That John Martin

PopSample is growing. We have a great core team that hails from the halls of Apple, Autodesk, comScore, and Cisco, but we need more help.

We’re currently looking for a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, and an Account Coordinator in Toronto.

If you think you fit the bill, or know of someone that might, give us a shout at jobs@popsample.com. We offer competitive compensation, flexible hours, expensive office chairs, big LCD monitors, and an operating system agnostic workplace.

Dick Costolo talks about the power of free in his first Wizard post of the year:

Look, there are plenty of great business models based on charging a subscription fee. It’s also the case that we’ve all been burned by “now it’s free, now it’s not” services in the past (think ATM’s, for example….it’s free until we’re all using it, at which point it’s $2 per withdrawal). Nonetheless, it would appear that models in which revenue and earnings accrue to a company as an indirect function of its free use are the models that have the most powerful impact on the Internet today, and you work against that trend at your own peril. This is probably true even where specific industries continue not to admit it. When you add costs to using a product/service, you add friction to customer adoption (he said, stating the obvious). If somebody else comes along and figures out how to make money on such a service by providing it for free, then it’s not so much fun to be you because your competitor’s lack of friction is going to make life harder for you. And time and time again on the Internets, we see that somebody ultimately comes along and figures out how to make a lot of money by offering for free a service for which somebody else is charging.

Paul has shamed me into reviving my blog. And we have a startup to talk about. So let’s see how we go.