Below are a couple of diagrams of how these free business models work.  They’re taken from Chris’s Long Tail blog, which, along with his book by the same title, I recommend highly.

Gary Vaynerchuk also has a bunch of other great videos on his blog.  I particularly liked the one on how word of mouth has changed.

It’s never pleasant to face the truth about darwinian capitalism. The bad
companies die. But that harsh fact forces all of us who want to survive to
evolve, adapt, and innovate. The time has come to leverage capital
efficiency, not just to make it easy to do a startup, but to survive a
downturn.

What is your company doing to prepare for what could be a prolonged contraction of the economy? Would love to hear your thoughts…

These are the categories in which Clemson is ranked and the ranking:
1 – Happiest Students
1 – Jock Schools (popularity of intercollegiate and intramural sports)
2 – Town-Gown Relations
6 – Best Quality of Life
7 – Best Athletic Facilities
7 – Students Pack the Stadiums (intercollegiate sports are popular)
8 – Best Career/Job Placement Services
8 – Everyone Plays Intramural Sports
20 – School Runs Like Butter (administration gets high marks)

Here’s the press release from Clemson’s website.

As an entrepreneur who has waited his fair share of tables, I found the article to be dead on in many respects, and I was inspired to try to list all the full and part time jobs that I’ve ever had. The results aren’t exactly what you’d find on a Harvard Business School resume, but it’s more clear to me now that each one of these jobs taught me something important along the way to becoming a “full time” entrepreneur.

Listed in a generally chronological order with the most recent first:

Sewickley Academy Ice Hockey – assistant then head coach (currently still a head coach)

Carnegie Learning – inside sales rep

Clemson Ice Hockey – vice president then president of club organization

United States Senate – mailroom intern

College Prowler – author of clemson university guidebook

Sewickley Heights Golf Club – waiter

Dick’s Sporting Goods – mailroom, maintenance

China Palace – delivery driver

Vocelli’s Pizza -delivery driver

Pizza Roma – delivery driver

Sewickley Cafe – waiter

Cronimet Corp – scrapyard laborer

Beaver County Times – paper delivery route

Lawn & landscaping business – mowed lawns, raked leaves for neighbors

According to the article, local advertisers are shifting dollars to the Internet only rather than paying for bundled media packages through traditional print and broadcast outlets.

What happens in a recession is advertisers are forced to make more economical decisions about how to spend marketing dollars,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of the local media research firm. “And the Internet, as they’ve tested it over the last several years, is cheaper and seems to work.

Pittsburgh bested all other cities with a 513 percent increase in new venture funding with nearly $200 million going to new companies, up from $32 million a decade ago. New Mexico, by comparison, had a total investment of venture capital in 2007 of $128 million, which was 375 percent higher than the investment there 10 years ago of $27 million.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette article

Pittsburgh Business Times article

Speaking of startups in the Pittsburgh area, I remember reading this great article in the Post Gazette a few years ago about Sewickley being sort of a Palo Alto East. Considering this is in fact where I “live and play,” I thought it interesting to read another’s opinion of my hometown.

The article still seems fairly accurate, though I’d add a few places like Brueggers Bagels and Crazy Mocha to the map of techie hot spots. And I got a kick out of the Sewickley Confectionary being listed — our small startup office sits directly above the popular ice cream store.