Competition in the Digital Age
That's the scenario being put forward by AT&T today. "A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage." Currently, mobile users pay for data. You want to consume more mobile data …
Continue reading "What if mobile app developers could pay for data?"
This week I was invited to speak at a “guru forum” of managers and academics who work in information technology. Among the many issues that were discussed, two conflicting trends were identified. On the one hand many corporate organizations are moving towards cloud services and all-in-one outsourced solutions (Oracle, SAP, IBM, …). On the other …
Continue reading "Cloud computing and the "me versus you" problem"
There has been much discussion over the last couple of days regarding Matter; the new long-form journalism experiment by Jim Giles and Bobby Johnson. The main news is that they made, virtually instantly, their $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter and are still going. That tells us that there are 787 people out there who would …
I've written about OnLive desktop before; the iPad app that gives you Windows and, most importantly, Microsoft Office on your iPad (for free). Yesterday, OnLive launched a paid version that added Internet Explorer and with it Flash to their platform. In the process, that gave users a 1Gbps connection to the Internet right on an …
Continue reading "Everything but the monitor and keyboard in the cloud"
That's a prediction not a fact. And I know predictions are dangerous but this one seems to have a solid rationale. I'll explain. First of all, if you missed the last month in social media, it was all Pinterest all the time. What is Pinterest? Well as David Pogue points out, it is exactly what …
Continue reading "Before the year is out, Google will have acquired Pinterest"
Mac users live in a wonderful world relatively free of viruses, malware and all manner of other computer security threats. To be sure, they are there but it is very rare to be taken down by a virus. Apple, however, seem to be aware that as their star rises, so does the challenge they present …
Can an iPhone app keep businesses honest? Apparently so when it comes to the accuracy of self reported information about skiing conditions. That is the finding from a new paper by Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz. Here is the abstract: Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore …
Felix Salmon has been getting lots of attention this week for his posts on 'quantity versus quality' in online news. It started with this post about the New York Observer [should it get italics if its mostly a website?] who Salmon argued has gone all in on a quantity strategy. Basically to publish more and not …
Continue reading "Reach vs readership: It's the advertising, stupid!"
That appears to be the question taxing analysts at the moment. The reason is that they want to work out if Facebook is worth $100 billion or not. For this, they guess that Facebook needs to make $5 billion a year in profit. Why? Well, if we go to its nearest neighbour, Google, it is …
The forthcoming Facebook IPO gives us lots to talk about. It is likely to be the largest in history (cool). It is predicated on an established business model (good), plus a future growth path into the mobile space that is uncertain (not so good). And it will make its 27-year-old founder incredibly rich (good, for …
Digitopoly 