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There are plenty of great free software applications and services available on the Web.

In some cases, payment removes advertising and enables more features. Some require a subscription or a one-time payment.Sometimes the payment is merely a donation to a one-man operation that wrote the code.

Here’s a few quick lists of what I’m using, inspired by this discussion on Weblog Tools Collection:

Keep in mind that my recommendations are for the consumer or individual versions of each service. Some products are available in corporate or enterprise versions for a fee.

Free software and services that I would pay for, along with links to each service’s “about” or home page:

• Craigslist, if only to get the spam and junk postings off the classified portion of the service.
• del.icio.us, my second favorite social bookmarking service. I’m waiting to see what happens to Yahoo, the company that owns del.icio.us and also owns my next choice..
• Flickr, for the Pro account features.
• Google Earth, to get enhanced features on the Mac application.
• MacUpdate, for enhanced features on this Mac software update service.
• PayPal, so I could have a business account.
• Skype, for unlimited calling.
• StumbleUpon, my favorite social bookmarking service, to get some extra features as a sponsor.
• TextEdit, my favorite text editor for Windows.

Here’s a list of free software and services that I wouldn’t pay to use, because the ROI just isn’t that great:

• avast, my favorite virus scanner for Windows and Mac.
• Firefox, the best web browser for the Mac and Windows.
• Gmail, because the keep adding more storage space to my free accounts anyway.
• Twitter, a microblogging service that supports SMS and a variety of web and software clients
• Twitterific, a Mac twitter client. I can live with the occasional ad.
• WinZip and other file compression programs.
• WordPress, the software I use to run the billso.com web site. It’s fabulous, free, and there’s no real reason to pay for it. Many WordPress developers earn consulting income from clients who need

The platform wars are heating up in the mobile phone industry. It is very difficult for a mobile carrier to support several different handset operating systems. Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin estimated that his UK-based company supports 30 or 40 different OSes, according to this MacWorld UK report. Sarin is also quited in this Business Week article.

It takes a great deal of effort to establish a computing standard. Consider Apple, which became a new entrant with its iPhone. There are about 4 million Apple iPhones available or in use now, which is a respectable number when one considers its limited availability. There are no official iPhone providers in China or Japan yet, for example.

Google won’t make or market its own mobile phone, especially now that the company has dropped out of the 700 mHz auction, as reported by Forbes. The company’s Android mobile phone platform is based upon Linux, and over 30 companies have signed on to develop and support Android hardware. Prototypes of the Google phone were shown in Frankfurt at the Mobile World Congress this week. This CNET slideshow starts with a pic of one such prototype, which appears to be running and connected to a GSM network.

Microsoft used a similar approach to develop its Windows Mobile platform for PDAs and smartphones. The company expects that 20 million Windows Mobile phones from various manufacturers will be sold in the first half of 2008. None of these phones are Microsoft-branded devices.

Symbian claims to have the top spot, with 77 million units sold in the last year. Nokia is the main manufacturer that uses the Symbian operating system, along with Sony Ericsson. The latter company has started using Windows Mobile in its high-end smartphones, however.

For more information, see my earlier articles tagged as mobile, including:

• 11 February 2008: The modular mobile phone
• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 11 January 2008: BlackBerry vs iPhone
• 26 November 2007: Mobile devices for US census takers
• 24 September 2007: Do you want a PC on your iPhone?
• 23 April 2007: Samsung and Microsoft further their convergence goals

In the past, I’ve posted links to articles in the New York Times in this blog. I read the Times’ web site several times a week. I got into the Times Web habit in 1995, actually. It beats waiting for the Sunday Honolulu Advertiser to reprint dated, abridged versions of the same articles.

There was always one problem with linking to the Times – their archiving policy. After two weeks, most recent Times news stories shifted from free access to subscriber-only access through a paid service called Times Select. Launched in 2005, Times Select was a bold revenue play on a web site that currently attracts 13 million unique visitors each month.

Authoritative news has its price

When I pointed users or students to a New York Times article, I wasn’t asking them to subscribe to the Times or buy the article. Readers didn’t like paying US$50 a year to use the Times archives. Yes, print subscribers received a free Web subscription, as did some educational subscribers. The Times also determined that more Web readers were following links from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to Times content. If the user wasn’t a Times subscriber, they might not see the Times content or ads.

Keep in mind that advertising helps subsidize much of the alleged “free” content on the Web. The bandwidth required to connect users to a web server can be expense at times. The servers, programming, and other services required to keep even a small web site going cost money.

Advertising, in turn, helps fuel electronic commerce. It’s far less expensive for an electronic merchant to advertise online, especially when the ads can be targeted to specific websites, users, and geographies. Customers who will consider an online merchant are more likely to read their news on the Web in the first place. It’s expensive to convert readers of print newspapers or television viewers to an online business model.

I run ads at the bottom of my site’s web pages more as an experiment than anything else. The revenue that I receive is laughably small, but I don’t pay that much for my web hosting at DreamHost, either. Google announced today that it is expanding its advertising business to mobile platforms, and other Web advertising services are moving in the same direction.

In the end, management determined that the Times would be better off without its subscription service, letting these readers read stories for free while viewing advertising sold by the Times.

Free the content – sell more ads

The Times announced today that Times Select will end tomorrow. Web site visitors will get free access to sections of the Times’s news and column archives, including the last twenty years. BoingBoing and Kaaawa blog iLind.net ran a quick mention of the change as well.

The Wall Street Journal may be the next major news daily to free its Web content. The Journal’s subscriber-only policies were more expensive and more restrictive than the Times’. The Journal are also one of the few newspapers that made money from its Web operations– at least US$50 million in subscriber revenue each year, according to this article in ZDNet. New owner Rupert Murdoch is already pushing MySpace towards targeted advertising based on user profile data, according to this NY Times article (via BoingBoing). I would not be surprised if the Journal and Dow Jones changed their business models.

