Airline has 9 seats for $9 on each flight - Video

Airline has 9 seats for $9 on each flight

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

By Chris Anderson 02.25.08

FEATURE

Webmail Windfall

How Can Air Travel Be Free?

How Can a CD Be Free?

How Can a DVR Be Free?

How Can Directory Assitance Be Free?

How-To Wiki

How To Make Money Around Free Content

The March 2008 "issue for free" offer is now closed.

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

Chris Anderson discusses "Free."

Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Michael Lennon.
For more, visit wired.com/video.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

Scenario 1: Low-cost digital distribution will make the summer blockbuster free. Theaters will make their money from concessions — and by selling the premium moviegoing experience at a high price.

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

source: wired

New York: Party für Lady Liberty

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New York: Party für Lady Liberty

Riesenfest in New York: Am Unabhängigkeitstag ist die Krone der Freiheitsstatue erstmals seit Jahren wieder begehbar. Seit den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September 2001 war die symbolträchtige Aussichtsplattform aus Sicherheitsgründen geschlossen. mehr...

Air New Zealand - Air safety video has nude crew

Air safety video has nude crew 2:17

Air New Zealand decided to shake up its in-flight safety video by featuring a flight crew in nothing but body paint.



Link:

The book that Facebook doesn't want you to read

Accidental Billionaires's author Ben Mezrich explains how he put together the tawdry tale that has Silicon Valley buzzing.

Ben Mezrich, is the author of "Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal."

Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook's CEO.

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Best-selling author Ben Mezrich is the first to concede he doesn't know exactly what happened between Mark Zuckerberg and the Victoria's Secret model at that San Francisco club in the summer of 2005. He tells the story just as sources reported it to him: a touch on the leg. A grasp of the hand. The pair leaving the club. That's it. Any inference from there is your own.

But man, is there ever inference. In "Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal," due out July 14 from Doubleday, Mezrich spins a fast-paced tale of intrigue and suspicion that follows Facebook's young founder on his ruthless rise to prominence in Silicon Valley. The 262-page narrative portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a hard-hearted genius with a fetish for Asian women who is not above stealing ideas and turning on his friends in his quest to create the dominant social network. "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin has already agreed to write the screenplay, and Daily Variety recently reported that David Fincher ("Fight Club") may direct the movie.

Doubleday labels the book "nonfiction"

Mezrich, who was criticized for making up characters and scenes in his best-selling book "Bringing Down the House," uses a lengthy author's note to broadcast his reporting methodology. He describes his work as a "dramatic narrative account," explaining that he reconstructed dialogue and even, to the extent that it moved the story forward, entire scenes. Some would call this fiction. But Doubleday has bravely labeled it nonfiction. Or as Mezrich told Fortune.com, "There are certain places in the book where I'm sort of doing a legitimate speculation." He calls his work "a best guess."

Of course, Mezrich's primary source for a good deal of the material is Eduardo Saverin, a classmate at Harvard College of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin used earnings from smart investments he'd made as an undergraduate to help start the site, then called TheFacebook.com.

Long before Saverin connected with Mezrich, however, he'd become estranged from Zuckerberg. After Saverin was pushed out of the company, Saverin and Zuckerberg lobbed lawsuits at each other liberally from April 2005 until last August when the suits were dismissed. Over the winter Saverin's name was added to the Facebook web site as one of the cofounders. At about that time Saverin also stopped talking to Mezrich. Saverin didn't respond to Fortune.com's attempts to contact him.

Mezrich remembers meeting Saverin by chance. "It was about 2 a.m. in the morning when I got an email out of the blue to my web site, which is essentially a fan site. This kid wrote an email -- I'm a Harvard senior and I have a really fantastic story for you' -- which of course you hear all the time. But the kid said, 'You know, I've been best friends with these people who founded Facebook, and I want to tell you this story.' I wasn't looking for this story, but I went and met this kid for a drink. So I show up at this bar, Bar 10 at the Westin [hotel in Boston], and the kid shows up with Eduardo Saverin. He wouldn't tell me who Eduardo was at first. It was all kind of secretive. Then Eduardo began to tell me this whole story, and he was clearly upset."

Mezrich is quick to add that "Accidental Billionaires" is based on many other interviews and documents. He got lucky, of course, when thousands of pages of court documentation surfaced after Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, also former classmates of the Facebook founder, sued Zuckerberg claiming he stole their idea. (This suit settled and the twins reportedly received $65 million.)

One person Mezrich never spoke with is Mark Zuckerberg. Says Mezrich, "There was always this 'Mark might talk to you, Mark might talk to you' thing going on, but in the end Mark decided not to talk to me, and he made it pretty clear he didn't want any of the people he's involved with talking to me." In a deft story-telling move, Mezrich turned this deficit in his favor, playing up the mystery behind Zuckerberg's personality.

