adam wagler

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

The Business of FREE

I have been reading an excellent book by Chris Anderson, FREE: The future of radical pricing. The book describes how companies like Google can offer so much for free and the business models that are emerging from prices progressively moving closer to zero. I am not anywhere near being an economist, but the ideas create an interesting discussion. I teach in a college of journalism where this topic has become more of and issue because of the current situation with newspapers going out of business and moving online. This book fittingly is available free as an audio book.

An interesting section of FREE is the piracy chapter where Anderson tells about China and Brazil’s take on copyright. I think China has an interesting model for the music industry with 95% of the music on the market being free copies, but labels become event planners. The classic example in the US now a days is Radiohead’s In Rainbows where you buy the album online and give what you like. This in turn drives interest in the band making concerts and merchandise.

Along these lines there have been some great videos online about piracy and copyright law that I think are opening the conversation about this topic.

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

A documentary by Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor RiP: A remix manifesto looks at issues of piracy and mash-ups. Watch it online or download it for what you think its worth!

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Ranch Rush from FreshGames

I have a iPod Touch which continues to amuse and waste time for me, but recently I downloaded FreshGames’ Ranch Rush. One of the more entertaining games I have played on the device. I don’t consider myself much of a gamer, I did have a bunch of the Nintendos back in the day, but the Touch has filled my gaming void via a hand-held device. Anyway, Ranch Rush is entertaining in that you get orders and fill them on a farm. You get to grow, make and raise all kinds of crops and animals which the choice gets larger as you progress through the game. The orders also get progressively harder as well making the game play fast and fun. My favorite and the most addicting part is the trophy room where different tasks are required to earn rewards, which aren’t all possible to do one time through the game. There is also novice and expert modes making the longevity of the game much better compared to others I have played. Definitely worth looking into if you are in the market for a fun, entertaining farm-themed game. Even better it sounds like Ranch Rush 2 is coming soon!

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Flickr is still cool

I had been keeping my eye on Flickr in the back of my mind over the years as an option for sharing and backing up my photos. Facebook is nice to share with people on FB but they compress photos and don’t save the original, as do other social sites like MySpace. Anyway finally I made the jump and signed up for another “free” account and loved what I saw… upload multiple photos at a time, geo-tagging, great organization tools, and best of all it makes multiple sizes of the image. This is great because I can share with my family high res images so they can print them. The privacy features are nice giving control over who sees what. In my mind that is worth the $25 a year! Check it out…http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamwagler/