The “freemium” business model is very popular among tech companies today. A freemium model is one where a company offers most features of a service for free, but also offers additional features for a price, often in the form of paid premium accounts. Some services offer so many features as part of a free account, that I wonder what the incentive is for users to get a paid account. I suspect the idea is one of pure numbers – if the free version is so useful that it attracts a gazllion users, a company only needs a very small percentage of those users to actually purchase the premium version.
Off the top of my head, the services that I pay for are Evernote, Toodledo, Lastpass, and Xmarks. What freemium services or apps have you found to be so useful, that you shelled out money for a paid version? Or maybe you didn’t even need the premium version, but wanted to support the developers? Let us know in the comments, below. If we get enough of a response identifying popular freemium services, we’ll run a poll in the future to see which paid services are the most popular.
One of the big news stories last week was the hacking of Gawker Media’s servers. As part of the attack, user accounts were compromised on Gawker sites, including Lifehacker and Gizmodo. More than 500,000 user emails and 185,000 decrypted passwords were posted online. If you’re not sure which account you used on a Gawker site, and want to determine if your account might have been compromised, there’s a tool for that.
Slate has created a widget that lets you input your username or email address to see if your account was hacked. All that you need to do is input your username or email address that you used on a Gawker site, and hit the “Check” button. You’ll get one of two messages back:
1. “Your account data has been released. If your account had a password, it has also been released in an encrypted form. Change it.”
2. “The e-mail account or user name does not appear to be in the released database.”
If you get the first message, you should not only change your Gawker password, but if you used that email/password combination on any other sites, you should change your password on those sites, too.
To avoid a problem like this in the future, make sure that you use unique passwords on all sites. Check out one of our favorite tools, LastPass, for an easy way to generate and remember all of those passwords.
Does a hack like this make you trust Gawker sites less? Or trust the Internet less? Our take: this could happen to any site out there. Protect yourself by using unique passwords on all sites.
From the Star Wars Kid to the Red Shirt Guy, certain items or ideas gain traction on the Internet, and reach the hallowed status of Internet meme. If you’re like me, you’re not exactly hip to the latest memes. Fear not! Know Your Meme has you covered, helping you stay abreast of the latest memes on the Internet.
In its own words, Know Your Meme is “a web series and online database dedicated to documenting Internet culture, one scientismic investigation at a time.” Know Your Meme is more than just a meme database, as a visit to the front page will reveal. For example, you can find blog posts discussing memes in greater detail. One recent example is a look at the basics of a distributed denial-of-service attack, which can help you to understand the Anonymous attacks on PayPal, Visa, and others this past week. Know Your Meme also highlights trending memes, and even has video episodes that dissect certain memes.
For me, though, the most fun is just browsing aimlessly through the site. In the Meme database, you can find a list of popular memes, many of which are worth a chuckle. Chubby Bubbles Girl anyone? To get the full effect of some of the memes, you need to check out the images at the bottom of each page. Some meme pages also contain graphs that track the interest in the meme over time.
There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Springpad lately, both here at 40Tech and around the web. For good reason, too. The app’s new features and interface improvements have put it strongly in the running for one of the best save-everything-and-get-organized apps out there. People are loving it! According to CEO Jeff Janer, the new Springpad has seen a huge spike in usage. After playing with it for a while, I can see why.
When I first reviewed Springpad, back in April of this year, I compared it directly to Evernote, and pointed out why some of Springpad’s features were actually superior to our favorite note-taking app. The downside of Springpad was that there was simply too much going on, and that some of the different functions, like the internal apps, didn’t always play seamlessly with one another. Springpad’s development team listened to their users, and the new interface appears to have brought about feelings of peace, harmony, and general bliss amongst the Springpadians.
There have been several major updates to Springpad in the past months, the most notable taking place in September, November, and on Tuesday.
If you’re new to Springpad and don’t want to read my (very large) previous post, or just want a quick overview of some of the new features, watch the video at the bottom of this post.
September: Mobile Alerts, Chrome Extension
September brought about custom reminders and mobile alerts that helped to keep you aware of things on the go, like price drops and coupons for items you saved to your Springpad. It also brought about their most excellent Google Chrome extension.
November: All New Interface, Notebooks and the Board
November saw a huge shift in the interface, paring it down, making it easier to navigate, and generally making it prettier. Along with the new look and feel, better tagging functionality, and bulk editing capability, a lot of potential clutter and confusion was removed by taking all of the internal apps (for GTD, blog planning, and many other things) and giving them their own playground. Users that really wanted to keep the information stored in those apps tied in a neat bundle in the main Springpad app were given the option to port the notes into what is likely the most significant improvement to the service: new, easy to add and use notebooks.
Adding notebooks to Springpad has done a marvelous job of giving you control over how you organize your information. It used to be in one big list, that could be broken down over the large lot of internal apps — which was good in theory, but overwhelming in practice. Now, you have full control over what buckets you want to dump your saved information into, and it is nicely black-boxed in a very clean new interface that looks and feels like a desktop app. To make things even better, each notebook can have it’s own theme, which you can customize with personal images and photos, if you like.
