Ben from MailChimp on their decision to go Freemium last year. (They started building this app in 2001, when they were a website development house! In 2007, we officially ended all web development work as "The Rocket Science Group" and focused exclusively on MailChimp.) Throughout history, and across all the businesses he (Matt Brezina) researched, the ratio of free-to-paid-subscribers ultimately ended up at the dismal ratio of 10:1... So the question to ask yourself is whether or not your “one” is big enough to pay your bills yet. For eight years, our company never thought about freemium. We didn’t even know the concept existed. For eight loooong years, we were focused on nothing but growing profits. If you had brought up the concept of “freemium” with us during those eight years, we probably would’ve looked at you like you were eff’ing insane, then went back to work. In fact, when we launched MailChimp in 2001, we didn’t even have a Free Trial option.

Mariusz Skonieczny has been profiling all the companies in the Education industry included in the Value Line Small to Mid-Cap Edition. These companies include American Public Education (APEI), Archipelago Learning (ARCL), Capella Education Company (CPLA), Bridgepoint Education (BPI), Franklin Covey Company (FC), Grand Canyon Education (LOPE), K12 Inc. (LRN), LincolnEducationalServices Corporation (LINC), Rosetta Stone (RST), Scientific Learning Corporation (SCIL), The Princeton Review (REVU), and Universal Technical Institute (UTI)... The three companies that I like the best are American Public Education, Capella Education Company, and Bridgepoint Education. They are all in the for-profit post-secondary education industry which has been hit pretty hard due to the uncertainties associated with the government involvement. However, they are in much better positions to deal with it than any other competitors. These three companies have the lowest loan default rates and therefore are the least likely to be affected by the new rules. In addition, American Public Education has the least reliance on Title IV out of all the companies I studied.

Jeff Vail has a series of posts on Resilient Suburbia (Suburb as Resilient Community?). No matter how energy-efficient cities may be (especially when compared to presently extant alternatives like suburbia), they are most fundamentally the manifestation of hierarchal structures engaged in peer-polity competition—a mode of human organization that, I believe, is at its core the root of humanity’s unsustainability (because it drives our demand for growth) and it is, itself, undesirable (because it emphasizes the mean at the expense of the median, marginalizing the vast majority of participants). I agree about the hierarchy issue, but I'm not convinced on the mean/median point. He's essentially saying that the poor do worse in cities, but I think the poor start out really poor and come to the city for opportunity.

Jon Udell is reading David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds and Albert Laszlo Barabasi's Linked. Terminology aside, what's most compelling here is the notion that these are universal properties of Network-s of all kinds: molecular, HyperText-ual, Social Network-s, Transportation. And further, that hubs - whether they are the Chicagos and Atlantas of air travel, or the Yahoos and Googles of the Web, or the Mavens and Connectors of Malcolm Gladwell's social universe - arise inevitably, and are sources of both immense power and frightening vulnerability... How do you gain control of this unpilotable airplane (metaphor for New Economy organizations)? Pervasive instrumentation, transparency, Distributed Computing, Loosely Coupled.

Albert-László Barabási (born March 30, 1967) is a Romanian-born Hungarian scientist. He is the former Emil T. Hofmann professor at the University of Notre Dame and current Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) and an associate member of the Center of Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University. He introduced in 1999 the concept of Scale Free Network-s and proposed the Barabasi-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the World Wide Web or online communities. (more)

Tim Bray's submission to Beautiful Code ISBN:0-596-51004-7 analyzes Web Traffic via log parsing: It's a classic example of the culture, born in AWK, perfected in Perl, of getting useful work done by combining regular expressions and hash tables. (more)

The ACLU and CCR this morning filed a lawsuit on their own behalf against Tim Geithner and the Treasury Department. The suit argues that Treasury has no statutory authority under the law it invokes -- The International Emergency Economic Powers Act -- to bar American lawyers from representing American citizens on an uncompensated basis. It further argues what ought to be a completely uncontroversial point: that even if Congress had vested Treasury with this authority, it is blatantly unconstitutional to deny American citizens the right to have a lawyer, and to deny American lawyers the right to represent clients, without first obtaining a permission slip from Executive Branch officials. (US Constitution, Anwar Al Awlaki) (more)