We’re still looking at Chapter 9 on e-commerce. My plan this week is to publish at least one post per day that extends the material that I posted last Thursday.

In my Thursday class, I mentioned web analytics as one popular method that e-commerce managers use to gather data about customers. There are a few legal ways of gathering this data, including web server log analysis, cookies, and programmatic methods. Web browse toolbars are another popular method of collecting this data. See slides 11 and 12 in this PPT that I originally posted last Thursday.

However, it’s much easier to get this data from a trusted source: an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Most residential customers use an ISP to access the internet. It’s trivial for an ISP to collect information about the web sites and pages that each customer visits.

Most customers don’t have a clue that, when they signed up for internet service, they also authorized their ISP to sell information about their internet activities. The legal notice is usually buried deep in the contract or a privacy notice, and US regulations require little if any disclosure to residential customers.

Wired magazine has been following this trend, and has two interesting reports from Ryan Singel. Friday’s report discusses a presentation by David Cancel about clickstream selling, as the practice is called. Jeremy Rainer posted a follow up interview with Cancel here. Cancel is also the CTO of Compete Inc., a major US web analytics firm that works with a wide range of major US ISPs and US advertisers.

When ISPs sell this clickstream data, they can add $5 of margin per subscriber to their value chain. Of course, ISPs love this found money. This additional revenue is a convenient way to accelerate the ROI for new lines, equipment and services. Selling clickstream data has quickly become a key success factor that major ISPs ignore at their peril.
Some ISPs might pass clickstream revenue along to customers as discounts, if these firms face pricing pressure in their market. On Oahu, Clearwire has gained several points of market share in the last 6 months, mostly from former customers of Oceanic Time Warner or Hawaiian Telcom.

Today’s report has a long list of questions that Singel sent to major US ISPs about their clickstream selling activities, focusing on privacy and legal issues. Outside the ISP and web analytics industries, few people know much about this data. Is it anonymized so that user names are not associated with details about their web site visits?

In IS 6100, we’re looking at e-commerce and chapter 9 this week. I’ll be posting a few articles that extend the book’s discussion, and help us move towards the final exam. As a reminder, my first post about the IS 6100 final exam was on March 1, where I focused on what CIOs really do.

I made my first online purchase in June 1987 on CompuServe. It was a compact disc that I couldn’t find in the local record store. CompuServe’s interface was good old text. No pictures, no hyperlinks. Customers had to be very motivated to make their purchase online. It’s funny what a good album will make people do.

Of course, today I can go to Amazon.com, Google, or eBay and find the same album in under a minute, and at a much lower price than I paid in 1987.

Ten years later, I heard about Jakob Nielsen. I was teaching web site design courses for a training company, and I was a bit frustrated. The course materials I was using didn’t really discuss how web sites could be designed to improve online sales. Nielsen’s site, useit.com, was one of the few places I found that had a credible, ongoing discussion of web usability.

So I was excited to see Jakob’s most recent article, posted on March 12. He addresses ROI and online usability by discussing a 10-point action list for online marketers.

ROI is a major concern for CIOs. IT departments have to balance the financial investment in information systems against the additional revenue generated by these projects. ROI is one way to measure these returns, by expressing change in a simple financial ratio. Our textbook has a very brief discussion of ROI on p 275 in chapter 7, but I’ll be posting some more materials before the final exam.

Nielsen had previously addressed ROI and usability in January 2003, in a post that summarized his 110-page research study. When MSIS students ask me why they need to understand research, I’ll be sending them to that page. The report itself costs US$122 and no, I don’t have a copy that I can send you.

I have issues with some of Nieslen’s newest findings. For example, he suggests using e-mail newsletters to help keep customer attention focused on the site, and away from search engines. I prefer RSS, as that technologies lets customers opt-in and opt-out very easily. Some customers still use the ‘report spam” buttons in the e-mail clients when they want to unsubscribe from an e-mail newsletter. If too many customers do this, ISPs might start blocking the e-mail newsletter to all their subscribers.

It’s expensive to attract a new customer. Frankly, I’m stunned when web sites force me to register before I place an order or request a shipping estimate. However, sites that let current customers reorder previously purchased items easily have an advantage over other sites that force customers to search for spare parts, refills and replacement items. On the other hand, I get really annoyed by sites that send me reminder e-mails to reorder and ‘save now’, especially when there’s no easy way to unsubscribe from these messages.

My eyesight isn’t very good. Nielsen makes an excellent point when he recommends that e-commerce sites design their pages for older customers and people with disabilities. Older customers tend to have more disposable income than younger customers. Sites that are designed for ADA compliance tend to be easier to navigate, especially on a smaller device like a phone or PDA. I find too many web sites that are designed for specific screen resolutions and web browsers. Usually, the owner or a marketing manager has decided that the site needs to look good on their computer, and the customers are left out of the equation. that’s why usability testing with real customers is so important in e-commerce. I really have problems with web sites that have huge graphics or are designed with Flash, as I can’t see these sites on my PDA.

Search is a valuable feature that is often overlooked in site design. Managers and developers sometimes forget that users want answers quickly. For example, Campus Pipeline has no search feature in its current implementation at HPU. Instead, there’s a jumble of graphical menu buttons and tabs.

I included search in this blog because too many students complained that they couldn’t find articles quickly in my old Bloglines site, as i noted on January 23. Search is a key success factor for any e-commerce site that offers more than a few products. If customers can’t find your products, they probably won’t buy anything.