Competition in the Digital Age
A few books have been released recently where entrepreneurs impart their managerial and strategic advice on the world. Of course, they are all successful which means that ultimately they are explaining what they did that made them successful. We should be sceptical. I remember an old Dilbert cartoon with the boss saying something “I’m reading …
Continue reading "Entrepreneurial advice from the horse's mouth"
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 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 …
Two pieces appeared on Medium in the last couple of days about Amazon; both critical and complimentary in their own way. But put together they reveal a contradiction at the heart of what Amazon is doing in terms of social value.Let me explain. The first piece you should read is by Clay Shirky. When Shirky nails …
It was almost impossible to miss Apple’s product announcements yesterday. The usual new iPhones but also an Apple Watch that itself offers fascinating innovations in the user interface; but that is something that I’ll look at another day. From an economics perspective, however, the biggest news was Apple Pay and near as I can tell …
Last year one of my kids needed a graphing calculator for school. We went to Staples and it seemed that the recommended one was a $130 TI-84 graphing calculator. I was outraged. Why would we need this? There was nothing this calculator did that you could not do for free on the web or through …
You may not have noticed, but recently the Huffington Post has been the poster child for lack of journalistic integrity. The actual details may appear to be small to many people, but not to me. HuffPo has made a sloppy journalistic error, publishing a historically inaccurate story, and on a claim many experts have proven …
Over at Vox.com, Tim B Lee, Vox’s resident explainer on bitcoins invested in bitcoins (again) and told us why. He makes the following points:“Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment network.” I agree with this. There is lots of potential for bitcoin (and its ilk) to be a more efficient payments network and improve the ability of …
Digitopoly 