Peter Griffin: Silicon Valley heads for the freemium way

I love visiting Silicon Valley, the heartland of American technology, and my current visit here has coincided with some interesting developments.

Hewlett Packard is immersed in one of the biggest scandals the valley has seen in years after the company hired private investigators to spy on employees, their families and journalists in order to trace a high-level board leak. And Google boss Eric Schmidt has been telling politicians that the internet will in future be able to determine instantly if what they are saying is factually sound.

Politics and scandal aside, the valley and the US tech industry, in general, keeps churning out amazing services. Netvibes.com is emerging as the king of the customisable web start pages. I've been using it for a few months and love it for the fact it integrates my Gmail account with RSS feeds.

Salesforce.com is a business application, but it's using the internet to take on traditional database software makers like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP with staggering effect. Salesforce.com offers customer relationship management applications that are all delivered via the internet, minimising the hardware requirements of companies using the services.

Bluelithium is taking on Google by serving up web advertisements that are tailored to your web-surfing activity. Google has successfully done this with text-based adverts, but Bluelithium has found a more successful way of making the "clickstream" advertising model work for banner adverts on major websites.

The internet telephony service Jajah promises free calls from your computer or mobile phone with no need to download software, use headsets or have a broadband connection. The service is largely focused on the US and Europe at the moment, but if it becomes anywhere nearly as successful as Skype, it will take the world by storm.

The web services concept behind free applications like Google's Writely, Gmail and Yahoo Mail is gathering steam, as internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are adapted to integrate more web-based applications.

DabbleDB, a premium web service, lets you access your own private database from anywhere in the world using a web browser.

The free RadiusIM application allows users of the Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Google messaging services to send messages from an interface that includes a map showing the location of people you are talking to.

Limbo ( www.41414.com ) is a weird reversal of auction websites like TradeMe and eBay, where the person placing the top bid loses. Instead, the lowest unique bid wins. It sounds strange, but Limbo thinks it can make money - some US$5 million (NZ$7.5 million) next year. The auctions are effectively marketing campaigns for businesses that want to give away cars or expensive electronics for a song. The auction website and the contributing company share the revenue.

Freemium services, the in vogue internet business model, are not supported by advertising but involve the company giving away an entry-level version of their product to convince users to upgrade. SixApart and Wordpress give away a standard version of their blogging software but offer more advanced features in its popular premium version. And Gametrust.com offers free online games - and many more you have to pay for.