Competition in the Digital Age
The news yesterday that Disney was acquiring LucasFilm and along with it, the Star Wars franchise led many in the blogosphere, twitter and every sub-editor in the media jump for joy. Never before had so many puns become available for some many headlines in such diversity. But at the same time, there was the realisation …
Continue reading "I suggest a new strategy George. Let the mouse win."
This week saw the unveiling of Apple's iPad Mini and the launch of Microsoft's Surface. I want to focus on the latter as I think that it reveals something fundamentally important about the personal computer/mobile computing/mobile phone market that no analysts are really appreciating: the type of person you are really matters. And for that …
Continue reading "I'm a Mac. You're a PC. There really are two types of people"
The people at PHD comics have posted a video summarising the case for open access to scholarly publications. It is a good summary of the issues and particularly salient as I spent yesterday at a Workshop that was looking into the economics of these issues. One part of the video was interesting. It was about …
Continue reading "Opening up library subscriptions to scholarly publications"
Now, you might think this is all in jest but, actually, it is pretty close to something else we have already discussed on this blog: Scott Adams' plan to see if he can sell an idea. If you recall, Dilbert creator, Scott Adams actually does not believe it is possible to sell an idea (unlike …
Information Wants to be Shared focusses on business models for information content provision. But the principles behind it, that information is more valuable if it is exchanged freely, obviously extend to many other matters. One such matter is health-related information. John Wilbanks is a crusader that has taken the issue of health sharing on. As …
FTC Challenges Innovators to Do Battle with Robocallers Agency Offers $50,000 for Best Technical Solution as Part of Ongoing Fight Against Illegal Calls The Federal Trade Commission is challenging the public to create an innovative solution that will block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones. As part of its ongoing campaign against these …
Continue reading "A Contest to end Robocallers with Technical Invention"
[HT: Scholarly Kitchen] A new paper published in Science (of course, paywalled) examines publications in biological sciences from 2006 and 2008 to see how many were accepted at first instance and how many were initially rejected (or rejected at least once prior to acceptance). 75% were accepted first time around while many otherwise went through the system quickly. Not surprisingly, …
I have written before about Twitter's new rules and how they have backed away from platform promises. One of their new rules limits the number of user tokens a third party developer can issue before effectively being 'owned' by Twitter. (I say, 'owned' because Twitter apparently can then exclude them from the platform). Now the …
Continue reading "Twitter's policies cause prices on third party apps to rise"
This morning, I had a "someone is wrong on the Internet" moment. The someone was Clay Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth who wrote a long piece for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard entitled "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism." The report is about the woes facing the newspaper industry and …
Continue reading "Media disruption: it is not journalism, it is advertising"
Talk to the management at leading technology firms in the same market, and the similarities in opinions are striking. Most hold roughly the same set of opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how specific actions lead to successful business outcomes. For lack of a better phrase, I call this the “prevailing view.” The prevailing view is …
Digitopoly 