Competition in the Digital Age
Publishers have been slow to adopt DRM free eBooks even though experience in music publishing suggests a natural evolution. To be sure, part of this relates to Amazon's proprietary Kindle format that is involves DRM and that has enlisted major publishers behind it. But there are some big exceptions and some others including TOR books and …
Continue reading "Harvard Business Review Press goes DRM Free (and expensive)"
A little while back, Scott Stern and I wrote a paper that asked "Is there a market for ideas?" The paper has since been published but is also available here. The paper noted that while many ideas are traded there do not appear to be organised markets to facilitate such trading. For patents, there have …
Continue reading "Is there a market for ideas? Apptopia edition"
It is August and plenty of my friends have mobile phone contracts up for renewal but want to wait for the new iPhone. In this situation, what they do has hand off to me their brand new iPhone 4S and I put it on eBay for them with the proceeds being put towards a new …
The big IP news this week was the verdict in the Apple-Samsung trial. The jury found (mostly) in favour of Apple in its claims that Samsung had copied patented technology. There were many patents that were under consideration but the ones that appear to have been most significant were the ones that related to the …
Our solar system inhabits an anonymous nub in one of the swirling fingers of the Milky Way. Suburban life renders the neighborhood invisible from the earth’s surface, collateral damage from too much light. Before a dam turned it into a reservoir, the Stanislaus River wandered through the foothills of the Sierras, far from such interference. …
[This post originally appeared in HBR blogs on 24th August 2012] Over the last year, a new app has been changing the way people get limos in some major cities in the US. Uber — founded by Garrett Camp, Oscar Salazar, and Travis Kalanick, and launched in 2010 in San Francisco — allows people to get and …
Continue reading "Uber and the delicate business of creating a platform"
That was a tweet on August 16 by Ryan Saver, Twitter's platform leader. It was in response to the kerfuffle that emerged regarding Twitter's proposed changes to its API. I saw the discussion and debate emerge on various tech blogs and it was hard to know what to make of it. Marco Arment, who runs …
The latest version of Apple's iOS operating system will allow its FaceTime function (it is not an app on the iPhone but is built in) over cellular. For the last two years it has been wireless only (although Aaron Sorkin's researchers appeared to have missed that in a recent version of The Newsroom). Of course, …
Continue reading "AT&T arbitrarily restricts communication on FaceTime"
With all of the discussion of changes in online education, the focus has been on lectures and classrooms. Of course, another chunk of learning that flows from the efforts of academics is the humble textbook. To date, digital textbooks have been attractive mainly because they can lighten the load in backpacks more than any other …
Continue reading "Could textbooks be the key to the digital education revolution?"
In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Nick Bilton used the metaphor of “Whac-A-Mole” to suggest that the creative industries are hopelessly naïve in their efforts to regulate online piracy. The editorial, “Internet Pirates Will Always Win”, argues that anti-piracy regulation is a lot like Whac-A-Mole: hitting one target only causes two or …
Continue reading "Anti-piracy regulation and competing with free"
Digitopoly 