It has long been recognized that networked services contain weak-link vulnerabilities. That is, the performance of any frontier device depends on the performance of every contributing component and service. This column focuses on one such phenomenon, which goes by the label “congestion.” No, this is not a new type of allergy, but, as with a …
Dan Ariely’s great idea: Shortwhale
Dan Ariely of Duke University is a pioneer behavioural economist. But he is also entrepreneurial. His latest little venture is Shortwhale and it solves a problem that many people, especially academics, have: email overload. Here is Ariely’s explanation.The idea is simple. When people you don’t know contact you, it is hard to parse what to do with their …
A little more conversation
A couple of things have happened this week regarding the use of voice as a form of communication. First of all, Apple’s new iOS8 allows users to send others short voice messages instead of text messages. Second, today, Ray Ozzie (whom Bill Gates called “one of the five best programmers in the universe”) released a …
Digitopoly 