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Anthony Tjan is a venture capitalist at the Boston-based VC firm Cue Ball, but he also blogs for The Harvard Business Review where last week he posted an article about packaged pricing deals in business. The article, The Pros and Cons of Bundled Pricing, points out the differences between bundles and "à la carte" pricing as well as benefits to both customers and businesses. Most Web startups offering an array of services will often bundle features into tiered pricing plans rather than an "à la carte" selection, and here's why.

If you're a mobile app developer, one of your biggest concerns is getting noticed. Companies like Smule and Tapulous already have recognized brands; however, for the independent app designer, the promotion process requires a fair amount of strategy. One proven method of increasing downloads is becoming listed as one of the App Store's top selling services. We spoke to faberNovel's Baptiste Benezet to find out how indie developers can hack the App Store ranking algorithm.

When Wolfram Research released its iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha earlier this week, most of the attention quickly shifted away from the features of the app itself and towards the high price of the app. At $49.99, Wolfram Alpha is far more expensive than most apps in the App Store today, where only a small number of highly specialized apps sell for more than $9.99. Today, we got a chance to discuss Wolfram's pricing strategy with Schoeller Porter, the product manager for Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app.

When Smule's Ge Wang, Lyricfind's Darryl Ballantyne and Tapulous' Bart Decrem got together to discuss mobile applications at the San Fran Music Tech Summit, the hottest subject was application pricing. While music publishers have searched far and wide for better monetization strategies, few facets of the business have shown the same revenue growth as mobile apps. Thanks to the iPhone, customers are used to paying for mobile applications and according to Appsfire, all but one of the top grossing apps is priced above $2.99.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter sends most of its traffic to Google, Facebook, TwitPic, and MySpace. Overall, Twitter sends about 1 in 5 users to social networks and another 1 in 5 to entertainment sites like Twitpic, YouTube, or Flickr. Even though some people think that Twitter is just a 'poor man's email system,' Twitter's clickstream profile is very different from that of most email services.

Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes.

The Android Market was designed to be the one-stop shop for all G-1 users to download applications for their mobile handsets. As such, it had a great deal in common with the Apple iTunes App Store - save for one specific feature: the ability for developers to charge for their apps. Now, even that feature will be common between the two application stores as the Android Market prepares to release support for priced applications.

Linking the value that a product or service provides to a price is an art, rarely a science. Software pricing, in particular, has suffered from this being done poorly. The old licensed-software model does not cut it anymore. Businesses won't stand to pay for a large number of software licenses they may or may not use, and then pay for maintenance on top of that.