Greg

We recently participated in an event that included photos taken by a professional photographer. The photos are OK and they're of my wife while she's 8 months pregnant - a pretty special time.

Unfortunately, we were only told after the event that the photos would be $125 to get the high quality digital version of the file. Right, one hundred twenty five US Dollars. I have a hard time imagining that any of her customers are going to buy more than one photo. Maybe two...but that's it. We will not buy a single one. I bet a lot of her other customers are that way. So, here's what I propose:

Simple price differentiation for professional photos

The problem is that some of her customers will pay $125 for some of the photos. And for those customers it is worth it and she makes a pretty good amount of money from it. But she is leaving some value uncaptured. We would probably pay $20 for a few of the photos of us. And some of the other people would probably pay $50 for their photos.

The classic econ 101 perspective on this is that you choose a market price and go with it. Supply and demand intersect and there you go.

Graduates of Econ 102 (or marketing 101) should get into the next layer, though: price differentiation. Price differentiation is charging different prices for the same product.

• The current scenario is this: she sells 2 extra photos at $125 and makes a total of $250.
  

The Photobucket site is a bit of a local Denver phenomenon. Started by Alex Welch who graduated from CSU at about the perfect time to launch a tech startup in Colorado. Photobucket is not nearly as well known among the tech crowd as Flickr and yet Photobucket beats Flickr in a variety of metrics (page visits, for example). Most folks in Denver have some connection to Photobucket through a friend-of-a-friend and people love swapping stories about how great and down-to-earth the guys are regardless of the amazing success of their company.

Slime Sandwich - Denver Game Company

Slime Sandwich is their next venture - an online, social, role playing game that will make money on subscriber fees. I found out about them because they kept coming up on the Colorado PHP News Aggregator that I set up - they're posting lots of jobs with a variety of skills. I created a channel for Slime Sandwich (which requires manual curation, but presents trend data that makes the manual activity worth it).

I look forward to watching the progress of slime sandwich over the next few years. According to a quick search they've got $1 million of seed funding on January 10th, though it's not 100% clear to me what the source of that funding was. They also can probably fund the company for a while based on profits that some of the founders made on previous projects. My guess is that it will take more than $1M to get their game online and start building the community for it so it will be interesting to see how they spend their money and build their business.

I'm always curious about technology products and product launches, but an interesting thing happened recently with the launch of the latest Google Phone (i.e. the Nexus One).

Release date prediction market on Hubdub

I created a Google Nexus One Release Date market on Hubdub. Hubdub is a play-money prediction market system, a wisdom-of-the-crowds tool to help gather ideas about the outcome of a specific event. The market was created on December 15th and almost immediately it was showing a 94% likelihood of release in the first quarter of 2010.

When will the Google Phone (Nexus One) be available to consumers

Hubdub lets people make predictions on a question and when they do so they choose whether that prediction will be public or private. In the case of this market there is currently over $18,000 of play-money at stake and just over $3,300 of those positions are public. So 80% of the play-money is hidden, but the effect of those positions is totally public. While hiding their identity is possible the world still can quite easily see the sentiments of the people involved: early 2010!

You may be wondering what's going on with IKEA in Colorado. I know I am. I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year and visited an IKEA out there and was reminded how nice it is to have high quality, reasonably priced household items within driving distance.

According to this article in the Denver Business Journal

"This is a very complicated project, and will take some time," said Joseph Roth, spokesman for IKEA Group’s U.S. headquarters near Philadelphia. "There’s still no time frame for groundbreaking or opening, but we are committed to the project and moving forward."

Once a construction timetable is fixed, the store will take 18 months to build, according to Roth.

Where are you going to recycle your computer or other fun metal stuff in Denver?

Atlas Recycling at 1100 Umatilla near Colfax and I-25.

In January I was sad, but not surprised, to see the Rocky Mountain News shut down. They made a cool video did some nice retrospective posts, and shut down the operations. Since then the Denver Post (which was kind of a part owner of the Rocky) has picked up some of the more popular journalists and probably some of the other staff.

So, some of the staffers, photographers and journalists got together and decided they were going to do things right. They weren't going to be driven by corporate greed like the evil capitalists, they were just going to do the news and make enough money to keep the business rolling. They created a site I Want My Rocky as a rallying point for the former employees of the news and as a place to gather interest in a proposed online-only pay-for-content news source.

Old Media: Guess what, you're old and you're doing it wrong

I was most recently drawn to the site by a post from Cindy House - one of the main people in the post-RMNews project - about New models, new challenges. She talks about how they haven't been successful in getting a readership, so they can't afford good content, so they can't build the readership. So, they're going to start providing consulting services, specifically: "Web design, search engine optimization and editing/writing services to other businesses."

So, how good are their consulting services?
Often the homepage for a service provider is weak. This is the so-called "Cobbler’s Son Has No Shoes" effect. However, there are some painful mistakes on the IWantMyRocky site which are actively hurting their efforts. Let's look at the home page: