Freemiums are services that lure users in with a basic product, then charge for more features
In these days of Web 2.0 services that rely on quick customer adoption, the strategy has become so common that VCs have coined a term for it: freemium.
We’re talking about companies like Six Apart, which offers its LiveJournal blogging platform for free and has sold 2 million of its customers a premium version, which costs $20 for a one-year subscription.
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The first thing that comes to your mind when you visit the new Cisco.com is WoW!
What a way to reinvent a company…a company that was seen as a ‘hard’ and lying in the background is now attempting a transformation itself into a ‘soft’ company. Cisco calls itself a company that is making possible the next gen network, a network of people–The Human Network. A neat thought to energize the company’s next lap.
When you look at a section in the web site where people all over the world post stories as to how the omnipresent network helped them, you begin to wonder if you were part of a social networking site. Well, Cisco sure does wants you to believe that and may be more. Take a look at this snippet from its annual report.
Does it mean it will stop making the hardware and the related networking enabling components. Obviously not. It just lifts itself from the hardware/software level to solutions level aligning itself with the social aspect of internet, and Web 2.0.
And Cisco wants to go wherever the human network goes.
“To Cisco, vision means the ability to broadly anticipate how the
communications and IT market will evolve and understand how
the network drives this evolution. We believe the network will
change the way the world works, lives, plays, and learns, and
that the network will have intelligence distributed throughout it.
We see, as the market plays out, that the network will literally
become the platform for all of life’s experiences by delivering
applications and services to our customers and by enabling
greater productivity, new business models, and expanded forms
of entertainment.”
John Chambers and John Morgridge in their letter to Cisco’s shareholders.
Related links
Cisco
Letter to Shareholders
I believe we need a new approach to venture capital in India.
There is a very limited legacy, so it’s not going to evolve the
way the U.S. did or even perhaps the way China did. In India
there are lots of gaps across multiple value chains. Sometimes
a service fails to take off because some parts along the value
chain are not appropriately digitized. What ought to happen is
a large amount of investment across building out an ecosystem
of companies. Instead of waiting for an entrepreneur to come
up with a business plan, venture capitalists need to be much
more proactive. They should say, “The capital is available, now
let’s find a CEO for this business and back that person with
funding. Let’s start multiple companies based on what we have
seen in other countries, and what we think the opportunities
are in India.”This is a very different, inside-out approach, where you end
up flipping the model around. That requires much more work.
It will not work if the core venture capital team lives abroad
and just comes to India once in a while. We need people on
the ground who understand the realities of India today, who
understand how the technology is evolving, and who can
make bets on what the future is going to be.
Knowledge@Wharton Full interview here