Twilio CEO Offers Tips for Pricing Your SaaS - ReadWriteCloud. Determining the pricing structure for a product can be challenging, and it's an area in which a lot of companies stumble, particularly when they find they have set the price too low.
At StartupDay 2010 yesterday in Seattle, Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson gave a talk on "Making Money with SaaS. " Twilio is a San Francisco-based startup that offers an API allowing developers to integrate telephone and SMS actions - receiving texts, making calls, playing back messages, for example - into their apps. Lawson argues that the simple, universal pricing structure should be: "take the value you create, minus some discount, and that's your price. " It's a formula that doesn't come up with the price by adding up the costs and then tacking on enough to make a profit. Rather, it's one that really demands you look at the measurable value your service offers. Lawson encourages businesses to make the most of customer feedback loops to determine the right price, particularly prior to launch. Defining "Platform" and "Platform-as-a-Service" - ReadWriteCloud. A couple of weeks ago, Alex Williams asked on the ReadWriteCloud weekly poll what people thought were the "worst terms" in cloud computing.
The results were inconclusive. Or rather, there are a number of terms we dislike. "Cloud-in-a-box," "cloudstorming," and "cloudburst" led the pack with the most votes, the latter two suggesting that we may be tiring of weather metaphors in cloud marketing. But one of the terms that has recently been on the receiving end of criticism didn't make it onto Alex's list: platform-as-a-service. Or even just "platform. " What is a Platform? Investor Brad Feld penned a rant about the term, noting that "platform" is becoming a buzzword bandied about without much concern for meaning. By extension, Gartner Research Fellow David Smith has also railed against the term platform-as-a-service, asking "Is PaaS passe yet?
" Everything's a Platform? In the case of platform, Smith writes, "Platform refers to an extensible entity, something that is built upon. Exploring How the Cloud Redefines E-Commerce - ReadWriteCloud. The 2010 holiday season may be remembered for the distributed nature of the shopping experience more than anything else.
Mobile technologies are on the rise and application platforms are serving as hothouses for any number of developments to buy and sell products and services. The iPhone, Android and now Windows Phone 7 handsets are as much e-commerce platforms as are game consoles, kiosks or the traditional personal computer. The variety of ways to sell goods and services online means that traditional e-commerce practices are opening to the new world of cloud computing, dominated by APIs, access to social networks and data services. This new breed of e-commerce platform is making it far easier for anyone to set up a storefront. More advanced integrations are faster, too, due in large part to open Web standards.
The business of software. Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference.
This is long, feel free to skip! My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives. Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown. Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. The same thing is true of software. The question used to be: Does it run? Now, the amount of high utility freeware and useful free websites is soaring. So if it’s not about avoiding fatal bugs, what’s the business of software? At its heart, you need to imagine (and then execute) a business that just happens to involve a piece of software, because it’s become clear that software alone isn’t the point. 1.
Who can I reach? 2.