Competition in the Digital Age
WordPress powers this blog. That isn't surprising as WordPress began with the goal of providing a powerful and, indeed, free blogging platform. To be sure, it earns money from premium services but, compared with its predecessors, WordPress is an open platform that gave users and developers the power to slash, hack and design. But now …
Continue reading "WordPress's evolution as a web publishing platform"
Since my post last week, Apple's iOS6 maps problem has become this year's '-gate' issue. Despite an incredibly strong iPhone 5 launch and a successful iOS6 launch, the share price has gone down and for the first time in recent memory, consumer satisfaction on an Apple product has dropped. The issue, of course, is how …
Craigslist dominates the classifieds market in the US. But as everyone who has ever used it knows, it is primitive. It reflects an older Internet era that is pre-search and pre-nice interface design. But it is a platform for businesses to post ads and for consumers to search listings. Recently, Craigslist has moved to block …
From Nature, The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers …
As I have written before, I believe that Kickstarter is a novel and important way of allowing innovators and information creators to ensure against some of the risks associated with upfront investment by obtaining some pre-investment signals of demand. Strictly speaking, those signals were supposed to be financial support but ultimately ended up being, for …
Continue reading "Kickstarter tries to clarify what it's about"
Regular readers will know that I often are willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. But with iOS 6 released today they have actually made a mistake that makes you wonder "whether Steve would have allowed it." The mistake was to drop Google Maps and replace it with an in-house Maps app with …
I like seeing the ideas coming through Kickstarter. Some are crazy while others are pedestrian. But one just caught my eye and I thought it was worth blogging about. It is LIFX that is billed as a reinvention of light bulb. Basically, these people wondered what could happen if you put WiFi connectivity in each …
Yesterday, Apple announced new mobile products: a new iPhone 5 and iPod touch (in their taller modes) and a new iPod nano. Of course, the views on the iPhone to all this ranged from "it's only an incremental improvement, but that's OK it is still leads the field" to "it's only an incremental improvement, Apple …
My last post challenged a New York Times op-ed’s view that the media industries should give up fighting piracy. Implicit in the Times editorial’s argument is the idea that piracy has little or no impact on media sales — a view shared by many in the tech community and seeming by some journalists as well. My colleague, …
Big data has the potential to revolutionize management. Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance. Of course, companies such as Google and Amazon are already doing this. After all, we expect companies that were …
Digitopoly 