he writes about what drove him to found Salesforce.com: I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” More than ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2010/02/salesforce-facebook-and-amazon/ The web commentary blog ReadWriteWeb wrote a blog post about how "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" which catapulted them to a top ranking for a Google search for "facebook login", as seen below. Hilarity ensued. Users started arriving at the ReadWriteWeb blog and commenting on it in their ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2010/02/using-google-as-their-address-bar-mainstream-users-confuse-readwriteweb-with-facebook/ When I'm at a restaurant and say: "We'll have a bottle of your Italian Merlot, please," I actually mean: "Give me a bottle of your second cheapest wine, please." Many months ago at Pizza Express I fell into a well laid trap and assumed the second cheapest bottle of wine would ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2010/02/merlot-main-courses-37signals-and-web-app-pricing/ Yesterday London's main daily newspaper, The Evening Standard, reduced its price from 50p to zero. Libby Purves, who hosts Radio 4's excellent Midweek, used the opportunity to weigh in on the Free debate in yesterday's Times: Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/10/to-free-or-not-to-free-dogma-vs-data/ Today I can announce that Wajapi has become a Facebook application. This means you can: Log on to Wajapi with your Facebook details by clicking one button Sign up for Wajapi by clicking one button Connect your current Wajapi account to your Facebook account Automatically share Wajapi books with your Facebook friends Below is a screenshot of ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/10/wajapi-connects-with-facebook/ Way back in January 2006 I blogged about the crazy model the Independent was using to charge for online content. At the time, for someone who wanted to follow, for example, Simon Carr's columns online, there were three options: Subscribe to the column online for a year for £50, subscribe for a ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/09/pricing-models-for-online-newspapers-revisited/ The NY Times is running a piece called The Cloud Hanging Over Skype on the recent $2 billion aquisition: Why were the winning bidders willing to pay so a high price for a company whose very existence could be threatened by this lawsuit? One possibility is that they have nerves of ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/09/the-mystery-regarding-the-skype-deal/ One of our products at Transmit is Smelltu (an english version is on its way), a web-app that measures banner pageviews, clicks and ROI. According to Doubleclick, the average clickthrough rate (CTR) on their network is ca. 0.1%. Our findings are similar although the CTR we measure can vary greatly ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/09/banner-art-indieclick-and-hype-machine/ Yesterday it was announced that Skype was being bought from eBay and would once more become an independent company. For Skype fans such as myself, this could be good news. Although the desktop client has been improving steadily over the past few years, the business model hasn't. Skype has more than ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/09/does-this-mean-skype-will-finally-become-a-platform/ In a meeting Microsoft held for Wall Street analysts, Steve Ballmer noticed that a lot of them had Apple laptops. "Don’t bother to hide them. I’ve already counted them. And it’s okay—feel free [to use the Macs], so long as you’re running Office." Office doesn't get much attention from commentators but ... http://www.geirfreysson.com/2009/08/ms-office-when-dominance-leads-to-stagnation/