According to Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired, one
of the reasons “free” works in a digital age is that with digital goods, you
can give away a huge portion of your product for free, without any cost for
those goods.
That's just one of the ideas included in his new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." Chris is speaking via WebEx this Wednesday, Feb 3 at 10am PT and the first 150 attendees will receive a free copy of his new book!
So how does this affect you? Free is big, and the list of who's giving it a try grows daily. We pulled together a few examples of free things you can try today. The idea is to get you thinking about free and how it might be a business solution for your company.
Email and Calendars
Yahoo, Google, Hotmail all offer free
email services typically supported by advertising. You can also find free
calendars associated with these email services. The business strategy:
multiple “hooks” make it harder for you to live without them.
Want even more "free" - check out this PC Magazine article
with the best free of 2009. It includes things like
Audacity, iTunes, Winamp,
TweetDeck, Google Chrome and more.
Back-up Services
This is one of the most important tools most individuals and small businesses need to insure their intellectual assets. If you need to manage costs and only need to protect a limited amount of digital assets, you can get 2GB of protection free from companies like SugarSync or Mozy. Business strategy: the minute you hit 2.1 GB, it will be too hard to switch to another vendor or manage multiple “free” accounts.
Virus Protection
This one is special and brand new – Facebook is offering its members six months of free virus protection from McAfee in response to security breaches the social networking site has experienced (you can see a list of other free virus protection services here). The business strategy: partner offers a service that has value (and responds to a PR issue) and in time, the user will agree and begin paying for the service.
Guess What? WebEx has Free Too!
And of course…we offer free WebEx events to help you learn more and stay on top of current events! You can even use the WebEx trial absolutely free (business strategy – when you experience an online meeting, we think you’ll like it!).
Be sure to join us for Chris Anderson’s talk on Wednesday. Register today!
Details
Wed, February 3, 10am PT
| 1pm ET
[Please note: the non-Cisco companies listed in this article were used
as examples only, they aren't endorsements of their service. We encourage you
to take a look and judge for yourself - that's the very nature of
"free"!]
