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The holiday crush is on and the clock is ticking. But what do you get the geek or coworker in your life who has (or wants) everything? How about something intangible: a web-service subscription.

Over the last few years, as I have moved more of my life into "the cloud," I have started to rely on a handful of such services. They keep me in sync, in the know and in touch. Here are three that passed my "30-day test."

And you thought location, location, location was only prevalent in real estate.
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“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon."

Rapp is a menu engineer. He helps restaurants maximize revenue by hacking common flaws in human decision-making. For example, by simply removing “$” signs from prices, people are less intimidated by them. And he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on price. Instead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it costs. But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison. Think about it: How many times have you ordered a bottle of wine in the middle of the price range?

"Verizon is the second-largest carrier in terms of mobile data, edging past China Mobile and closing in on NTT DoCoMo, which had revenues of $8 billion."

10 Commandments of a Successful Freemium App

1. Make sure that the usefulness and engagement of the app are in perfect sync.
2. Make your user value proposition a simple one.
3. Focus deeply on one single domain.
4. Clearly define what is free and what is paid.
5. Build a subscription service into your application.
6. Encourage your customers to use your application often, for the more they use the application, more likely they are to establish a relationship with your company and that means you can sell them something new (or an upgrade) in the future.
7. Data is the ultimate lock in. The more data that is stored inside the application, more difficult it is for customer to switch, because of the extra effort involved.
8. Free is free marketing. Instead of advertising, the service should sell itself.
9. Make sure what you started offering for free, remains free.
10. Ensure your app works across all platforms, including devices (such as the iPhone) preferred by your likely customers.

There is an interesting conversation going on over at GigaOm. Earlier this year, Om Malik asked his readers and Twitter followers what one app they could not live without. Some of the most common responses were those that follow the "Freemium" model - give something away and charge for premium features and services. Follow the link for more.

My response to Om was that I felt he left the most important point for last and didn't follow up. He retorted that "Sometimes, a guy just says something so perfect that you can’t add anything to it.' He was referring to a quote from Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, who told The New York Times, “Our product is our marketing.” 

We tend to forget that it all begins and ends with building a product or service that people want and need. Next it is vitally important that we deliver a flawless user experience. All of these companies Om mentions in his post - Evernote (www.evernote.com), Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) and Remember The Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com) - do that exceptionally well. The “Free” part of Freemium must be compelling because without that, users have no motivation to upgrade to premium services. No one really wants more of a useless hard-to-use application.