As crazy as a pay-for-access social network might sound in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not without precedent. The Well was essentially the first social network, and it was expensive for people to access.

But the key, for Caldwell, is quality.

“I don’t believe that massive numbers of people will adopt something just because it’s good for them,” Caldwell told me yesterday. “To become mainstream, it must become truly better — MySpace was better than Friendster, and Facebook was better than MySpace.”

Not that huge numbers are the goal for App.net. Caldwell’s initial goal for the beholden-to-users-not-advertisers social glue that became App.net was a mere 10,000 users. App.net has already tripled that, and it recently reduced prices from $50 to $36 a year due to economies of scale.

Rather, the goal was freedom.

Freedom for subscribers, who would be the customers and not the product of a social network for perhaps the first time since The Well. And freedom for developers, who would not be at the mercy of a service that owed its capability to meet payroll to advertisers’ capability to make a buck, and therefore to their ability to package and sell users’ attention.

“In my first blog post [about app.net] I said I believed that the social API backends of Twitter and Facebook were really useful to developers, but unfortunately, they’re getting locked down,” Dalton says. “It’s not like the people running the companies are dumb or bad, but they have a business model that forces them to control the stream.”

Which means that that Facebook and Twitter — and any other social network that depends on ad revenue — have a financial incentive to “hose their developers” over and over again. The recent API dustup between Instagram and Twitter that resulted in Instagram photos being banned from the Twitter stream is just one example.

“All the things I’ve been writing about have been coming true,” Caldwell says.

Which is one reason why App.net recently introduced its new file API, which is essentially the building blocks for having your own private cloud without having to own any hardware. With the new API, if a Flickr user wanted to join 500px instead, she could simply import her photos from Flickr and pick up right where she left off at 500px. If — and here’s the massive caveat — both services supported the new API.

That caveat is one reason it makes perfect sense that in conversation, Caldwell still refers to his 6-month-old baby as “an experiment.” It’s a social experiment as much as it is a technological experiment, if not more so. The original idea was to only create a social API backend — a backend for literally almost everything that could be social online — and let developers play with it, build on it, all in a spirit of freedom and openness. User-centricity plus developer-friendly.

“Originally we weren’t even going to have a client ourselves … we didn’t want to build a client for it,” Caldwell said.

Eventually App.net did build a web client, more as a proof of concept than anything else, but Caldwell is more interested in what other developers are doing.

Source: App.net

Patter on App.net

Such as a new client for App.net called Patter which, Caldwell says, looks nothing like microblogging or even Facebook. In fact, it looks like AOL chat rooms, with different topics and rooms you can go into. In other words, nothing like anyone from App.net would have built.

“That’s exactly the point,” Caldwell says. “Stuff that we would never have expected ourselves.”

Whether App.net is a successful experiment or not is still an open question. Early returns are positive, but 30,000 users in a world with billion-user social networks is clearly a blip on the radar. It’ll be interesting to whether that blip is the tip of an iceberg, or just a rowboat tossed in the waves.

App.net, however, has two things going for it.

One is its developing community, who care enough about the service — and what it stands for — to pony up cash for something others think they’re getting for free elsewhere. These are the power users that are spending time on App.net’s fledgling front-end, building relationships and engaging in richer, deeper conversations than they’re finding elsewhere.

The other is that, as sociologist Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And Caldwell has a plan for that small, committed group to grow at a much faster rate. But that’s a story for another day.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Information may want to be free, but the organization behind Wikipedia wants knowledge to be free, too. So Wikimedia has formed a partnership with the world’s sixth-largest telecom, VimpelCom, to deliver Wikipedia mobile sites for free to developing countries.

It’s part of the Wikipedia Zero program, which is the project to deliver Wikipedia “free of data charges” on mobile devices in developing countries.

