It has been a minor obsession in my life to find good ways of managing email. I have been down the route whereby my Inbox is a mixture of things I have just received, things I have ignored but may come back to and things that I am trying to trigger some memory for. A …
Annals of Antitrust Smells: Retailers dropping Apple Pay and Google Wallet
Antitrust economics has its analytical side. But sometimes you hear a story — and you know you don’t have the full story — but it just carries with it a stench that something is awry. The odor that wafted from my iPad this morning when I read this was quite strong. There's a lot of hype around …
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Amazon: it’s not the power, it’s the lost focus
Since Paul Krugman wandered into my field of economics today, I thought this might be an opportune moment to recount various things I have said about Amazon and its dispute with Hachette over the last few months. Krugman’s problem: Amazon has too much power, plain and simple. Well, it isn’t that plain or simple.First, if Amazon has …
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Apple’s quiet mobile revolution
Apple’s iPad launch event last week was fairly uneventful. The iPad Air 2 looks impressive and the Retina display iMac even more so. But there will be no queues in front of Apple stores this time around. Indeed, most of the event was filler, perhaps to cover the fact that Apple’s product strategy does not …
The NYT turns to Crowd Science
Some years ago, what is now called Zooniverse, had the great idea to involve the crowd in assisting in scientific endeavours. It started with the classification of galaxies before moving on to other topics such as the classification of cyclones, the identification of Antarctic penguins and coding weather from shipping logs. This was pure science …
Tirole and Pasteur
There are lots of criteria that we use to think about why someone should win a Nobel prize. There is creative genius, there are pioneering findings but, in reality, the dominant criteria is impact. The tough issue is usually "impact on what?" Because being at the frontier is difficult, most specialise in their impact. To be …
Co-Founder Equity Splits
Alex Blumberg, formerly of This American Life and Planet Money is starting a new business. The business has something to do with creating a great network of podcasts (actually, three episodes in I’m not entirely sure but that is a matter for a future discussion). Naturally he is podcasting his own experience in this and I’ve been …
A little podcasting
One of the newest ventures in the Creative Destruction Lab is 'Instaradio.' They have put out an app called RAUR and I have been playing around with it. What RAUR does is offer a dead simple way of broadcasting audio straight from a mobile phone. Basically, you set up an account and then, when you …
Digitopoly 