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With over one million square feet of selling space, Harrods is one of the largest department stores in the world. They have more than 5,000 staff and on peak days, more than 300,000 customers visit the store.

The London Underground is the metro system in London.

ConsumerSearch.com has been redesigned and is now running Drupal. The site is a part of the About.com Group, a subsidiary of The New York Times Company.

ConsumerSearch.com gets about 5.5M unique visitors each month (and growing). I don't know what server infrastructure they run on, but with the help from Jeremy at Tag1 Consulting, they configured Drupal to rely heavily on memcached and Drupal's built-in aggressive caching mode. Knowing Jeremy, they are probably trying to serve cached pages from disk, rather than from the database.

A couple of weeks ago we presented Mollom at the TechCrunch Belgium Meeting organized by Robin Wauters, our Belgian Michael Arrington (i.e. Robin writes for TechCrunch and is the organizer of the Plugg conference).

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK was invited to cover the event as part of his TechCrunch Euro Tour. He just posted his round-up of the event, titled "Yes, even Belgium has startups", and concluded his Mollom summary with the words: "I think this has long legs.". Thanks Mike!

© Bart Claeys

Belgium.be, the official website of Belgium, is using Drupal at http://forum2010.belgium.be. This forum site has been put together in preparation for our Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2010.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the fact that the site was built in less than 10 days. The Chancellorship of the Prime Minister picked Connexion to build this site with the help of Internet Architects.

The site is available in 4 languages so all Belgian citizens can express their opinions and engage in interactive discussions about European issues.

When I was 20, my favorite quote was: "Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss" (Douglas Adams).

Today, I turn 30, and while I'm still new to this whole thirties thing, so far I continue to really like that quote: let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's continue to learn, and let's not take ourselves too serious.

With that in mind, let's end my twenties in style ...

Jay just announced Acquia's plans to get into the hosted search business. By doing so, we hope to provide Drupal sites a (i) faster, (ii) more scalable search solution that (iii) can work across multiple sites, that (iv) can handle broader content, (v) that offers faceted navigation and more.

Content management systems with basic keyword search are going nowhere but out of style. Content management systems that do search really well can improve a site's navigation in new and significant ways. We want Drupal sites to be in the latter category.

As we've learned with big sites like drupal.org, it is extremely difficult to do search well from within Drupal, hence the need for a powerful hosted search service. By offering a hosted search service, Acquia continues to tear down barriers for adoption so Drupal can fulfill its full potential.

We're still working on this new service, and we don't know yet when it will be ready, but let us know if you're interested in being an early private beta tester.

At Mollom, we're focused on blocking spam. To do that, we've built a world-class (and world-wide) infrastructure that evaluates your site's comments and posts in real time, freeing you from moderation duties to spend your time on more satisfying pursuits.

Mollom is built on the freemium business model, and our customers have a variety of different needs. While many of our clients take advantage of our free filtering service to protect their site, a growing number use our Mollom Plus subscription service. We're always looking for new ways to add value for all of our customers, especially those with Mollom Plus subscriptions.

To that end, we're pleased to announce our new 99.9% availability standard for the back-end network available to our Mollom Plus subscribers. With 99.9% availability, we guarantee to keep our infrastructure working on your behalf. Those guarantees are in writing at http://mollom.com/standard-service-level-agreement and part of the updated web service agreement for paid subscriptions.

For around 1 euro a day, the Mollom Plus subscription service provides great value. At 99.9% availability, it provides great reliability. And by accurately blocking spam, it provides peace of mind.

English Online is an initiative created by the British Council to encourage the learning of English in China.

In good Drupal style, the site boasts a number of social networking features such as personal profiles, blogs and forums to connect a community of over 60,000 users. Users can customize content in Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and English. Other features include video, newsletters, an events calendar, as well as a mobile version of the site at http://m.englishonline.org.cn.

The site, developed by Brightlemon, was also referenced in Gordon Brown’s recent visit to China.

I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

I've been thinking about the freemium business model because, inspired by Drupal and Open Source, both my companies, Acquia and Mollom, use a freemium business model. (Technically, Acquia uses an Open Source business model which is different from the freemium business model, but there is plenty of overlap and similarities -- pointing out the differences could be a blog post and discussion on its own.)

At Acquia, we currently provide community subscriptions for free -- people that want help with Drupal installation and configuration can get free support from Acquia's Drupal experts. While our free support is limited to certain channels (i.e., forum only), certain support questions (i.e., no module development help and no security best practices) and comes without response time guarantees, we have people on staff whose full-time job is to help you (example customer story). Further, we invest heavily in Drupal and give those contributions away for free.

Similarly, at Mollom, our basic spam filtering service is available for free to sites with limited post volumes. Our free website protection service provides all the features of our commercial Mollom Plus product, but is limited in the number of posts it will protect each day and in its access to our high-availability back-end infrastructure. The great majority of our Mollom clients are using our free filtering service with great success.

There are a number of things that attract me to the freemium business model. The first, and certainly foremost, is the opportunity to do “good” and “well” at the same time. It’s a great thing to help people build quality websites with Drupal, and it’s a great thing to provide Mollom to help deal with spam. Second, I believe a company is better off with a large install base than a small install base, even if the majority of clients ride free. A large install base translates to direct and indirect network effects, including efficient marketing, greater brand awareness, the collective intelligence of your users, and faster product adoption. And, last, I strongly believe that a successful company built on the freemium business model is simply a stronger and more defensible business in the long run.

The freemium business model is relatively new because it didn't become a serious option until the internet gave us a low-cost distribution channel. Ultimately, I can't help but think the freemium business model is the business model of the future for the sole reason that it puts the customer first. With the freemium business model customers only have to pay when they get significant value from the software (i.e. they have reached the limits of the free version). Compare this to the current model where people have to pay to get access to the bits, or where people have to pay before they got enough value from the software (e.g. most shareware software).

That all sounds great but you have to make the freemium business model work first. Getting free users to convert to paying customers is hard. Conversion rates of less than 1% are not uncommon. Free is often “good enough” and only a few people choose to pay for additional features and services. You have to put enough value in the free version to drive adoption (so that you get the scale and the network effects that derive from it), while providing enough incentive for people to pay for premium features or services. The marketing and sales funnel is really wide at the top, and very narrow at the bottom. Plus, you have to make sure that the paying users subsidize all the free users.

Achieving the right balance between free and paid customers is difficult and requires close attention to a number of variables. As a result, I've been trying to answer questions like: how much should we invest to acquire additional free users? How do you estimate the value of a free user? What is the cost of a free user? How long does it take for a free user to convert to a paying customer, and how many will do so? What are the triggers that convince free users to convert?

For example, in Mollom's case, one could argue that we get thousands of dollars worth of value from free users already. We currently have more than 3,000 active users that use Mollom for free. Say each user spends on average 15 minutes a week moderating his site's content and reporting classification errors to Mollom. Mollom learns from this feedback and automatically adjusts its spam filters so that all other Mollom users benefit from it. At a rate of $10 USD/hour, we get $390,000 USD worth of value from free users a year -- 3,000 users x 15 minutes/week x 52 weeks/year x 10 USD/hour = $390,000 USD/year. If these numbers hold up, the value of a free Mollom user could be estimated at $130 USD/year. And that doesn't include the marketing value they add. That said, the value of a free user probably declines as you get more of them and the business becomes stronger.

Both Acquia and Mollom have just opened for business so we have a ton to learn. It will be interesting to look at the different variables and questions a year from now, and to see what we have learned. I hope we can make it work so we can do good and well at the same time ...

Ever wondered how spammers can be profitable? According to this BBC article, researchers have calculated that those sending unsolicited e-mails can make a profit by attracting just one sale from every 12.5 million spam e-mails sent. Even though their conversion rates are well under 0.00001%, big spam networks generate more than $3.5 million USD in annual revenue. All it takes is thousands of hijacked machines sending hundreds of millions of spam messages a day. More details in the original research paper (PDF) by Chris Kanich et al. Crazy!

Packt Publishing has just announced that Drupal won two prestigious awards: Drupal is the overall winner of the Packt 2008 Open Source CMS Award as well as the winner in the PHP category. The runner up in both categories was Joomla!. Winners were elected by a panel of industry experts as well as by visitors to Packt’s website.

The Packt Publishing awards highlight the growing impact Drupal is having on the CMS market, and they are a testament to the many contributions from dedicated Drupal community members around the globe. It is great to receive recognition for our work!

SourceForge, Inc (formerly VA Linux/Software, NASDAQ: LNUX) switched their corporate website to Drupal. Another public company with a Drupal site!

SourceForge operates many of the sites that had a huge impact on my early Open Source career, including SourceForge.net (the world's largest open source software development and distribution environment), Slashdot (the web destination that pioneered community generated content and that provided inspiration for some of the features in Drupal 1.0), ThinkGeek (my favorite online shop of cool stuff and whose t-shirts turned me into a walking Open Source billboard evangelist), NewsForge (who published an instrumental Drupal 4.7 review), Linux.com (who published many great Drupal articles), freshmeat.net (where I publicly announced Drupal 1.0 on January 15, 2001; e.g. check this comment from 2001 on the Drupal Freshmeat page), and more. And last but not least, VA Linux's IPO (now SourceForge, Inc) helped make Linux a success, which is how I got involved with Open Source development in the first place. Fantastic news!

117 million people participated in the United Nations' Anti-Poverty event, and it was organized on a Drupal site: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/.

Nearly 117 million people – close to 2 per cent of the world’s population – took part in events all around the world to stand up and take action against poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals. According to a United Nations' press release they broke the Guinness World Record for the largest social mobilization ever on a single issue. Furthermore, the United Nations unveiled that they secured around $16 billion in new commitments to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The Stand Up Against Poverty site was developed by the great folks at Development Seed; and as you can tell from their blog post, they pushed the Drupal envelope once again.

It is great to help make a product that many people like, but it is even better when that product helps improve the world a little bit!

Over the weekend, Ben created a map that visualizes the website spammers in the world as captured by Mollom. The map is updated multiple times a day and visualizes all the spam attempts over a time span of approximately 6 hours. Check out Ben's blog post for more details. Interesting!