An interesting battle is looming over Apple's newspaper and magazines subscription pricing for iOS devices (notably the iPad). Apple's offer to publishers is simple. They can offer an app that allows consumers to buy individual issues of their content or to subscribe to it from within the app; the publisher sets the pricing. But Apple …
Can Digital Technologies Replace Superstars?
Japan's newest pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital creation. For the past couple of decades, digital technologies have been responsible for skill biased technical change, automating and replacing routine, low-skill work while augmenting the demand for more skilled workers. Bank tellers, clerks and assembly line workers were early targets of automation, while rock stars and CEOs benefited from being …
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The Flipside of Cisco's Flip Decision
In 2009, I purchased a Flip HD camcorder. Around the same time, Cisco purchased Flip, the company, for about $600 million. It was never clear precisely what Cisco was up to, but with YouTube being a big deal, some form of Internet connectivity seemed to top the list of the possible "synergies." It took Cisco just a …
In digital media, the commercial value of the pile
Recently, the satirical newspaper The Onion captured — and not for the first time — just what I wanted to write about in this post with its article "'The Economist' to Halt Production for Month to Let Readers Catch Up." Still, though, I think the five-issue-high pile of The Economist on my desk could tell us much about what …
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Apple's 'Buy Your Way Out of Piracy' Office
At the WWDC Apple announced its iCloud suite of apps. One of them was ‘iTunes in the Cloud.’ This was a free service that allowed consumers who had purchased music through iTunes to download that music and sync in across multiple devices (including the iPhone, iPad and both Macs and PCs). This provided ease of …
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Digitopoly 