2013 has been the year of the freeloader: from freemium SaaS business models, to the continuing re-organisation of conventional news media, to the Open Source industry, the unstoppable rise of stuff-for-free continues to expand beyond music and games.

And it seems that few industries will be immune to it in the long term – digital manufacturing and 3D printing make it much easier for consumers to produce their own stuff, so if they’re widely adopted physical manufacturers could face the same sort of freeloading that is redefining music, video and games sectors. A whole range of businesses need to start engaging with the idea that a portion of their revenue is likely to be under attack, and under attack from people who love what these businesses are doing and want to share it.

These are the ideas behind The Curve, which is the best analysis available of why this is happening and what businesses can do about it. Here’s a nice 2 minute summary of what it’s all about:

The point is that as well as a challenge, the technologies that enable freeloaders also represent a huge opportunity – to assemble a great fanbase, to understand exactly what they want, and to provide much higher value services and products for the ‘Superfans’.

Don’t think that this is just a B2C phenomenon, either. Back in February, our CEO Tales on Open Source dug into this question a bit, and how a product that is accessible to all, freely, can make a great business model. The corporate superfans of OpenSource products value a range of things – professional support services, maintenance contracts, configuration services, even hardware, and their valuations for these products are high.

We’ll be bringing these perspectives together on the 22nd November with a special afternoon edition of CEO Tales, a seminar on how The Curve can work in your business. If you run or invest in a business online, you can register here.

Here are some of the things we read and saw that made us think this week that we found interesting even if they were more than 140 characters long.

1 Excellent story in the New York Times about the story behind the original iPhone launch.

“It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs. “The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.”

Also worth reading this critique of the story from the inside – Ken Segall – who explains why the product was announced before it was finished. Turns out it was pretty simple.

2 As Twitter prepares to IPO, this is a great, sometimes scurrilous story about the founding of the business.

“As the new service evolved, though, the power struggle between Williams and Glass, which had been simmering at Odeo, moved to Twitter. Glass, protective of his new idea and distracted by his divorce, was growing increasingly edgy and anxious. When a lower-level employee mistakenly let a well-known tech entrepreneur join the service, Glass went into a tirade. “This is our enemy,” he yelled in front of the staff. “We need a war map. They’re going to attack us.” He also pulled Dorsey aside and confessed his fears that Williams wanted him out.”

3 How a journalist tried to save Nokia.

In 2008, a Finnish journalist, at Helsingin Sanomat wrote a letter to Nokia explaining why their new phone was crap and what to do about it. Great story about what they wrote and the response from Nokia.

“And then there is another, different example: I send a text message, which is something that I do dozens of times every day. First, I press messages, then I select create message, and then I need to choose from among four options: text message, multimedia message, audio message, or e-mail. So each time, dozens of times a day in the years that follow, I am bothered by this extra message, and each time I give the same answer.

“I would guess that this is the case with others. My guess is that out of every 1 000 messages sent, 999 are ordinary text messages. It is as if my telephone had not been designed in such a way that it would make it as easy as possible to do what I am doing with it all the time, and that instead, the telephone is constantly promoting all of the amazing things that I could do with it.”

4 Bug: Government keeps shutting down

You don’t need to be a code monkey to appreciate the excellent comments on this post in GitHub about the US government shutdown…

“I noticed a bug over the past week or so and it seems reproducible:

1. Go to U.S. Government.
2. U.S. Government is shut down.

“Hope you can resolve this soon. It would seem that the U.S. Government would value 100% uptime in order to be a reliable and trustworthy source for the rest of the world.

5 America’s greatest inventor.

Some view Tesla as America’s greatest inventor – Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal for example – and see Edison as a stealer of credit and other people’s ideas. Bill Gates argues that Edison is America’s greatest, not because of the things he is often credited with inventing such as lightbulbs, but for the legacy he left in terms of the way he worked.

6 Ten challenges the IOT Community needs to master.

Stefan Ferber, VP IoT Innovations at Bosch outlines ten of the challenges that the Internet of Things needs to overcome to be a success. Neat overview but also think we should be focused on making more people understand how to make products people actually want rather than developing technologies.

