DISQUS

I have a suspicion from our experience that ventures led by ex senior multi-national people are actually LESS likely to succeed all things being equal.

I have a suspicion from our experience that ventures led by ex senior multi-national people are actually LESS likely to succeed all things being equal.

Surely "Freemium" makes more or less sense as an investor dependent on your position. If I was an angel investor, with limited personal bandwidth and capital, then it never made as much sense as a more organic growth model. In Europe at least, I wouldn't expect many angel investors have ever been very comfortable with anything where significant revenues lagged behind the costs and user base. When one of our portfolio, with a Freemium model and a decent and rapidly growing user-base, was fundraising last year it became very clear that there was a binary distinction between two classes of investors: I'd say that about 2/3rds of the institutional investors (actually tending to be those who were more generalist), would only buy in when the revenue conversion was fully proven and the company was approaching break-even. The other third were equally vociferous in their belief that you should "build-the-user-base-first-and-monetize-later".
I suspect that your friend is in the minority in actually "switching" his investment model, others may simply feel that in the current climate they can speak their conservatism more stridently.
Maybe, if a company has a low burn rate, a decent capital base and supportive investors, it might be better not to scale the sales model during a fiscal winter. Instead some companies may want to conserve their cash, build their user base cheaply, ready to emerge butterfly-like when the ice has melted in the fiscal spring?

Where you have the host down as "Web-based" it is important to check that it will work on your particular OS. Some of these use ActiveX, which isn't going to function on Macs or Linux. Some use a Java applet, which may work differently or require a download to get an up-to-date version of Java onto the machine. Sorry to be pedantic!

It certainly feels closer- have you a come across any common way of linking the GPS information the handset holds with the web services that would use that data for you? Without that we're likely to have a range of diverse applications for different phones.