Oh, All That Yummy Consumer Data . . .

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What do people want?  That's a big question in any business venture or job, and one that is often surprisingly hard to answer.  In many cases people just hope people want what they make, or hope to convince them they want it (that's what marketing departments are for).

Right now in the age of DLC, e-comics, and online purchases from stores with gigantic virtual inventories, we've got an incredible opportunity to find out what people want.  We'd better be ready, because the meandering-forward economy with its eBooks and virtual stores and fermium games is going to be a giant learning opportunity.

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News Of The Day 11/30/2010

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Google makes an offer for GroupOn, Yammer gets a ton of cash, Zynga has a new partnership, and the Wikileaks scandal may venture onto Fraudclosure!  Must-know geek news time go!

Economics/Freakonomics:
Restraunt Performance Index Up – Which may indicate consumer confidence is recovering. Also shared for the geekonomic value of using restraunt data . . .

That whole Wikileaks mess with the diplomatic document dump? Looks like the guy behind it may dump info on a major bank, probably Bank Of America. If he's got some nasty info on BofA and dumps it, this could A) further destabilize the state of the bank and others, and B) distract from the controversy over the diplomatic document dump. So my guess, is it's gonna happen.

And the mortgage/foreclosure mess is even worse as many foreclosures are due to servicer issues. Really, just read this one.

Social Media:
LinkedIn to add article-sharing button. I of course am pro LinkedIn, but also feel, objectively, this makes sense. Lots of people share with LinkedIn anyway, this just makes it easie (and lets people share to specific contacts). ALso worth USING on LinkedIn so you can share with your business contacts.

Zynga forms partnership with American Express. Membership reward points can be exchanged for virtual goods. A simple and effective partnership.

Technology:
Prediction of the death of RIM. Meanwhile, analysts seem bullish on RIM due to their tablet.

That above article took some inspiration from an article on lessons learned from ten years in the tech news beat that is also worth reading.

Woah. Yammer gets $25 million in investment. I haven't followed them much, but $25 million for their enterprise messaging/microblogging service. Time to pay attention – and hey they got $25 million and they're involved in a hot area, so send a resume.

Google has made a $5.3 billion offer for Groupon. Groupon's board is going to meet on this. Google seems to be on a spree (though delaying their social media endeavors).

Video Games:
EA aiming at digital market for growth. No one is surprised.

QUESTION OF THE DAY:RIM – bright future or dark?  What do you think of their initiatives?

– Steven Savage

The Analysts’ Freemium Nightmare

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I'm starting to pity economists, beyond the whole "how did so many of you morons miss the economy melting down" thing.  I'm feeling bad for them because they've got to try and analyze a lot of crazy trends in the actual working parts of the world economy, and things are changing rapidly and are far more distributed.

Last column I speculated on the various facets of Freemium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium) that I feel need to be further explored and understood.  I'm quite enthused about the model and feels it holds great promise.

Now assuming Freemium is the wave of the future, as opposed to a tiny splash in the big ocean  of pricing models that lies on the shores of weird economic metaphors, there are going to be changes in more than just how we sell and buy.  There will be changes in how people analyze economic information, from understanding sales, to evaluating the performance of an industry.

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