Drop us a line if you find anything that makes you think that deserves wider appreciation.

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Thanks to Tim Barker at Datasift for sending us this. Reddit does everything differently.

We’re looking forward to tonight’s event at UBS headquarters, 1 Finsbury Avenue, London EC2M 2PF. Drinks networking starts at 6pm, the discussion starts at 7pm.

The guest list up to 9am this morning is:

The hashtag for discussion this evening is #CEOTales, and if you have any questions that you would particularly like to put to the panel please do send them to us, via Hermione@thebln.com.

This evening’s event would not have been possible without the support of UBS, Rackspace and Erevena Executive Search, our supporters who are promoting the growth of the tech sector.

Here are some of the things we read and saw that made us think this week that we found interesting even if they were more than 140 characters long.

1 Terrible news! (For absolutely no one whatsoever in the  world of technology except the scum sucking people behind Intellectual Ventures).

IV rumoured to be running out of cash and looking for $3 billion from investors.

2 How user feedback turned a project to create a timepiece for the blind into a high-fashion, tactile watch.

Brilliant lessons in product development and constantly challenging your assumptions by talking to potential users as early as possible.

“In conversations with people who are visually impaired, we were surprised to hear this feedback again and again. They want to wear a watch that everyone else is wearing, not one specifically designed for someone with a disability. A product designed “for the blind” would accentuate the barriers and differences between the blind and the sighted. Wearers would be no better off with it than with the talking watch in the MIT classroom.

“When we instead introduced the watch to sighted users as an innovative, tactile timepiece that would help them tell time without having to look down at their wrist at inopportune moments — during long business meetings, less-than-magical dates or dinners with family — the response was much more enthusiastic.”

3 Presentation skills considered harmful. I am a UI. Nothing more.

A brilliant perspective on presentation skills and overcoming stage-fright. Kathy Sierra  is one of the most brilliant presenters in the world. Period. (Watch this talk on making users awesome). Bet you didn’t know she fears public speaking.

Remember,

“The Big Problem is… YOU.

“Or rather, the problem is thinking that what matters in your presentation is you. Because unless you’re a paid performer – musician, comedian, motivational speaker – you are not the reason they came to the conference. They are sitting in your session because of someone that matters far more to them than you: themselves. They are there for their own experiences, and “watching you present” is not one of those experiences.

“My path to coping with heart-stopping stage-fright is to focus NOT on what I do but on what theyexperience. And since I’m a software developer, I’ll think of the audience as my users.”

4 The difference between men and women – on Facebook

An interesting analysis using Word Clouds of 700,000,000 words from 75,000 people on Facebook split by gender.

5 New Scientist discusses the possibility that the FBI is getting very good at tackling cybercrime as evidenced by their bust of the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts this week.

“The FBI managed to get administrative access to the Silk Road servers and make a copy of the hard drives, then sit in the background watching all the traffic.”We don’t know how that was done, are aware of no routine techniques that would enable that kind of intrusion. If there’s technology to do that, it’s very advanced.”

“The Silk Road take-down also has implications for two important internet technologies – Tor and digital currency Bitcoin. Bitcoin lost 40 per cent of its value as soon as news broke that the FBI had seized Silk Road servers.”

6 Enterprise sales tips for hackers

Some of this is obvious, some of this is very good. All of it together, is a very useful primer. If you think that codinig is the easy part, it is a must read.

Drop us a line if you find anything that makes you think that deserves wider appreciation.

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Here are six of the things we read and saw that made us think this week that we found interesting even if they were more than 140 characters long.

1 VC investment themes 

A great slide deck by Gil Dibner at DFJ Esprit. Even if you are not interested in investment, this is a great framework for the questions you need to answer in order to grow a big company.

2 What Clayton Christensen got wrong. How Apple survives with design vs low cost competition.

“Apple is – and, for at least the last 15 years, has been – focused exactly on the blind spot in the theory of low-end disruption: differentiation based on design which, while it can’t be measured, can certainly be felt by consumers who are both buyers and users.”

