Competition in the Digital Age
That's the scenario being put forward by AT&T today. "A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage." Currently, mobile users pay for data. You want to consume more mobile data …
Continue reading "What if mobile app developers could pay for data?"
This week I was invited to speak at a “guru forum” of managers and academics who work in information technology. Among the many issues that were discussed, two conflicting trends were identified. On the one hand many corporate organizations are moving towards cloud services and all-in-one outsourced solutions (Oracle, SAP, IBM, …). On the other …
Continue reading "Cloud computing and the "me versus you" problem"
There has been much discussion over the last couple of days regarding Matter; the new long-form journalism experiment by Jim Giles and Bobby Johnson. The main news is that they made, virtually instantly, their $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter and are still going. That tells us that there are 787 people out there who would …
I've written about OnLive desktop before; the iPad app that gives you Windows and, most importantly, Microsoft Office on your iPad (for free). Yesterday, OnLive launched a paid version that added Internet Explorer and with it Flash to their platform. In the process, that gave users a 1Gbps connection to the Internet right on an …
Continue reading "Everything but the monitor and keyboard in the cloud"
That's a prediction not a fact. And I know predictions are dangerous but this one seems to have a solid rationale. I'll explain. First of all, if you missed the last month in social media, it was all Pinterest all the time. What is Pinterest? Well as David Pogue points out, it is exactly what …
Continue reading "Before the year is out, Google will have acquired Pinterest"
Mac users live in a wonderful world relatively free of viruses, malware and all manner of other computer security threats. To be sure, they are there but it is very rare to be taken down by a virus. Apple, however, seem to be aware that as their star rises, so does the challenge they present …
Brett Danaher of Wellesley College and I have a new working paper (Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Piracy on International Box Office Sales) attempting to find evidence on whether piracy, in particular movie downloading via BitTorrent, depressed international movie box office revenue. Our approach is based on the following two insights. First, Hollywood movies …
Continue reading "The Marquee Result of the "Reel Piracy" Study"
Can an iPhone app keep businesses honest? Apparently so when it comes to the accuracy of self reported information about skiing conditions. That is the finding from a new paper by Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz. Here is the abstract: Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore …
After more than a decade of successful growth, Wikipedia continues to defy easy characterization. It receives more than 400 million viewers per month. Close to four million articles grace its web pages in English alone. Volunteers built the entire corpus of text. This experience suggests that Wikipedia has done something right, but begs the question: …
Felix Salmon has been getting lots of attention this week for his posts on 'quantity versus quality' in online news. It started with this post about the New York Observer [should it get italics if its mostly a website?] who Salmon argued has gone all in on a quantity strategy. Basically to publish more and not …
Continue reading "Reach vs readership: It's the advertising, stupid!"
Digitopoly 