“The world’s sixth-largest telecommunications company and fifth-largest website globally are coming together to offer our customers a better mobile experience and greater access to free knowledge, particularly in emerging markets,” Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

You’ve probably never heard of VimpelCom — the organization typically does business under other brands, such as Wind and Mobilink — but the telecom has a strong presence in Russia, former Eastern bloc countries, parts of south-east Asia, and Africa, with 212 million subscribers in a service area with 780 million people.

With this partnership, Wikipedia Zero now will be providing free access to 330 million mobile users around the world, Wikimedia’s Kul Takanao Wadhwa said, adding that it was an important step towards the organizations’ ultimate goal: “free knowledge to everyone on the planet.”

The 18 countries that VimpelCom is bringing onboard include Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic.

The roll out will start this year, Wikimedia said, with a focus on Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

photo credit: Absolute Chaos via photopin cc

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Whether you are a successful business man or woman, or an entrepreneur getting ready to take the plunge, we have the perfect read for you. It will be your first wise business decision: Paying zilch for a $25 e-book. By reading this book, you’ll gain insight from Steve Blank, a former Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur and current professor at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia. His credentials are extraordinary, due in large part to his mastery of customer development. His four-step framework is the ideal customer development strategy that helped him drive eight tech startups to success; a framework that is highlighted in this free E-book from CustDev.com.

At it’s roots, Customer Development is essentially a scientific approach to understanding your core business assumptions. One reason a vast majority of entrepreneurs fail is their inability to recognize and scale successful business practices. Innovative ideas and strategies can be a gold mine, but playing the lottery can be as well. The odds are already stacked against you as an entrepreneur. Customer Development is the perfect tool to act as a checks and balance system to ensure your business decisions don’t escape your core goal of producing a lucrative business.

The beauty of this strategy is how applicable it is regardless of where your business stands today. You can experience success without external validation, but your chances of sustaining success with an inward eye is similar to how successful you would be driving a car solely focusing your feet pushing the pedals and your hands turning the wheel. Don’t continue down an ill-advised road slowly veering off the path, use customer development to reassure your business heading in a viable direction.

This comprehensive “cheat sheet” will teach you all of the steps necessary to pivot toward startup success. Entrepreneurs are a dime a dozen. Who knows how many ingenius ideas are out there waiting to be discovered? What we do know is the countless pitfalls to avoid and basic principles that result in success. Read up on interviews and case studies with successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs/founders alike. Mimic successful strategies and avoid unprofitable ones.

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It’s a potential treasure trove for those who develop for Microsoft, or work in a Microsoft environment, and want to broaden their skills. I’ve included a few of the potentially most interesting below — but be sure to check out the full selection.

Web geeks who want to start building Windows 8 apps might want to check out Programming Windows 8 Apps, which will show you how to use your Javascript, HTML, and CSS skills to program for the desktop in Windows 8.

Or, if you’re a mobile developer and are thinking of possibly throwing an app on the Windows Phone platform, Ligman has listed a few books for you as well that will have you up and running with Silverlight, XAML, and sprites in no time.

IT administrators might find this set of books more helpful: a Microsoft Office 365 handbook for the more adventurous, and Office 2010 for the majority of you who are in corporate environments that stay just slightly off the bleeding edge.

Staying with IT theme, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions might be useful. Server room jockies will likely find something to learn in Windows Server 2012. And database administrators? There are a least eight different SQL e-books in Ligman’s list — all for free.

None these will be helpful, of course, if you’re not in a Microsoft shop.

But for those who are, take a look at both this list and a secondary list that Ligman posted that includes resources on developing for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud:

Image credit: Vladimir Melnikov/ShutterStock

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With the cost of living in New York City constantly increasing, New Yorkers have come to appreciate anything that’s free. And Wi-Fi provider Boingo‘s latest deal has it working with Google Offers to bring free Wi-Fi to New York City’s subway riders.

Boingo offers the free service in six subway stations from June 25 to September 7. The selected platforms are limited to a group of stations along 14th and West 23rd streets in Manhattan.

The free service also extends to the more than 200 above-ground Boingo hotspots in New York City.

