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As January draws to a close, the businessroundups.org team is on all cylinders (are we still saying that in an age of electric cars? What’s a better phrase these days?), with a wall of awesome content you can download straight to your brain . We picked the cream of the crop, even though we don’t know why there was cream on the crops in the first place. In short, idiomatic English continues to confuse even the biggest language nerds among us. — Christine and Hey
Table of Contents
The businessroundups.org Top 3
- Who’s calling?: T-Mobile’s data breach last week appears to have spilled over to Google Fi, which now says hackers gained access to customers’ information. Carly has more.
- Home sweet HomePod: Brian plug in the 2023 Apple HomePod and share what he likes and dislikes about it.
- More layoffs: Cloud data management giant NetApp will lay off 8%, or about 960, of its employees across multiple regions, Ingrid reports. And yes, it cites the economic climate as the “why.”
Startups and VC
There are people on the internet who don’t want to be found. That seems to be the case for the elusive, mysterious owner of Stripper Web, a 20-year-old forum for exotic dancers and sex workers. With just a week’s notice, the forum’s unknown owner announced that the website will close on February 1, erasing the decades-long digital footprint of a fringe community. Amanda‘s main story tries to get to the bottom of things and is fantastic – check it out!
In January, Germany’s largest vaccine maker, BioNTech, announced it had agreed to acquire Tunisia-born and London-based AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-related investment in a £200 million tranche . Tage states that the acquisition of InstaDeep is a classic case of an African startup gone global.
Not enough to keep you busy? Well, here’s another handful:
When to build a freemium plan and how to do it right
Image Credits: Jonathan Knowles (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
SaaS pricing comes in three flavors: the classic sales-driven model, free trials that ultimately force users to make a decision, or freemium plans that hopefully deliver enough value to keep users coming back.
“Given the obvious differences between these models, choosing one should be fairly easy,” writes Konstantin Valiotti, product director of growth at PandaDoc. “However, current market conditions do not support having just one model.”
In this TC+ article he explains how to determine the right time to roll out a freemium plan and, just as importantly, when not until. It also includes a tactical framework for developing freemium products with limited and unlimited use cases.
“Each strategy is unique and depends on the company’s idea of how it wants to move forward,” writes Valiotti. “So think of freemium as an extension of your strategy and see if it’s right for you.”
Three more from the TC+ team:
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Big Tech Inc.
Finally, someone is turning tablets into something you can use other than surfing the web or watching Netflix. Hey let’s take a look at Plugable’s new dock that turns your tablet or phone into a workstation.
In the meantime, Rita wonders what would happen if China-based Baidu developed an answer to ChatGPT. Would it make a difference? And what kind of limitations would it have?
Now there are five more:
