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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News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.
Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.
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“It looks like a great product,” he said.
Then he paused a second. Something didn’t compute.
“It’s only for Macintosh?” he asked.
What did Bill Gates say when he first saw the iPod?
Did Apple engineers use foam core and old fishing weights to craft a model of new MP3 player?
Steven Levy of Wired.com, gives a movie-esque narration of the events that led to the emergence of the iPod, with a pre-titles Bill Gates intro scene. Here is the complete article.
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