Must Read: Uzi Shmilovici on How to make freemium work for you — Excerpt via Tech News and Analysis

By Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple Jan. 29, 2012, 12:00pm PT

After studying this topic thoroughly and talking to many entrepreneurs, I found that there were two questions that people kept struggling with:

  • What happens to the customer acquisition cost in freemium?
  • What is the right free/premium segmentation?

Customer acquisition cost in freemium

Some people argue that freemium significantly increases the customer acquisition cost, and that the increase might in turn lead to disastrous results. The argument is that it costs money to acquire every new user, while only a sliver of them end up paying.

In order to understand what happens to the customer acquisition cost in freemium, let’s assume that your marketing investment is a given, so we’ll consider what happens to the total amount of premium users in the case of freemium.

The total amount of premium users depends on three factors:

  • the amount of people visiting your site (traffic)
  • how many of them sign up (signup conversion)
  • how many of those who signed up become paying members (premium conversion).

Read the full post here:

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/29/shmilovici-freemium/

Nice Post! Scott Walker on: Wyrd Con 2: One LARP, Two Panels, Infinite Fun

01.27.12 Posted in LARP by

This is a long overdue post about my adventures at Wyrd Con 2 in 2011.

If any of this sounds interesting, be sure to contact Lauren Scime (lauren at witchfactory dot com) about running a LARP, organizing a workshop, or speaking on a panel at Tri Wryd this June!

I had the pleasure of slipping down to Costa Mesa, CA for part of Wyrd Con 2 on June 10th and 11th, 2011. It was my first time at a convention focused on live action role-playing (LARP), and while there was plenty of LARPing to be had, to say Wyrd Con was just an annual LARP convention is a grave disservice. Wyrd Con is much more than what you typically think of when you hear “LARP.”

In addition to a spectrum of widely varying LARPs, attendees also got to enjoy:

  • panels
  • workshops
  • film screenings
  • a dedicated space for merchandise

I was humbled to be asked to co-moderate the “Interactive Storytelling” panel with Kirsten Carthew, and I was a panelist on the “Transmedia and LARP” panel moderated by Angelique Toschi and featuring Lauren Scime, Alistair Jeffs, and Bret Shefter (all members of Transmedia L.A.).

I also checked out a few workshops on making original costume/clothing, crafting weapons for boffing combat, and even basic boffing techniques (not as sexy as it sounds but a lot more fun than you think).

The highlight for me was running the “Spirits of Kita-mura” LARP, an experience set in Runes of Gallidon (a shared world of fiction, art, and more, with its own history and mythos).

It was the first LARP I had ever designed, and my LARPing experience was (at that time) limited to traditional table-top role-playing in the form of D&D. I was nervous about a great many things.

Read Scott's full post here!

http://metascott.com/2012/01/27/wyrd-con-2-one-larp-two-panels-infinite-fun/#

Very Cool: NY Times launches Deep Dive beta620 | Exploring Stories With Deep Dive

From the NY Times:

Why Deep Dive?
One of our central problems here at NYTimes.com is surfacing content. With hundreds of articles, blog posts, media features and apps published every day it is simply impossible for readers to see them all. This is a good problem to have, but a problem none the less. So how do we help readers find everything they would want to read given that they only have the time to scan a small fraction of what we have to offer? We do so in many ways:

Our homepage/section front/subsection breakdown of the site itself goes a long way in allowing our editorial voice to guide visitors to a combination of what is important and what they want to read. The Recommendation Engine allows us to leverage the power of distributed computing to reference each user’s personal browsing history, then leverage connection via our semantic tags. Facebook and Twitter allow us to provide a social angle showing what people in networks are sharing. Elements such as Most E-Mailed take another approach allowing people to follow what is most popular.

What is Deep Dive?
Deep Dive stands among these, but differentiates itself in one key way: it allows users to discover something then focus their attention deeper based on that piece of content. Each of the methods above take a global viewpoint. For example the Recommendation Engine looks at all of the articles a reader has viewed (over a 30-day time period), Most E-Mailed shows popularity across the site. With Deep Dive, a visitor is able to leverage topical tagging (and eventually semantic, editorial, social and other) connections between content stemming from the piece of content that has piqued their interest.

The first iteration of Deep Dive is basically a glorified “show me more like this” engine customized for the news reading experience. It allows a user to dive into a root article and see related articles based on date and topics. It is presented in a custom viewing experience that allows for quick scanning of related articles to allow readers to quickly get a deep contextual understanding of the greater scope of the story. At launch, this includes primarily articles and blog posts, but we intend to expand the viewer to support video, multimedia and other content types as well.

Looking Ahead
Beyond a root article, users can create any combination of topics and search terms they would like to customize a personally compelling dive. In the future we look to take advantage of more semantic and descriptive data to increase the ways in which users can refine their dives.

Bringing the concept into the temporal dimension, Deep Dive will allow readers to follow these story arcs. By saving a deep dive, users are basically telling our system what slice of the news they want to follow. As new articles are published that fit the criteria, alerts will tell readers that there is something happening surfacing the article for them. For custom dives, this system can be used to keep and eye out for rare occurrences or simply keep up to date on a specialized interest.

Thinking socially, dives could easily be shared across existing social media or internal NYTimes social tools. Influence for dives can be measured by how many people follow them and navigate through them, which can lead into personal reputation for the people crafting the dives.

Ultimately, we look forward to continually improving Deep Dive as NYTimes content metadata and social mechanisms mature. We would love to hear any ideas or uses that you have for this concept.

