Sidecut Reports

If there is one big dirty secret to blogging and the Internet, it’s the amazing number of “scraper” blogs out there which either use RSS feeds or just good old cut-and-paste to lift original content from “real” entities like this one and use the content to populate their own sites.

Since they are too numerous to chase and usually without any real contact information, real creators of original thought can only hope that the market will sort issues out, and that advertisers will see their banners on these garbage sites and fire their ad-buyers. In the meantime… thanks to Google Alerts we often stumble upon some hilarious attempts to cadge our original content, like our report excerpt that we posted Tuesday morning. Reading through something that looked like it went through several translation rinse-and-repeat cycles, you get this lead paragraph:

Editor’s note: The following is an pericope from our latest four times a year dispatch on all things Clearwire, the CLEARWIRE NTK OCTOBER 2009 (need to know) dispatch, on waiting aeons ago in a blue moon during the humble low cost of $4.95. In this pericope we talk close-knit to how Clearwire’s on-time, on-target retail launches in Atlanta and Las Vegas, as proficiently as a host of smaller cities, be experiencing kept the companionship on butt with its overambitious 2009 rollout plans.

I’d provide the link to the site, but as they say… that would only encourage them. And this is what they say:

According to Clearwire, it require cache up marvellous subscriptions in Silicon Valley during deliver, while allowing any other developers in the acreage to dispose of up away joining the company’s developer program, and then purchasing approved character accouterments during $50.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to purchasing some approved character accouterments. And then I will keep my companionship on butt.

Any lame jokes about how this stuff is better than the original… companionship them on in the comments.

Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from our new report, Goin’ Mobile: How WiMax Could Change the Consumer Broadband Experience. In this excerpt we talk about how flexible, innovative pricing schemes from main provider Clearwire may help drive the adoption of WiMax services by consumers. The report, which updates our previous consumer guide with the latest in market launch information from Clearwire’s Atlanta, Las Vegas and Portland markets, is available for purchase from our website for $4.95.

WIMAX PRICING, MARKETS AND ROAMING

If there is any other hallmark that differentiates WiMax pricing, it is Clearwire’s long list of flexible options, which include choices of different levels of service speed as well as “bundling” options that offer lower prices when consumers combine two services, such as a home service and a mobile service.

While writing about Clearwire service pricing is an inexact science (since the company has rapidly repriced and reduced prices on options in the first six months of 2009 alone) its entry-level price for basic home WiMax service has remained steady at $20 a month. Its fastest home-service option, which offers 6 Mbps download speeds, was priced at $40 per month as of the writing of this report. An unlimited-usage mobile service option was priced at $50 per month, with promised download speeds of 4 Mbps. And a combination of unlimited home and mobile services — say a home modem and a USB card tied to the same bill — was priced at $65 per month.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are happy to make our latest report, the $4.95 Clearwire NTK report, available on Scribd! Follow the links below to purchase from Scribd if that is your preferred data-downloading arena.

Clearwire_NTK

Pardon the press-release tenor of our previous post, but we did want to put the news out there before explaining some of the inside-baseball decisions that prompted us here at Sidecut to radically reduce the price we charge for our industry reports.

While we’ve received many compliments for our research reports (including many requests to post our views elsewhere on the Internet), finding a pricing model that fits both the economic times affecting our readers and a sensible business model for ourselves has been a work in progress. The tipping point toward what we are calling our new “right-sized, right-priced research” was when we made two of our reports available for free — resulting in hundreds of downloads and a much larger audience for our news reporting and analysis of the U.S. WiMax market, public policy, and the general telecommunications and Internet industries.

The favorable response to our no-price option was just part of a growing realization that the traditional analyst/research business model — where you charge a selected audience a premium of thousands of dollars for timely, focused research in their specific field of interest — may be heading down the same dwindling-returns path as other traditional media businesses. At least for a smaller operation like Sidecut Reports, it seems to make sense to use our speed, agility and low overhead to produce reports that add more value than any typical collection of similar blog posts, while at the same time making our information and analysis available to a much wider audience by pricing it like the kind of information one might purchase for their Kindle bookreader or iPhone.

So welcome to the world of five-buck reports!

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the June, 2009 installment of our “Clearwire Need To Know,” or Clearwire NTK, Research Series. The NTK Series provides quarterly updates on all things related to Clearwire Corp.’s nascent WiMax services, including market launches, pricing schemes, WiMax device availability and recent business deals from the company building a nationwide WiMax network.

The Clearwire NTK reports are designed to give anyone interested in Clearwire the most thorough and up-to-date package of news, analysis and short-term outlooks available, in a format designed for easy reading. Much more comprehensive than short blog posts — and much more timely and economic than thousand-dollar traditional analyst reports — our Clearwire NTK reports are “right-sized research” for busy professionals who want to stay as current as possible on all things Clearwire. If you are interested in Clearwire, here is everything you NEED TO KNOW, ready for you to order and download directly from our site.

Topping out at just over 3,000 words — like those good old feature stories that most tech publishers don’t have the space or author experience to provide any more, each of our Clearwire NTK reports are available in form factors designed for your convenience, from PDF downloads for your desktop, laptop or netbook, or in formats suitable for reading on your Kindle bookreader or iPhone.

All NTK reports will be priced at just $4.95 — that’s no typo, but yes, Four dollars and ninety-five cents. So for less than the price of a beer at a baseball game, anyone interested in Clearwire — from investors to partners to resellers, competitors and most importantly, end users — can have the right information you need, right now, at the right price. Order your report now!

Read the rest of this entry »