Competition in the Digital Age
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 …
Continue reading "Small facts can cause big changes to conclusions"
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Of typefaces and scientific communication"
As pretty much everyone knows, it is hard to face the choice, several times a day, of whether to choose ‘fit’ or ‘fat’ food or something in between. When I noticed that my wife was taking pictures of her food in order to keep a record of how she was doing diet-wise I wondered if …
Continue reading "Can the wisdom of crowds transform your diet?"
[This post originally appeared at HBR on 3rd July 2012] Music publishers have long realized that consumers need help with finding new music. Radio played this role, and it was a source of revenue too. The placement of songs in movies and other media also fueled demand. The music video evolved from television shows to …
John Gruber points us to a prediction made by Clay Christensen 5 years ago about the iPhone: That’s why they’ve [Apple] been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture …
Continue reading "Clay Christensen on the iPhone: Wrong about success but right about disruption"
Last week, Google released its Chrome Browser for iOS. A few weeks earlier it had update its main search app for iOS. Both are extremely good. The Chrome Browser does something important, it synchronises data and also open tabs across devices. That means that when I am on my iPad I can now see what …
The other day, the Wall Street Journal reported on the various ways eBook providers were gathering information on reader behavior. This is not really a surprise but as I have noted before, the notion that publishers may learn more about what readers want has generated undue alarm in some circles. This latest discussion is on …
Continue reading "Can analytics on reader behavior improve publishing?"
I never thought very much about Facebook Credits until an MBA project team decided to explore them more fully last year. The team tried hard but I really could not understand why Facebook wanted people to buy credits when they made purchases (of, say, virtual sheep) on Facebook. They explained that you could now earn …
Continue reading "Facebook Credits and the Perils of Research on Digitisation"
I must admit that sometimes when I'm going through the junk mail filter, I like to look at the narratives of scammers to see how creative they are being. However, it is so sad that they are so obvious. And there is very little variation in the narrative. It just seems that there are an …
Continue reading "Why don't scammers say they are from somewhere else?"
Digitopoly 