For those of you with an interest in frontier infrastructure, check out this article from Stacey Higginbotham at Gigaom. She wanted to see what *really* high speed fiber looks like in practice, so she went to Chattanooga, which has been running an experiment at the frontier. This quote will give you a feel for the …
PopVox – building a Civic Profile online
Last week I was teaching “IDEA week” to my mid-career Sloan Fellow executive students. IDEA (innovation-driven entrepreneurial advantage;-)) is a week when we usually explore how innovation provides entrepreneurs with the advantage they need to really build a business that has competitive advantage and can compete with large established firms – either in new markets or …
Something isn't adding up with apps
Last week, the makers of the popular Sparrow email app (available on both Mac and the iPhone) were acquired by Google for a reported $25 million. I used this app on my Mac as it was a very neat email client but I stopped when Apple upgraded its own Mail app last year. By all …
Small facts can cause big changes to conclusions
Last week I attended the NBER's Economics of IT and Digitization conference at its Summer Institute. There were lots of interesting papers but I wanted to focus on one, in particular, that demonstrated how important seemingly small facts were for policy conclusions. This paper was by Jason Chan and Anindya Ghose and it explored the …
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Goin’ Cracker(s)
A few weeks ago NPR staffer Emily White blogged unapologetically that, like many members of generation, she had never paid for music. This prompted a firestorm of response and attention, including a few New York Times pieces ( here, here, and here). Musician David Lowery responded eloquently and forcefully, piquing my curiosity about him. It …
The new Economics of Privacy?
Here is an insightful article about the changing economics of privacy. It comes from Jeff John Roberts, one of the more insightful online reporters and commentators in tech today. Here is a quote: "It has become cheap and easy to pry into the lives of others at the same time that protecting our own lives …
Dropbox lives on
In the past I have expressed my opinion that Dropbox did not appear to have sufficient power in the market to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft (see here and here). The reason was that while for Dropbox its service was a product for others it was merely a feature and so they …
Hollowing Out
Tom Edsall does a nice job summarizing the increasing hollowing out of the job market in his New York Times column today. The employment/population ratio has fallen drastically since 1999 even as Real GDP hit an all time high this month. Edsall quotes Andy McAfee and me arguing that technological progress is part of the …
Tiered Broadband Pricing
Kellogg Insight's Editor, Tim De Chant, and I sat down to discuss tiered pricing for broadband. It was a pretty interesting conversation, and Tim distilled it into a blog post. If you are curious to see the original post and other posts by Tim, see his blog, Expertly Wrapped. With Tim's permission, here is a …
Of typefaces and scientific communication
I have to admit that I did not think that the potentially historic announcements on the Higgs boson today would provide a platform to discuss the all important issue of fonts. But the decision to use the iconic, Comic Sans, in the PowerPoint presentation today by CERN scientists have brought typefaces front and centre. And …
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Digitopoly 