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Mobile game maker Rovio released a free full version of their popular Angry Birds app for Android users today and the launch has subsequently taken down the company's website and, at times, has impacted the app's download page on the independent app store, GetJar, where the app is being exclusively launched. In fact, the app is proving so popular that GetJar is recommending users visit m.getjar.com from their mobile phone browser instead.

Several years before pronouncing that the " web is dead," Wired's Chris Anderson also predicted that "free is the future of business." (Don't let your skepticism about one assertion cloud your judgment of the other.)

Certainly "free" - and by extension "freemium" - has become one of the most popular pricing models for web companies. Evernote, Pandora, and as of yesterday SlideShare are among the companies that offer customers some version of their product for free, with additional features and services for a premium fee.

Most platforms gain traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation?

Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. As we enter a period of "social update exhaustion" (as in, "I really do not care what you had for breakfast"), the real-time Web may evolve into things that we really need to make a living or to get essential stuff done. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.

Let's face it: If cropping was all you needed to do, you'd just use MS Paint. Photoshop, Adobe's industry standard for image editing, costs a whopping, unforgivable $600; and because there's no affordable and equivalent option for non-pro users, we're willing to wager Photoshop places high in the rankings for the most illegally cracked warez of them all. But when you need tools such as layers, filters, and other effects, 101-level apps such as Picnik and Picasa just don't cut it. So we've rounded up and road-tested seven free resources that pack the punch of Photoshop's bells and whistles without the price. You just might find your dream freebie below.

In part 1 of this series, we looked at the three big waves crashing down on the traditional book publishing business: Google Search, the Kindle and e-books, and print on demand. In this second part, we'll try to wipe the muck from our crystal ball and see how this could play out in the future, specifically for the major players of book publishing: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.

Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available for free in text form and as an audio book), is stirring controversy and a spicy conversation around the blogosphere. The current wave of discussion started with a critical review by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. In his review, Gladwell defends journalism and goes negative on "Free." Seth Godin, who till then had stayed out of the debate, penned an instantly classic Godin post titled "Malcolm is wrong."

Mike Masnick followed on TechDirt with an insightful post in which he attributes some of Gladwell's confusion to the way that Anderson wrote the book. Masnick says that the book does not provide enough details on the mechanics and applications of Free. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.) Fred Wilson joined the conversation with a sharply delivered post on Freemium and Freeconomics. He gives examples of the kinds of Free that actually work.

On the internet, there are a number of places you can go to get free music, but when it comes to free, legal music, there just aren't as many options. That's why it's exciting when something like The Free Music Archive opens its doors. Having just launched into beta, this site, a project of WFMU, one of the most popular freeform radio stations in America, aims to provide a platform for free public access to new music. At the FMA, they've created an online archive where there are currently 5000 free tracks available for download in a variety of genres.

San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has announced they will be giving away free accounts on their TypePad blogging system for professional bloggers and journalists who recently lost their jobs as well as those who fear the axe is coming. Cleverly dubbed the "Journalist Bailout Program," the service includes one free blog, a place in the Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, a as well as other tools and advice on driving traffic to your site, all courtesy of Six Apart.