Presenting Your Ideas

Businesses should have USP - Unique Selling Points - and the truth is that most don't (and get along fine without them!). 

Presentations are similar.  They should have USPs - keenly honed ideas, just a few, presented with clarity to excite and engage the audience...

Right?

And when was the last time that happened to you?  

The truth is that most presentations score no better than average... they get along ok, but overall they don't score big, and the things that presenters think are important, are irrevelant.

 The Slow Demise of RSS

You will be seeing a lot less of that little orange square soon.

If you use a reader, you will have noticed more and more newspapers moving to a subscription base, and whilst that was understandable for the Financial Times and Walls Street Journal where hourly updates on key stories were required and a lot of high end journalism had to be financed/managed, it was something of a surprise to see the UK's Telegraph start to limit its content recently.  

The Telegraph!?!  I know... whatever next?

The Many Flavours of "Freemium"

During a recent discussion with a client - developing an app - we started to look at the freemium model for his B2C project.  Since people were never going to pay for the app, the business model has to remove all potential barriers to download and encourage the app's innate network effect.

Fremium beckoned however it was interesting to see how it panned out when we started to examine how to bound those free services.  What would people pay for?  Once?  Routinely? Happily?

 Which Business Model should you use?

Following a long and detailed examination of the business model an app developer could use for his new project, it struck me that there was something missing...  We had spent the guts of a whole day looking at all the different features and gates that could be used in a freemium model.  We built up a phased launch which focused on virality and the network effect.  Freemium - in case you are not familiar with the term - is a mix of free and premium and it is where the baseline service is offered free but you have to pay for the extra bells and whistles.  Its a very successful and extensively used model, with Skype (service), Evony (game) and Copernic (tool) being my favourite examples.

But the discussion led me to a very strange place, a kind of reductio ad absurdum that might...