Thanks,
David, Brandon and Priya

Henry Jenkins' New Post: On Transmedia and Education: A Conversation With Robot Heart Stories' Jen Begeal and Inanimate Alice's Laura Fleming (Part Two)

On Transmedia and Education: A Conversation With Robot Heart Stories' Jen Begeal and Inanimate Alice's Laura Fleming (Part Two)

Some transmedia properties are entirely top-down, deploying fairly conventional models of authorship, despite their deployment across multiple media platforms. Others include strong elements of participatory culture. How central is youth participation in the production and circulation of media to your visions for transmedia education?

Jen: Youth participation is very important In production and circulation as many Transmedia projects are aimed at young people, and the ones aimed at adults require that the adults have some prior knowledge of media which leads us back to teaching media literacy at a young age. Specific youth aimed projects, like Robot Heart Stories, require that the students create their own videos, write collaborative stories and construct and color their own paper robots (called "heart packs") which were pdf downloads from the website. The theory behind transmedia education is that user generated content (i.e. created by the students themselves) should be at the core of these projects.
Laura: Story-driven user-generated content is a powerful piece of the transmedia experience and in my opinion is an essential consideration for any educational property. Technology tools allow for new forms of participation and learners inevitably seek out those opportunities. Even just the notion of creating transmedia experiences for specific groups or demographics is something we need to consider carefully. Learners themselves should be immersed in the creative process to ensure that they are not mere consumers of the experience.

What are the implications of teaching a generation not only how to read but also how to write across media?

Read the full post here:

http://henryjenkins.org/2012/01/on_transmedia_and_education_a.html

Reach and Frequency: SEO Secret to Brand Building on Google? - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

By Mark Jackson, January 29, 2012

For those of us who have been in search engine optimization (SEO) for a number of years, we can recall the days when SEO efforts were measured by a ranking report, alone. That is to say, you might pick your top 50 keywords, dump these into a rank checker, run a report monthly, and determine whether these 50 keywords moved up successfully or fell in the search rankings.

SEO Evolution

We evolved. We:

  • Incorporated reports on link building efforts.
  • Started to incorporate increases in natural/organic search traffic from our web analytics reports.
  • Started breaking out branded versus non-branded keyword traffic.
  • Started looking at conversion rates (what percentage of our organic search visitors were completing lead forms and/or buying products from our site).
  • Incorporated call-tracking and looked at conversion path, to include multi-channel conversion tracking.

What’s Next?

read the full post here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2142065/Reach-and-Frequency-SEO-Secret-t...

4 Simple Steps to a Facebook Timeline that Tells Your Marketing Story | Copyblogger

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Read the full post here:

http://www.copyblogger.com/facebook-timeline/

Here are the bullet points:

"There are four key parts to the Timeline that will help you tell your story:

1. Using the Subscribe button,

2. Adding a great Cover photo,

3. Crafting your About page, and

4. Adding activity and Life Events to your Timeline.

Let’s take a look at each of these four more closely …"

Love love love: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer – powerHouse Books

There is still very little known about the life of Vivian Maier. What is known is that she was born in New York in 1926 and worked as a nanny for a family on Chicago’s North Shore during the 50s and 60s. Seemingly without a family of her own, the children she cared for eventually acted as caregivers for Maier herself in the autumn of her life. She took hundreds of thousands of photographs in her lifetime, but never shared them with anyone. Maier lost possession of her art when her storage locker was sold off for non-payment. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 83.

CATS ON FILM: MY DAY BY JONESY: A CAT'S EYE VIEW OF ALIEN

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Excerpt from a brilliant post by Jonesy.

"...In short, one cannot overestimate the importance of Jones to Alien. This is his story.

MY DAY by JONESY

Y-a-w-n. Was just having a pleasant dream about eviscerating a small family of fieldmice when the can-opener tipped me off her chest by sitting up. Impossible to go back to sleep with the can-openers all aflutter like this. S-t-r-e-t-c-h. They seem to think we're home. I could tell them we're not, but I'll leave them to work that out for themselves. No sense of direction, these people. But hey, since I'm awake, might as well take advantage of the situation to tuck into some moggynosh. I eat at the big table, like everyone else. I have my own bowl with JONES painted on the side so the can-openers won't steal my food.

Since it doesn't look as though anyone's going back into hypersleep any time soon, I do my usual patrol around the bowels of the ship. Yeah, no changes here. Everything just as I left it. But all that patrolling is exhausting, so I take a nap behind some nice warm pipes in one of the boiler rooms. Hmmmm. Hamsters. Crunchy little bones. Hmmmm..

Woken by the ship landing somewhere. Not Earth though, so go back to sleep. Woken again by a lot of shouting and neurotic activity coming from somewhere on the far side of the vessel. Honestly, can't these people show a hardworking feline any respect? But hey, since I'm up now, might as well go on the hunt for space rodents. Space rodents! Who am I kidding? No such thing, of course. When we first took off from earth, many cat-years ago, there was a family of rats nesting in the engine room, but I soon sorted them out. Maybe too soon; maybe I should have left them alone to breed a bit, so their descendants could have entertained me during the rest of the voyage. There's nothing left to hunt. Nothing. But how was I to know we'd be cooped up for so long? Anyhow, I offered generous gifts of dead rat to everyone in the crew, except the one who doesn't smell like the others; he tried to stroke me once, but got the rhythm all wrong and his fingers were too hard, so mainly I steer clear of him now...."

Read the full post here:

http://catsonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/04/alien.html