Beta Means Not Ready

People in the Internet and tech world have a tendency to think of the beta tag as something cool, like a product so cutting edge that it hasn’t even left that mythical beta stage. Of course the poster child for this is Google’s GMail product, which is still in beta and appears to be ordained to never leave that status. But perceptions within a community are often different than the perceptions outside a community, and that is often the case in business development partnerships with traditional media, where “beta” all too often means “not ready.”