For Google Offers, this means that smartphone users can search for local deals while on subway platforms, and for Boingo, it means plenty of exposure.

But Boingo has a much larger stake in this. After all, it’s teaming up with Transit Wireless to bring Wi-Fi to 36 subway stations by the end of the year. By 2017, Boingo says it intends to bring service to over 270 stations, which means that not even subway tunnels will be a viable escape path for technology-weary New Yorkers.

Here’s the full list of free Wi-Fi-equipped stations:

• A, C, E station at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street
• L station at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street
• C, E station at Eighth Avenue and West 23rd Street
• 1, 2, 3 station at Seventh Avenue and West 14th Street
• F, M station at Sixth Avenue and West 14th Street
• L station at Sixth Avenue and West 14th Street

Photo: Flickr: Paul Lowry

Technology teaches us to forget the past. Last year’s tech news seems like it has no use whatsoever. Thankfully, historians beg to differ, and they have begun to preserve the history of the tech industry as it becomes more and more important to the evolution of our lives and world. Those who understand the history of technology and the people who made it happen can probably figure out more quickly how to build on the shoulders of giants and advance technology further. Here’s some books that are great fun to read because they either relate great ideas that influenced a generation of technologists or because they chronicle the lives of people who changed the world. This list includes books that have stood the test of time and are worth a look for the history lover. And it includes new books, such as Walter Isaacson’s tome on Steve Jobs, that are likely to be the new classics. It doesn’t, however, include any tech textbooks. My focus is on books that deliver not just a technical understanding of how something works today, but hard-earned wisdom.

1. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011). This 571-page tome captures the key moments and thoughts of Steve Jobs, c0-founder of Apple. Isaacson built a moving portrait of the life of the tech icon after 40 interviews with him. Aware of Jobs’ reality distortion field, Isaacson also interviewed more than 100 key players about what Jobs told him, getting a full picture of the man from many points of view. All of the key players in the life of Jobs — his ex-girlfriends, former employees, board members, wife and children, and industry luminaries such as Bill Gates — talk about their interaction with Jobs, from his days growing up in Silicon Valley, to his pot-smoking days at a commune with an apple orchard in Oregon, until his death from cancer in 2011. Isaacson’s book captures the complexity of a man who could be a tyrant at one moment and an emotional wreck the next. Whatever you think of Jobs or his accomplishments, it is a must-read for anyone remotely related to the business of technology. The book makes you feel like you know the man behind the legend by the time you’re finished. It is so well done that it inspired me to write this list.

2. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (1997). It took a Harvard Business School professor to see why new technologies can cause great companies to fail. After studying industries from steel to hard drives, Christenson discovered that listening to customers can cause a great executive to misread the market. Typically, customers ask for new features, and the most enthusiastic customers ask for lots of new features. The managers who accommodate requests and put them into the next version of the product run the risk of failing because they make their products too complicated. They don’t notice that for ordinary customers, the technology is good enough. When a technology becomes good enough, the market leader may fail to notice, only to be disrupted by a competitor who comes into the market and offers a good enough product. Too many companies are afraid to disrupt their own products, and so they are disrupted instead. At the same time, businesses that routinely improve their products often miss the boat when a new technology comes along and becomes a huge wave. While the book focuses on business strategy, it offers a lot of insights and it had a huge impact on the tech industry. And Christensen’s “Innovator’s” series of books became a cottage industry. For innovators of any stripe, the whole series is worth reading.

3. The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981). This is the classic tech product creation story. Kidder writes the book so that you feel like you are a fly on the wall in the meetings at Data General, a minicomputer vendor in the 1970s. The author chronicles the turf war that takes place between two internal design groups within the company that are trying to create the great next-generation machine. The two teams are pitted against each other and they test whether a “quick and dirty” computer made by recent college graduates will make a better product or one that is painstakingly designed by an elite group. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in another era, but what hasn’t changed is difficulty of dealing with egos in team dynamics or the frenetic pace of product innovation. The book has inspired countless other business tales, including my own books on the history of Microsoft’s Xbox video game business.

4. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow (2006). Before we move on to making a god out of Mark Zuckerberg, it’s good to remember who came before him. No one had a more remarkable rags to riches story than Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel. He was born a Hungarian Jew in 1936 and he survived the Holocaust while his father did not. During the bloody Hungarian revolution of 1956, he fled the country, crawling across the Austrian border in the mud. He arrived in America penniless, found help and managed to work his way through college. He graduated in time to catch the wave of change sweeping through the new Silicon Valley with the creation of seminal chip companies such as Fairchild. He was the third employee at Intel and became its CEO, taking no prisoners along the way. Grove became a statesman of the valley and a feared boss for those who didn’t have their act together. Among his decisions: engaging in a strategic retreat, where he and Gordon Moore decided to exit the memory chip market to focus on microprocessors. Then came IBM, looking for a microprocessor to put in its first personal computer. After that, Intel was golden and Grove was a key reason that Intel became the world’s biggest chip maker.

5. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis (2001). This tale showed how all roads led to Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon. Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, swept into Silicon Valley and cozied up to Clark, the brilliant graphics expert who became the most important technology entrepreneur of the 1990s. The tale shows how the boom surrounding the internet turned the geeky Clark into one of the valley’s first billionaires. Clark rewrote the rules of Silicon Valley and capitalism itself. Lewis also chronicled Clark’s creation of Hyperion, a high-tech yacht that was more complex than a 747. Like Kidder, Lewis is a great storyteller who captured the poignant moments of Clark’s life. Clark didn’t set the world on fire with Healtheon, but his protegé, Marc Andreessen, has inherited the mantle of the uber-entrepreneur and investor of Silicon Valley.

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There is a limit to Rdio’s free music, though, and a meter at the top of the site will keep track of how much of it you have left for the month.

An Rdio representative explains the free music limit like this: “The amount of free a person will get is dynamic and will be based on their own personal use and displayed in a meter in the corner of their profile. A heavy user will get more, but probably not as much as they will want and a light user will get more than they’d ever want.”

The free service requires just an email address or Facebook account to sign up — there’s no credit card required. That’s a wise decision, since it completely removes the barriers users previously had to checking out the service.

Rdio has a catalog of over 12 million songs. Free users can upgrade to the $4.99 Web subscription plan, which lets you stream an unlimited amount of music from your web browser. There’s also a $9.99 Unlimited plan that gives you streaming access to music, as well as access to Rdio’s mobile apps, which allow you to download music for offline listening. For families, Rdio introduced an Unlimited Family plan for $17.99 a month (for two accounts) and $22.99 (for three accounts).

Rdio hinted at its plans for a free streaming service back in September, after competitor Mog also announced a free version of its service. Both are trying to compete with recently launched Spotify, which gained popularity for its free ad-supported streaming music service. Spotify relies on a desktop client, while both Mog and Rdio are web-based.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple could be gearing up to release a low-cost “iCloud iPhone” alongside its flagship iPhone 5, in coming months, according to the site Apple’n'Apps.

Several unnamed sources told the site that Apple has quietly been putting together a low-cost iPhone that would be free with a two-year contract. The iCloud iPhone could potentially use much of the internals from the iPhone 4 while sporting less on-board memory for storage. As a result, the device would force users to keep most of their data on Apple’s iCloud service for storage rather than the device itself.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard talk of a stripped-down, low-cost iPhone coming this year. Back in February, we reported on a rumor that Apple was working on a streaming-only “iPhone Mini,” something that I shot down as complete crazy talk because it seemed way too soon for Apple to give up on local storage entirely.

At the time, I wrote about a slightly more likely possibility for a stripped-down iPhone:

The iPhone Mini (or Nano, or whatever) could have significantly less storage than a typical iPhone. Most likely 8 gigabytes of storage — the same as the lowest end iPhones right now. Apple won’t prevent users from storing their own content, because that would be crazy. But since it has a small amount of memory, Apple will likely push the ability to stream media via MobileMe as well.

