Here is a detailed (and informative) overview of pricing schemes for web applications (or Software as a Service as some would like to call them). Includes examples of free, freemium, free trials, pay-as-you-go, and multiple plans.
How to Price your SaaS Application:
The bottom line
Pricing is no rocket science if you rationally arrive at it. Experimenting early on, staying flexible and listening to your customers can really help you nail down the ideal pricing model that works for your business. Allow customers to upgrade/downgrade and even exit without any penalties. Don’t simply underprice for the sake of looking more affordable than your competitor. Keep your conversion and retention ratio in check to back your pricing decision.
[Reproduced from TenMiles's blog]
(Via PluGGd.in.)
I fired up VS 2008 for the first time today since ages and I was amazed at its speed and ease of use again.
I’ve been breathing Eclipse for the last few months while doing J2ME and Android programming. I think I have 5 different Eclipse installs on my dev box at work (including variants such as MotoDev for Android, Carbide.c++, etc.). While I do love Eclipse for its plugins, refactoring tools, and cross-platform abilities it is still so slow compared to VS it’s unbelievable.
Anyway… VS 2010 arrived today and the new stuff looks very nice but I’ll wait till all the 3rd party C++ libs (Qt and OpenSceneGraph mainly) and the plugins I use make the jump before I do.
What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4?
Buttloads. Here’s the things I’m digging most.
- What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 – The IDE and Editor has really shaped up nicely. I’ve got it installed side-by-side with by existing VS2008 with no problems. There’s hundreds of new things that I can’t fit here, although some favorite IDE features of mine are:
- Multimonitor support – You can drag documents or toolboxes out of the IDE and onto other monitors.
- Zoom - You can “ctrl+scroll” (press the Ctrl key while scrolling your mouse wheel) to zoom in editors or diagrams. The editor has been totally rewritten using WPF.
- Navigate To - Hit “ctrl+comma” to navigate around your files, code, variables or methods much faster than Ctrl-F.
- Code-First Intellisense - You can hit Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar to tell toggle intellisense between regular Intellisense and a more TDD-friendly style that lets you create new classes and methods without getting hassled by the editor.
- Multi-Targeting Support – You can use VS2010 to create (target) .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 or 4 applications. That means you can work on existing applications and get all the new IDE features while also working on new .NET 4 apps, all with the same IDE.
- ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 are included in the box. WebForms now lets you create clean markup (no more tables) that’s semantically correct and CSS-friendly, even for “legacy” controls and clientids that you control. ViewState is way smaller and can be turned on and off with greater granularity. Chart controls are included as well. On the MVC 2 side, we’ve got Areas, Strongly-typed helpers, Templated Helpers, field validation in models, and more. Both MVC and WebForms get all the core ASP.NET 4 improvements like a smaller web.config, the new <%: %> encoding syntax, extensible output caching, preloading of web apps, session state compression and routing for SEO-friendly URLs.
…
(Via Scott Hanselman – Visual Studio 2010 Released)
Apple and Adobe are an old couple, going all the way back to the early Mac days. Adobe had created beautiful fonts, a PostScript interpreter, and had absorbed Aldus for its seminal program, PageMaker. That’s how the LaserWriter was born and the era of desktop publishing began. Besides being crucial to the Macintosh by creating so much desktop publishing software, Adobe also acquired and published Photoshop in 1990, at first exclusively on the Macintosh.
One is tempted to say that without Adobe there would be no Macintosh and no Apple. Steve Jobs and John Warnock, one of Adobe’s founders, were close, even if things didn’t always go swimmingly. An Apple engineer, Gifford Calenda, began to develop TrueType, an alternative to Adobe’s “mathematical” fonts. I was at Apple when we had to make the buy-or-create decision. The basic set of Adobe fonts cost about $30, if memory serves. If Gifford and his colleagues succeeded, which they eventually did, we could get our fonts for “free”. To make sure the fonts got industry-wide adoption, Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft for free. The business model wasn’t font revenue but Adobe license fee avoidance. Adobe, understandably, wasn’t too pleased with this.
Sometime during the mid-nineties, fearing the Mac wasn’t going anywhere, Adobe made Windows its priority. Adobe’s key applications were first written for Windows and then adapted for the Mac. This continued even after Jobs’ “reverse acquisition” of Apple, when he brought NeXT technology and people to breathe new life into the Mac OS (but without Adobe’s Display PostScript, the engine behind the NeXT graphics system). Today, much to Apple’s persistent chagrin, the Mac version of Photoshop is written on an older version of the Mac platform, and the result is perceived as being inferior to the Windows version.
Via The Adobe – Apple Flame War
I guess they’ll wait for Apple to develop their own Photoshop killer to do that.
“Many of Adobe’s supporters have mentioned that we should discontinue the Creative Suite products on OS X as a form of retaliation. Again, this is something that Adobe would never consider in a million years. We are not looking to abuse our loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company. What is clear is that Apple most definitely would do that sort of thing as is evidenced by their recent behavior.”
(via The Flash Blog » Apple Slaps Developers In The Face.)
Twitter did a Facebook this Friday and announced two official apps for Blackberry and iPhone.
Today we are excited to announce that RIM has launched the Twitter for BlackBerry app and can be downloaded for free at blackberry.com/twitter.
Some of the highlights from our perspective are:
- Real-time BlackBerry push of Twitter direct messages
- Camera and photo gallery integration
- Browser integration for Tweeting links
- Customizable interface for changing fonts, hiding tool bars, etc.
- Inbox integration so you can read your Twitter direct messages along side your email and text messages
- @integration so that if you receive an email or text message which includes an @username, it is linked to the Twitter app profile page
- Twitter lists integration
- Notification of @mentions
- Search for users, content, and trending topics
- Localized for French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Brazilian Portuguese
Looks like they developed the Blackberry app themselves (with help from RIM) but for the iPhone they got out and bought Tweetie for iPhone and will go from there.
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.
Two questions: What will happen to Tweetie for Mac and will they buy Twidroid for Android or go and develop their own client from scratch?
VS gets Javascript. How does it handle heavy jQuery usage I wonder?
Because VS 2010 is psudo-executing code within the editor, it is able to handle a bunch of scenarios (both practical and wacky) that you throw at it – and is still able to provide accurate type inference and intellisense.
For example, below we are using a for-loop and the browser’s window object to dynamically create and name multiple dynamic variables (bar1, bar2, bar3…bar9). Notice how the editor’s intellisense engine identifies and provides statement completion for them:
via JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 – ScottGu’s Blog.