What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.

CNet's Greg Sandoval reported yesterday that some new limits were coming, based on unnamed but clearly well-informed sources. Free account holders today are able to listen to up to 20 hours of music on-demand, song by song and album by album, each month. The new limits will allow 20 hours for the first 6 months of any user's new account. After 6 months, free listening will be cut down to 10 hours. That means 20 minutes on average, every day of the month, for free. That's still generous, as far as I'm concerned.

Spotify is a joy to use and free account holders are sure to be unhappy about the changes (maybe they should help pay the bills at the company and be happy for the service).

Spotify head of communications Jim Butcher Tweeted just hours before the announcement was made that his gumshield (like a mouth protector for boxers) was in. Spotify UI designer Tobias Ahlin said just after the news went public: "This is a day when I'll be a sad panda and you'll try to hit me with sticks." Spotify Chief Product Officer Gustav Söderström : "Very tough day today..."

Good luck guys, and thanks for all the music.

"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"

This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?

How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.

This is an important development for the analytics industry, but also for Yahoo! If Yahoo! can successfully attract web publishers to their free service -- and it is hard to see why they wouldn't be able to -- it means the ability to gather loads of aggregate data for their behavioral ad targeting initiatives.

It will be interesting to see what effect this analytics arms race has on Google and Microsoft's offerings, and what might happen if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal goes through.

Since Google Voice dropped its Canadian service in in 2009, there have been no free virtual phone options to customers and businesses in that country. and TellFi, which also offers service in the U.S., has stepped in to fill that gap.

But it isn't simply a matter of offering more business-oriented features. TellFi boasts better support and better quality phone calls too.

TellFi's offer of free service is only available for Canadian numbers. This includes one local number (chosen from any available number with any Canadian area code) and one year's free service. Upgrades (with their associated fees) are available so that businesses can add additional features like toll-free numbers and multiple extensions.

TellFi launched its service in late February, and in the words of co-founder Jason Corwin the company was "flooded with new Canadian users, so we decided to give away TellFi free to everyone in Canada."

Amie Street is an online music store that has two key features: their unique pricing model and DRM-free downloads.

The Amie Street pricing model is quite simple - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. So as the demand increass, the price goes up accordingly. At present there is a cap at which is the maximum price a track can sell for, which is $0.99.

The site overall is well designed and they highlight their key selling point nicely. However the online music store market is quite crowded. Similar competitors include Snocap, ReverbNation and BlastMyMusic. Snocap has focused on partnering with some of the biggest social networks on the web; and this is something that Amie Street should consider too. Currently Amie Street is mostly focused on selling through their store, instead of spreading throughout the web and selling via widgets and social networks. Currently the site has a recommendation service, but no sign of widgets or other distributed mechanisms.

The DRM free strategy that Amie Street has is starting to blossom in the world of online music sales. In April 2007 EMI announced a DRM-free music download offering. That is a premium service, covering EMI's entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.

However the Amie Street catalogue growth has been limited due to DRM-free being in just its initial stages. Once DRM-free is used by the other major labels and more independent labels, then look for the Amie Street catalogue to grow a lot. Indeed Amie Street could be a market leader in introducing DRM-free to a wider audience.

What do you think of Amie St? If you've used the service, please share your impressions.

Fighting Free With Free

Clearly, this is also a program that is meant to create more goodwill towards Microsoft in the developer community. For a lot of tech startups, running Windows is often not even a consideration, as they are already building their software on top of free software anyway. As Om Malik points out, the idea of using Microsoft software often didn't even cross his mind when he started his business.

It is good to see that Microsoft is trying to gain some market here. However, it seems that Microsoft is trying to fight the free software movement by giving away its own programs, while a lot of developers prefer software that is not just free, but also open source.

Last.fm Radio will remain free via its website and desktop app as well as for U.S. and U.K. users of Xbox Live and Windows Mobile 7 phones.

Last.fm Radio offers a personalized station, playing full song tracks based on users' preferences. Currently, that streaming service is free in the U.S. and U.K. via an ad-supported app.

The change brings Last.fm in line with many other music services that charge you to listen to music via your mobile devices. The $3-per-month fee is less than Spotify's $9.99, but Last.fm does not let you play tracks on demand.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability of the 'free' music model earlier this year, but clearly, his own band has been able to make it work. While overall album sales were down last year (even when accounting for digital downloads), bands like the Nine Inch Nails have been able to leverage their fanbase and bypass the traditional music industry channels, while still making a profit.

On the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson asks why people chose to pay for the NIN album even though they could have had it for free. While, as he points out, ease of use is surely one reason, most fans probably simply want to support their favorite musicians by actually paying them directly for their music.

With the Kindle, Amazon has created the current de facto standard for hardware eReaders, but the market is still young enough for others to be able to regain the lead again. The fact that Sony bothered to send out press releases about the fact that it now offers 1 million free books clearly shows that the competition in the eBook market is heating up.

Sadly, most eReaders are locked down with digital rights management software, so that users can't just transfer books from one device to another. Because of this, users are locked into one store once they buy an eReader, and the availability of books in the eReader's eBook store could easily sway customers in one direction or another. While Sony offers more free books than other companies, the average price in the Sony eBook store is generally higher than the standard $9.99 that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are charging.

It is worth noting that Google only scans these free books and doesn't edit them in any form, so that they often contain spelling errors.

If you own a Sony Reader and want to access these free eBooks, you can download the necessary software here. The PRS-500, one of Sony's first eReaders, however, is not compatible with the Google Books software.

Free Access to Paid Content

The free access to paid content sites, however, is the big news here. According to Starbucks, this new service, called the "Starbucks Digital Network," will give users who surf the Internet from U.S. company owned stores access to "various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones." Besides the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks' partners include Apple's iTunes, The New York Times, Patch, USA TODAY, Yahoo and ZAGAT.

While Starbucks did not release details about these partnerships, it is easy to image that in-store Wi-Fi users could, for example, get free access to specific songs on iTunes and be allowed to bypass the New York Times' upcoming paywall restrictions.

Holland-based CoffeeCompany is starting to market their menu items via their Wi-Fi networks. If you head to any of their coffee shops don't be surprised to see networks with names such as 'OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready' or 'TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro'. With the help of THEY, CoffeeCompany is promoting their specials of the day and more, while humorously guilt tripping patrons accessing their Wi-Fi networks to grab another cup of coffee. Did anyone suggest this to Starbucks yet?

Will it Increase Business?

There haven't been any reports of an increase in business, but we think the idea is great! Would it tempt us to buy another cup of joe? Once we could control our laughter at the creative network names we'd be more than happy to. While it won't stop most from free-loading, we think CoffeeCompany might be on to something with this marketing technique. What creative network names would you use to market your products or services via a Wi-Fi network?

Image courtesy of Adrants

Judging from the change in business models, however, it would seem that Calgoo couldn't attract enough paying users. It's interesting that Calgoo couldn't make its 'freemium' model of free basic services and paid advanced feature work.

According to Calgoo, it is making its products available for free in order to "move to in-calendar advertising business models." While Calgoo hasn't outlined what these in-calendar ads would look like, this move is also consistent with the overall trend on the web towards advertising financed products.

As Svetlana Gladkova also points out in this context, users have simply become so accustomed to not paying for anything on the web that even charging for premium features is becoming very difficult for some companies. Calgoo must have surely felt the same pressure. In the short run, this is probably to the users' advantage.