Ever scratch your head and wonder why you can use your favorite application for free?  How can a business actually make money (and stay in business) when they offer their product for free?  This article looks at the freemium business model, to see when it makes sense for a company to offer it.  ...

The failure of Congress and the President to come up with some kind of workable bailout, or prepackaged bankruptcy plan will have nasty consequences. But they won't be as rapidly apparent as those of the Lehman collapse. Make no mistake, however, there will be long term systemic effects if the autom...

Mumbai's 8/11 is emblematic of a lack of security co-ordination across city, national and private sector organisations. Jyoti Banerjee examines the lessons that the West can learn from Mumbai's 8/11. Mumbai’s terror attacks at the end of November have created a deep sense of sadness and loss among...

This crisis is beginning to resemble Imelda Marcos' shoe closet, so many of the damn things keep dropping. The next one, might it be Citigroup? As Citigroup’s stock sank during the day, falling 68 cents to close at $3.87, the Federal Reserve was carefully monitoring how much money corporations and...

Lord knows I've been hard on GM in the past. And the latest news from the company is no different. Only now are they closing plants to focus more closely on building cars as opposed to trucks. Where's oil? In the $120s? At what point did they start having committee meetings, to have more committee m...

Climate change, whether you believe in it or not, is going to change every business on the planet, either by force of regulation, or by a competitive drive towards low-carbon business models. Medium enterprises have a great opportunity to be the next generation of big winners in a future low-carbon ...

Prioritization is about maximizing the value you provide to your customers. When you have multiple sets of customers with different priorities, what do you do? You could try and find the lowest-common-denominator, and please everyone a little bit. But that would be the wrong thing to do - by trying ...

Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The impro...

I used to do search engine optimization (SEO) marketing for a living, and just recently started up consulting again. Not, as I always point out right up front, the URL misdirection and link spam kind. No. The kind where you create human-readable content geared towards providing the information your ...

Sounds like a bad spy movie doesn’t it? How about this… ‘What’ versus ‘how’ is a fundamental struggle in requirements definition. Hmmmm…that doesn’t help it in not sounding like a bad spy movie. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to h...