The homes of several leaders of the Twin Cities antiwar movement were raided Friday by the FBI in what an agency spokesman described as an “investigation into activities concerning the material support of terrorism.” Search warrants were executed on six addresses in Minneapolis and at two in Chicago, said FBI spokesman Steve Warfield. Among the homes raided were the apartments of Jessica Sundin, who was a principal leader of the mass march of 10,000 on the opening day of the Republican National Convention two years ago, and Mick Kelly, who was prominent in that protest and among those who announced plans to march on the Democratic National Convention in Minneapolis, if the city is selected to host it in 2012. (more)

The Justice Department's Inspector General says that the FBI lied during the George W Bush administration about its basis for surveillance of domestic activist groups, including Green Peace, PETA, and the Merton Center. The report concludes the groups - which ranged from anti-war to animal rights and environmental organizations - were not specifically targeted by the FBI, but that agents used inaccurate or flimsy reasons to open investigations; and, even after no basis to investigate a group was found, the FBI kept its probe open for years afterwards.

failed Libertarian offshore Free State Project (more)

Paul Graham gives lots of info about the operations of Y-Combinator. Dinners, office hours, discussions of Pivot and Minimum Viable Product, launching, fund-raising, Demo Day, Angel Day, legal support, etc. The first YC cycle in summer 2005 had 8 startups. The most recent, in summer 2010, had 36.

Mike Shatzkin on 3 new EBook Platform-s: GoogleEditions’ special proposition is ubiquity; BliO’s special proposition is enhanced feature sets (a tool kit that made it pretty easy for publishers to enhance their print books for electronic delivery with sound and video (Multimedia), and even to fiddle with the design); and CopIa’s special proposition is building Social Networking right into the content consumption platform.

Andrew Parker connects WikiLeaks to the Data Haven story inside Crypto Nomicon. I Commented as to whether a Data Haven could be Publicly Held.

BookMark Data Synch service, originally FoxMarks.

Radley Balko on The PayPal Wars: Battles With EBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth - ISBN:0974670103 - Peter Thiel and Max Levchin had hoped PayPal would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency (DigiCash), something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Crypto Nomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore Data Haven free from government control... In the book's first chapter, Jackson recalls a speech Thiel gave to Confinnity employees, just a few days after he began work, in which he described his hopes for PayPal to become a borderless private currency (DigiCash). He saw PayPal facilitating trade in currency for anyone with an Internet connection by enabling an instant transfer of funds from insecure currencies to more stable ones, such as U.S. dollars. Thiel explained to his young staff how governments had historically robbed their own citizens through inflation and currency devaluation. The very rich could always protect themselves by investing offshore. It's the poor and middle class, Thiel explained, who get screwed. (more)

Charles Grassley of the US Senate is investigating whether various religious groups deserve their Non-Profit tax status (Religion). In the past five years, Grassley has led probes of nonprofits that unearthed lavish perks at the Smithsonian Institution, conflicts of interest at the Nature Conservancy, and mismanagement at the American Red Cross. Now, he's looking at some of America's largest, media-based ministries... The six ministries include WithoutWalls International Church in Tampa, Fla., the World Healing Center Church, Inc. in Grapevine, Tex., Joyce Meyer Ministries in Fenton, Mo., the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., WorldChangers Church International in College Park, Ga., and Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Newark, Tex.

A new stupid drug law (War On Drugs) being considered. Here is the description and a form to generate faxes to your Congressmen. S. 2633, sponsored by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), expands the so-called "crack house statute" to allow the federal government to fine or imprison businessmen and women if customers sell or use drugs on their premises or at their events. Property owners, promoters, and event coordinators could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars or face up to twenty years in federal prison if they hold raves or other events on their property.

a country located on the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia. It has an estimated population of more than 23 million people and is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden to the south, and Oman to the east. (more)

US Senate member representing VT (more)

Social Bookmarking/Social Search service based on people sharing their FireFox bookmarks. (more)