Charles Hudson’s Weblog

One more quick events post. Two of my friends are organizing events that I think are both interesting and worthwhile – check them out if you can:
FailChat #1: The Pivot
March 3rd, 6:00pm – 9:30pm
PariSoma
What do Flickr, YouTube, and Nintendo all have in common? They each went through a pivot: the act of a company [...]

I’ve been hard at work on the Freemium Summit and it’s less than a month away. More importantly, for those of you interested in attending, Earlybird pricing ends on Friday. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers and topics (see below) – I hope you can join us!
If you read this blog or found this [...]

This is a really short post.
1. Earlier this week we announced that Serious Business, where I have been the VP of Business Development for the past 18 months, was acquired by Zynga. You can read more about it here. It’s a great outcome for the team and I’m excited to see what the two [...]

My Google Nexus One is slowly starting to win me over. After a few errors in getting it set up (I’m willing to accept a good deal of the blame upon reflection), I really like the device. It’s not going to displace my iPhone as my primary device until they solve the entertainment experience [...]

Thanks to all of you who have recommended speakers and topics for the first ever Freemium Summit. The event is shaping up nicely – we have some fantastic speakers lined up and some really meaty topics to discuss. We already have confirmed speakers from Dropbox, Pandora, YouSendIt, Box.net, Mailchimp, Xobni, Evernote, and Automattic (WordPress). I’m [...]

A number of people have asked me how things are going with my virtual assistant, specifically what tasks I have her doing and how it all works. I thought I’d do a short follow-up blog post on how I work with my virtual assistant (who is really great, by the way), to schedule meetings. For [...]

So, I’ve been really excited about the freemium business model of late. I’ve spent the last year or so trying to meet more entrepreneurs, funded and bootstrapped, who are interested in pioneering this model. In the process of these conversations, I’ve learned a ton and I’m now sufficiently inspired to actually pull together a small [...]

I’ve been using Highrise CRM from 37signals for about a year now and I think it’s a pretty good product – certainly better than most other CRM tools I’ve used. However, there are some substantial features the products lacks that keep it from being even more integrated into my workflow. There are three core ways [...]

I’ve been playing with Gist since the beta. After a several week hiatus, I’ve started using the product again. Overall, I think it’s a very good effort at helping people keep up to date with what their friends are doing across the web and helping you stay up to date. The best use case? Checking [...]

I’ve been using foursquare since March and I have to say that I really like it. Having played with lots of other location-based friend finder applications in the past, I never really found one that worked for me. I lost interest in most of them for the same 3 reasons:
1. Most LBS friend-finder applications [...]