273

Thanks to everyone who participated in the inaugural 273 Challenge.  We had some great pictures submitted, it’s amazing how creative people can be with objects found lying around their rooms, from the kinky to the chilli to the TV.  The final winner was Sergio Zuniga founder of the exciting young biotech company, Starlime Bioprotection and a Lund Entrepreneurship alumni, you can see his pics here .  Congratulations Sergio, who has won a $50 Kiva Gift Certificate, courtesy of another Lunder Entrepreneurship alumni, Max Boronovski.

Below is a magazine showcasing Sergio’s and some other great pics from the competition.

To ideas which I really love have either gone down or changed over the past couple of days.  Hoongle, got a great review in the New York Times which unfortunately seems to have led to its demise - it grew so quickly that it became unmanageable for the two college student/social entrepreneurs that started it.  Hopefully someone can step in to help them and they will be able to get it back up and running again.  I wish them luck and will keep you guys updated.

Last.fm a great social music player and more importantly (for me at least) discovery service, has started charging subscription fees to users outside of the US, UK and Germany because they cannot run profitable ad supported streaming music from those countries.  I am sad because I love that service and would be happy to pay if I wasn’t on a student budget, at the same time, I wonder if they could implement a different strategy - get the users to sell ads.  Basically you could receive a free subscription if you could support the cost of that subscription with ads you sold that were relevant in your country.  If the ads sold generated more income than the cost of subscription, these could be shared between Last.fm and its users.  I’d be interested to hear what you think of this, please vote in the poll below.

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What other creative ways could Last.fm use to increase its revenues whilst keeping its service free?

I really screwed (not the words you would have first heard coming out of my mouth!) up this morning and somehow managed to delete the entire 273 website from my server (HostPapa who were particularly unhelpful!). Anyway the lesson learned is that you should always back-up! Over the week, I will slowly try to restore the posts using cached copies from Google but I’m not sure I will be able to get them all.

On the plus side, it gave me a chance to re-think the design a little. You will now see that links to all your most used sites appear right at the top - so you can use 273 as your homepage and launch to these sites. I have decided to keep the sliding bar for featured sites, these are great sites and start-ups that we love (if you have any suggestions please let us know - if you are a start-up and would like to be featured, just make a $25 donation with the 273 team and we will contact you for an interview).