Competition in the Digital Age
[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"
That is precisely the claim in a new report, The Economics of Online Advertising, released by ComScore CEO Magid Abraham today. Here is a summary of his claim: The very interesting thing about the online ad market is that it’s the only market where the accounting mechanism that you use will radically change the economic …
Continue reading "Can changing the unit of the account save publishing?"
Tomorrow the second cohort of The Next 36 will graduate. The Next 36 is a program that selects 36 keen and bright undergraduates from all over Canada, puts them in teams and gives them a big chunk of money each (from $20K - $50K) to develop a mobile app. In the process they receive business …
Justin Rao and David Reiley have a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on "The Economics of Spam." It is a very interesting read; especially for the historical overview of the phenomenon. I had the opportunity to discuss the paper at the NBER Summer Institute and so I thought I'd record my thoughts …
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 …
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 …
Digitopoly 