Sex and Drugs and Koalas

One of the book's more picaresque characters is Silicon Valley bad boy Sean Parker, the cofounder of music file-sharing service Napster and one of Zuckerberg's boyhood heroes, per Mezrich. Mezrich describes Parker and Zuckerberg's first meeting in a Manhattan restaurant: "the look on Mark's face, the sudden flush in his cheeks and the brightness in his eyes. Pure idol worship." Mezrich wouldn't say whether he interviewed Parker, but Parker is included in many of the book's more salacious moments -- parties where drugs feature prominently. Parker did not respond to requests for comment.

Often the details Mezrich makes up are juicier than the facts that inspired the scenes. For example, Mezrich believes Zuckerberg had to break into a Harvard residence house to retrieve student data to launch an early forerunner of Facebook. At the start of a chapter, he writes: "He might have gotten what he needed in other ways, we certainly don't know for sure every detail; but we can imagine how it might have gone down..." Cut to the middle of the night where a kid "who just liked to prove what he could do, how much smarter he was than everybody else" crept into a residence hall, then ducked behind a sofa while two coeds engage in a sexual act.

So far, even some of the details labeled "fact" in the book have been disputed. Soon after they arrive in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg and friends find themselves eating koala meat on a yacht belonging to a Sun Microsystems (SUNW) founder. Yup, the cuddly marsupial. When excerpts from the book's proposal appeared on Gawker earlier this year, that anecdote was called into question.

"It was a story told to me by Eduardo, and I did my best to look into it, and I believe truly that it happened, " says Mezrich. "I believe they ate koala on the yacht of one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. It wasn't the CEO as Gawker reported. And the funniest email I got after that proposal [leaked], is that the one thing Eduardo wanted to make sure of is [the fact that] it wasn't the CEO it was the COO. That was his main problem with my proposal."

Facebook Responds

Facebook spokesman Elliot Schrage thinks the book is so inaccurate readers will not take it as fact. "Ben Mezrich clearly aspires to be the Jackie Collins or Danielle Steele of Silicon Valley. In fact his own publisher put it best. 'The book isn't reportage. It's big juicy fun,' he says, quoting Doubleday publicist Todd Doughty from a June 24 New York Times blog post. "We particularly agree with the first part of that and think any readers will concur."

In the end, "Accidental Billionaires" is not that damning to Zuckerberg's character. And it's not that true. But much as the story may be more fiction than fact, it may well take its place in American culture as Facebook's definitive founding myth, particularly if Hollywood gives it the full treatment.

source: cnn money

updated 2 minutes ago

Michael Jackson is dead

Michael Jackson, the show-stopping singer whose best-selling albums -- including "Off the Wall," "Thriller" and "Bad" -- and electrifying stage presence made him one of the most popular artists of all time, died Thursday, CNN has confirmed. full story

source: cnn

How Much Does Obama Care About Immigration Reform?

"I think it's time for a president who won't walk away from something as important as comprehensive (immigration) reform just because it becomes politically unpopular. I will make it a top priority in my first year as the president of the United States of America."

--Barack Obama, speech to the National Council of La Raza, July 13, 2008

The president was in Green Bay, Wis., Thursday, stumping hard for his real top legislative priority, health care reform. But saddled with his potentially awkward pledge to also press for the first major liberalization of the immigration laws in a quarter century, Obama is playing for time by resorting to that favorite dodge of temporizing presidents – a closed-door meeting.

Unlike the televised health care summit in early March, Obama is meeting in private next Wednesday with still unspecified congressional leaders to try to figure out the politics of normalizing the status of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. The legislative architecture has been in place since immigration reform first passed the Senate with 62 votes in 2006 (only to die in the House) – the carrot of a path to citizenship coupled with the stick of stricter border enforcement.

With White House aides eager to downplay expectations surrounding the meeting (which they repeatedly stress is not a summit, a trip to the mountain top, a blue-ribbon conference or a rally), immigration reform advocates remain concerned about whether Obama has worked out a short-term legislative strategy. "That the president is meeting with members of Congress is a very positive sign," said Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, a Latino advocacy organization. "But there a few questions we have about the participants in the meeting. Will this be just the standard committee chairmen and vice chairmen? Or will it include the leaders who have expressed an interest in this – Senator (Mel) Martinez, Senator (John) McCain and Senator (Lindsey) Graham?"