3 Harry McCracken on the Myth of Steve Jobs’ constant breakthroughs.

“Under Steve Jobs, Apple released an epoch-shifting product every two years or so. Under Tim Cook, it’s capable only of the boring, evolutionary business strategy Cannold later calls “incrementalism.”

“Except…

“The golden age of Apple that Cannold pines for never existed. Steve Jobs didn’t change the world every two years like clockwork, and he was incrementalism’s grand master.”

4 Fascinating post mortem of the failed startup, Sonar, from the founder, Brett Martin.

Lots of useful lessons, the one on focus being particularly apposite for startups.

“You do not have 20% time. Identify your top three priorities. Throw away numbers two and three.”

5 The habits of successful people – they start before they are ready.

“We all start in the same place: no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience. The difference is that some people — the winners — choose to start anyway.”

6 The user is drunk.

A fantastic 4 minute video about the importance of UI and how you should think about it.

“Great UI isn’t there.”

Drop us a line if you find anything that makes you think that deserves wider appreciation.

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Not all useful advice for entrepreneurs can be contained in a single tweet though that doesn’t stop people relentlessly tweeting contextless ‘wisdom’ at conferences. Here are some of the things we read this week that we found interesting even if they were more than 140 characters long. Grab a cup of tea and have a quick browse.

Some of the best writing and thoughts about entrepreneurship we have seen recently – Tim O’Reilly’s view on his personal business failures; the world of Jeff Bezos; Paul Graham on fund raising; why one-size fits all interfaces suck; Ryan Carson on taking the managers out of his company; Michael Skok on hiring.

How I failed. Tim O’Reilly on culture, cash, people and mediocracy.

20 of the smartest things Jeff Bezos has said. Good thought provoking stuff, not the usual entrepreneurial ‘inspirational’ BS.

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

How to raise money. Useful insights into the process of raising cash from investors from Paul Graham. While we still think Paul’s definition of a startup as a company with ‘rapid growth’ is wrong, there is solid, savvy advice here for those considering raising funds.

“To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque—partly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you. And the misleading ways of investors combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders.

“One of the things that surprises founders most about fundraising is how distracting it is. When you start fundraising, everything else grinds to a halt. The problem is not the time fundraising consumes but that it becomes the top idea in your mind. A startup can’t endure that level of distraction for long. An early stage startup grows mostly because the founders make it grow, and if the founders look away, growth usually drops sharply.”

Tricycles vs Training Wheels – the tragedy of the one size-fits-all user interface and the difference between ‘learning curves’ and ‘learning walls’

Why we removed bosses at Treehouse. Ryan Carson, outlines the thinking behind abolishing managers at Treehouse. This is the first in a series of posts and it will be interesting to see what transpires.

“By 2013 we had grown to 60 people with seven managers and four executives. As we added more people to the team, we noticed something disconcerting: rumors, politics and complaints started appearing.

“What if we removed all management and simply empowered everyone to choose what they do every day? We laughed at first and then the conversation turned serious. We had hired talented and motivated people. Did they need managers?”

How I hire. Good slide deck overview of the process of hiring employees from Michael Skok. Sits very nicely with Mikey Trafton’s brilliant talk at Business of Software Conference last year about hiring for culture fit.

Drop us a line if you find anything that makes you think that deserves wider appreciation.

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We’ve written before on the BLN about Apps for Good: this year’s final award evening blew us away and we’ve no doubt it’s a huge force for good in the UK today.

If you have coalface experience in building businesses then you can get involved: Apps for Good are looking for mentors for their 2013/2014 programme. In their own words:

‘Apps for Good is an open-source education movement that enables young people to create mobile, social and web apps to solve problems that matter to them. You can join the movement by becoming an Apps for Good Expert. All you need to do is to volunteer one hour of your time remotely via video call. Give an expert session and share your skills in new product development, UX design, app development, marketing, user & market insight, business modelling, public speaking or entrepreneurship. By advising students on their app ideas on your area of expertise, you will make a positive impact on their journey and get energy and inspiration from them in return. Sign up as expert volunteer today via: http://www.appsforgood.org/public/get-involved/be-an-expert’

You won’t regret it.

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