Business - Written Friday, May 14, 2010 by Haydn Shaughnessy - 0 Comments

The future of free, and other prices

Friday last I got talking to Nick Black over at Cloudmade in London. Subject: How does a start-up compete with Google or Nokia? We talked about other things too, like Free.

Cloudmade is a great example of “business as platform”. From the ground up, day 1, Cloudmade’s founders set out to create monetizable services around free mapping. That’s what lines them up against the likes of Google and Nokia, true behemoths of the mobile space. For those who are new to mapping, briefly, mapping’s popularity began with in car navigation in high end saloon cars (BMW for example) where the nav app could be charged out at a fraction of the saloon car price and still be worth $3,000.  That was less than a decade ago. Navigation is now free, and maps – or geo-data – are the next big wave of content and applications. Continue…