All the senators Murguia named are Republicans, which underscores the political reality that immigration reform is either bipartisan or buried. Back in 2006, the original odd-duck coalition consisted of the Bush administration (which was surprisingly moderate on immigration issues), Republicans like McCain, and liberal Democrats led by Ted Kennedy. This time around, faced with politically skittish congressional Democrats (a phrase that may be redundant), Obama needs GOP support. As Frank Sharry, the founder of America's Voice, an advocacy group for immigration reform, put it, "John McCain has to get over his grumpiness and play on this."

At the moment, though, there is no immigration legislation, just a vague Senate timetable. New York's Chuck Schumer, an adroit dealmaker who took over the immigration subcommittee from the ailing Kennedy, has promised to have a bill ready to send to the Senate floor by the fall. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (running for reelection next year in Nevada, a state in which about one-sixth of the voters are Hispanic) said last week that he wants to pass an immigration bill this year "if it is at all possible." But then there is the black hole known as the House of Representatives. Simon Rosenberg, the founder of NDN, a center-left Democratic think tank which supports immigration reform, said, "In the Senate, you have knowledge and sophistication on the issue. In the House – which has never gone through a serious debate on immigration – you have more ignorance and fear."

Beyond congressional gamesmanship, there is a larger political question about the nation's mood in the midst of a deep recession. At first glance, this might seem like a moment when it would be easy to arouse economically struggling voters with ominous images of menacing foreigners and threats of open borders, all conveyed by the word "amnesty." But high unemployment in the United States has, in fact, lessened the allure of sneaking across the border or overstaying a tourist visa. In late May, the Border Patrol informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the Mexican border had declined by 27 percent in 2009 to their lowest level since the 1970s. Since enforcement has remained relatively constant, immigration experts believe that this statistic indicates a sharp drop in the number of attempted illegal border crossings.

Another symbol of softening attitudes may be found in – of all things – television ratings. A few years ago, CNN's bumptious Lou Dobbs was riding high as he fed fears that illegal workers were devastating the economy, breeding disease (he actually ballyhooed a bogus leprosy statistic) and claimed that immigration legislation represented a stealth plan to impose a North American super state. But the New York Observer reported this week that Dobbs's ratings were down by 29 percent on CNN and dropping fast on Headline News (HLN). As Felix Gillette wrote in the Observer, referring to the prized 25- to 54-year-old viewing audience, "He finished in fourth place in the demographic at different time slots (7 p.m. and 9 p.m.) on two different networks (CNN and HLN) on the same night!"

Polling data also suggest that hard-line viewpoints on immigration are fading along with the other remnants of the culture wars. A May national poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 63 percent of all voters (including 50 percent of Republicans) support "providing a way for illegal immigrants already in the U.S. to gain legal citizenship." A CBS News/New York Times poll conducted in April gave voters three choices about what to do with illegal workers in this country: 44 percent opted for allowing them to stay and eventually apply for citizenship; 21 percent chose allowing them to stay as guest workers; and only 30 percent said they should leave the country immediately.

It is, of course, easy to build air castles out of answers to survey questions. And the political puzzle is not what attitudes are when immigration is barely being publicly debated, but whether these sentiments will shift in the midst of a high-decibel congressional drama over amnesty for workers who entered this country illegally or stayed on without a valid visa. For many congressional Democrats who won Republican seats in 2006 and 2008, the political calculation may come down to how much do they fear having a vote for immigration reform be demonized in a 30-second attack ad.

Still, immigration is one of the rare issues on which a centrist viewpoint has emerged that unites all but the send-'em-home right and the heart-on-the-sleeve left. Alan Bersin, an assistant secretary of Homeland Security and Janet Napolitano's special representative for border affairs, summarized this consensus in an interview: "The politics and policy of immigration reform require three things. First, that the economy has the labor it needs. Second, an answer for the 11 million people who are here illegally. And, finally, to assure the American people that – unlike after the 1986 (amnesty) legislation – future flows of workers will be handled through legitimate labor markets." Bersin's last requirement is a reference to securing the borders to avoid attracting a new generation of illegal workers.

Immigration reform before the 2010 elections, though, may prove a bridge too far even for the ambitious Obama administration. White House burnout and congressional exhaustion is a danger at a time when the administration is also trying to grapple with health care, global warming and a "been down so long, it's beginning to look like up to me" economy. Ultimately, the question is – and no one on the sidelines is certain of the answer – how much does Barack Obama care about immigration reform? For without aggressive presidential leadership, the congressional votes are probably not there to reform an immigration system that no one (left, right or center) believes is working.

UPDATE: The White House announced Friday afternoon that the immigration meeting had been postponed yet again. The most likely time for a third try: the week of June 22.

source: politicsdaily.com