That basically seems to be what’s described by today’s iCloud iPhone rumor. We know that iCloud isn’t exactly a streaming service — files are synchronized and fully downloaded from iCloud, not streamed — which tells us that Apple will still need to include some sort of storage on board the iCloud iPhone. 8 gigabytes of storage, the same as Apple’s current low-end $50 iPhone 3GS, seems like the bare minimum necessary for a modern iOS device.

Apple is reportedly trying to get the cost of the purported iCloud iPhone down to $400, which would allow carriers to offer it on contract for free, Apple’n'Apps blogger Trevor Sheridan writes. The company will also move away from the expensive glass rear and antenna band from the iPhone 4 to cut costs on the device.

An iCloud iPhone would be a fundamental shift for Apple, which has generally expended as little effort as possible on its low-end offerings by discounting older generation iPhone models.

But I wouldn’t count it out entirely. Hitting the magical price point of free would be a major score for Apple, and the device would also attract even more consumers to iCloud, which would help Apple compete against Google and Amazon’s cloud storage offerings.

In announcing a free travel credit program Tuesday, Airbnb, the fast-growing social marketplace for travel accommodations, is moving to fend off rising competition by enticing loyal member to bring in new customers. The program rewards frequent customers with travel credits that are good towards a free night (or nights) at any space listed through Airbnb.

Airbnb is aiming to enhance the word of mouth that has fueled its success. Customers earn credits when a friend or family member books or lists a place on Airbnb. They get $25 for every referred person that books a trip over $75. For each referred person who successfully lists a space that gets booked, they earn $75.

The credits stack up, meaning customers can apply all the credits they’ve earned to the total price of an accommodation booked through Airbnb. The company even set up a page to track friends and family referrals from social networks like Facebook.  Airbnb automatically generates a coupon code for redeeming the credits.

The free travel credit program — along with a rumored $100 million total funding and high-profile investors like Ashton Kutcher — gives Airbnb an advantage over the growing number of competitors in the social travel accommodations market.

Last week, social travel startup Wimdu raised a comparable mega round of funding estimated at $90 million from Kinnevik and Rocket Internet, European investors known for putting money into “clones” of successful startups like Groupon and Zappos.

Airbnb has taken the threat of competitors very seriously — painting lesser-known rivals as deceptive scam artists and hiring an aggressive sales firms that ended up going rogue. But honestly, every piece of news about Airbnb suggests this is one startup that’s anxious to achieve success, which also makes it an attractive investment.

The company has achieved its measure of success by promoting its service as safer and classier than others — not to mention the 800 percent growth the service experienced in the last year alone. Airbnb has listings in over 14,500 cities in 184 countries, with over 1.6 million local homes booked, since launching in 2008.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Now here’s a way to build some quick publicity (and quickly clear out some old stock). Best Buy will be offering the 8-gigabyte iPhone 3GS for free with a two-year AT&T contract later today (December 10), Engadget reports.

The deal, which will only last one day, certainly isn’t meant for smartphone power users. The iPhone 3GS is one generation behind the iPhone 4. And with 8-gigabytes of storage on board, it’s not going to be the best option for storing your music collection and having room left over for taking photos and videos. But still — it’s a free iPhone!

The deal follows Radio Shack’s offer of the first iPhone sale in history — $50 off the 16GB and 32GB iPhone 4 (and a mere $49 for the 8GB iPhone 3GS). Radio Shack’s deal ends December 11.

There’s a lot we can read into Best Buy’s offer. Sure, the retailer could just be looking to spice up sales leading up to the holidays. It could also potentially make a killing off accessories from customers overjoyed with their shiny free iPhone. But it also seems clear that Best Buy is clearing out its stock for something, and that could very well be the Verizon iPhone.