The final hurrah for November was the introduction of the Board. The Board is an awesome use of HTML5, and there is one in every notebook. It gives you a visual approach to organizing your information that works like an old fashioned cork board, or laying out flashcards and sticky notes on a table. For the visual among us, myself included, this was a sweet miracle! The gift that keeps on giving, the Board also automatically adds items with address information to a handy, interactive Google map that can also be moved about. The Board is especially cool on the iPad, which allows you to move the items about with a finger, adding a tactile element that only improves upon the experience.
December: Chrome Web Store, Drag & Drop File Attachments, Keyboard Shortcuts and More
As if all that wasn’t enough, December’s updates brought about several more nice additions to Springpad, including the ability to drag and drop outside files onto the Board as file attachments. This is a fantastic improvement to on the other way to add files to Springpad which is to add a note, then add a ‘note to the note’ that has an attachment. You can even add multiple files at once (10mb/file).
The file-dropping feature only works in Google Chrome, which Springpad has entered into a nice marriage with. The web app was even featured in the launch of the Google Chrome Web Store on Tuesday. Chrome users can now install a shortcut of the Springpad app right into their start page, as well as sign up or login with Google’s OpenID, which allows easy access to the app. Once installed, you can open Springpad in a new tab, as a pinned tab, in full screen (which really makes it feel like a desktop app), and — if you use a Google Chrome developer version — as it’s own application. When combined with the Chrome extension, the installed Springpad is an information saving and organizing powerhouse. In my installation, and I’m not sure if it is a result of the extension or using a developer version of Chrome, I can even save a page to Springpad simply by right clicking and selecting the option from my context menu (if you happen to know which is the proper reason, let me know in the comments).
The final additions in the barrage of new features are keyboard shortcuts, like the ability to Shift+Tab between notebooks (see the complete list below), a search box and alert notifications on the home-screen, and the ability to share private items via a link (public items can already be shared to a gazillion services).
What’s to Come
The single thing that most longtime Springpad users were hoping for would be a desktop app. Unfortunately, that’s still a ways out, but I give Springpad credit for focusing on making their service a hell of a lot more functional on the web side of things first, before committing themselves to a desktop undertaking. According to Jeff, the desktop app will probably come in a windows flavour, first, but he didn’t have a date for me. What he could tell me, thought, was that the web version will make use of HTML5 to enable offline access to Springpad in and around the first quarter of next year. This is something the mobile versions of Springpad already do, and with the new web interface it will likely be almost as good as a desktop app by itself.
Some other pending features include the Board on the iPhone, as well as on Android OS (once it supports tables), and some interesting Facebook and other integrations that will enable you to do things like pull friends’ likes into the recommendation engine and filter them by subject. They are also looking into the possibility of a universal app for Facebook, and potentially, .doc and .PDF scanning.
In just a few months, Springpad has moved in leaps and bounds that blue tights-wearing, red-underwear-on-the-outside super beings might be jealous of. I am thoroughly impressed and actively considering new ways to implement the service into my day to day workflows. I actually did research and planned this post in Springpad. It was a good process. I’m also using it to track potential Christmas gift ideas for family members, and I can see the Board and me becoming great friends — especially if Springpad adds some connectors and other customization features to it in the near future. To be perfectly honest, though, they had me at “HTML5 offline access!”
What do you think of Springpad’s new features? How Will they affect how you use the app?
It was my birthday the other day. I turned 35. Yep, 35, and I write for a blog called 40Tech. I’m mature for my age, ok? Either way, I was feeling pretty good about myself that day. 35 years old is young, right? Well, that’s what I thought until I saw this video by Accenture that has little kids explaining cloud computing.
I now feel positively ancient.
The video, called “Cloud Computing Here and Now — Our Youngest Experts Explain the Cloud,” features a whole bunch of cute, smarty-pants little rug rats that make websites and are working on video games that feature super-spies with heads made out of cheese puffs. They were born with the internet — broadband, even — and it’s as second nature to them as hair bands are to the rest of us. I mean the music variety, by the way, not the hold up your hair type — but I digress.
Watch this video. It may make you feel like somebody’s grandparent, or even great grandparent — but it is a very clear look into the future of tech. Well, the future from the point of view of a high-end consulting company that is obviously convinced of the impending takeover of cloud computing — and trying to sell people on it — but that’s not saying they’re wrong.
The Cloud Explained — by Kids
photo by zakwitnij
It was my birthday the other day. I turned 35. Yep, 35, and I write for a blog called 40Tech. I’m mature for my age, ok? Either way, I was feeling pretty good about myself that day. 35 years old is young, right? Well, that’s what I thought until I saw this video by Accenture that has little kids explaining cloud computing.
I now feel positively ancient.
The video, called “Cloud Computing Here and Now — Our Youngest Experts Explain the Cloud,” features a whole bunch of cute, smarty-pants little rug rats that make websites and are working on video games that feature super-spies with heads made out of cheese puffs. They were born with the internet — broadband, even — and it’s as second nature to them as hair bands are to the rest of us. I mean the music variety, by the way, not the hold up your hair type — but I digress.
Watch this video. It may make you feel like somebody’s grandparent, or even great grandparent — but it is a very clear look into the future of tech. Well, the future from the point of view of a high-end consulting company that is obviously convinced of the impending takeover of cloud computing — and trying to sell people on it — but that’s not saying they’re wrong.
Watch the video below — What do you think?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eq3Sj1GGs8&feature=player_embedded