BIG Council helps Charlotte-area companies navigate stormy economy
by Fred Tannenbaum
Dolan Media Newswires
CHARLOTTE, NC — Like the reassuring signal from a lighthouse in stormy seas, the Business Innovation & Growth Council is sponsoring an event Tuesday to guide entrepreneurs through today’s business challenges.
BIG, which supports fast-growing Charlotte-area companies, is partnering…. Full Story
Below is a great article on the Economics of Free written by Wired Magazine’s, Chris Anderson.
Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero — nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods — from music and video to Wikipedia — can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.
Which is not to say companies can’t make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that’s two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn’t new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this “two-sided market” model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.
In other cases, the same digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as “Freemium,” a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers. It’s an inversion of the old free sample promotion: Rather than giving away one brownie to sell 99 others, you give away 99 virtual penguins to sell one virtual igloo. (Confused? Ask a child: This is the business model for the phenomenally successful Club Penguin.)