Re: iWindsurf: Anybody Else Bugged By Flashing Ads?

On Apr 3, 9:27 pm, josh.sampi...@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

the new wind graphs are cool - and, have you tried the wind station/
google maps overlay? SWEET!

Also, I use iwindsurf on my cell phone, and it's all text based - no
ads or anything.

Florian, are you pointing your phone's browser to
www_dot_iwindsurf_dot_com or wap_dot_iwindsurf_dot_com?

I use the second one, which seems to be almost entirely text based,
and smaller, condensed graphs ....


If you're using their wap service, you're getting a lightweight
version of the site, w/o the ads, and with lower graphics content.
That's a good thing if you're coming in over a wireless connection -
but it costs extra (wireless web membership, as opposed to FX
membership). If you're using a regular web browser on a wireless
device such as a Blackberry (like the Blackberry or Opera browsers),
you'll run into two issues. One is speed - all that flashing stuff and
all the eye candy will severely slow you down. The other is usability
- the new overlay maps simply don't display right in the Blackberry
browser, and they don't fully work in Opera either.

So to get the streamlined version free of eye-candy and advertising,
you'll have to pay extra. Which just gives you one more option, and
ensures that people who value it generate extra revenue for iWindsurf.
Economists call that price discrimination - charging a different price
for different options/flavors of a product based on demand for those
differentiated products, not based on cost (since the WAP page, if
anything, should cost less to produce than the graphics and gizmo
heavy standard interface). The software world is full of examples -
products where there's a regular and a pro version - the only
difference being what features are unlocked and thus usable based on
your license code (since the code included in the different versions
is the same - you just can't use some of it - so one product costs the
mfg exactly the same as the other - the price differential is due to
the demand differential).

One thing iW could do is to offer an ad-free site for a premium
(similar to how you can use Eudora in free/ad-supported mode, or in
premium/ad-free mode for a small fee). How many users would pony up
for that, I wonder? Probably not enough to justify the additional web
development.

-Andreas
http://g-42.blogspot.com

.

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