As it is the holiday season, I thought it might be useful to list my favourite iPhone/iPad apps that for work. Their primary selling point is that fact that they actually get used by me. Due: Due is an iPhone app that solves a particular problem: I need to remember to do something at a certain time …
Explaining exponential growth
One of the themes here at Digitopoly is the power of exponential growth. I recently came across a terrific lecture that explains its power. Exponential
Apple's international pricing
A few years ago I had the idea of using iTunes song prices to form an index to illustrate whether currencies were under- or over-valued. The iTunes index indicated significant over valuation of currencies relative to the US dollar in a way that was not correlated with the Economist's Big Mac index. While this may …
Controlling the timeline
Facebook have finally released their much-anticipated timeline. Finally, this is a product change that its users will actually like from the start. It is a major innovation. What timeline is is a way of strolling through all of your Facebook activity since you first enrolled (and indeed, by adding retrospectively, from before that). To be …
Ignore the piracy
Louis CK is responsible for much joy. If you don't believe me, watch this and if that isn't enough hunt down his appearances on The Daily Show. So you had better believe that if he had a digitisation angle I was going to post about it. Fortunately, this week he ran an experiment. Rather than putting …
Pricing the Vogue archive
I must admit that I have no idea why the pricing of the new Vogue archive is interesting me so much. I guess it was Matt Yglesias's post that described the whole endeavour as tragic that got my attention. Having noted that an individual subscription will cost $1,575 per annum, Yglesias wrote: I don't care …
Amazon's new exclusivity drive
Amazon has introduced a new option for publishers/authors -- Kindle Direct Publishing Select. What is it? KDP Select is a new option that features a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers. If you choose to make a book exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, the book is …
Thinking about patent woes
I'm currently in Brussels at the Charles River Associates conference on competition policy. The session I am participating in is about patent policy and its interaction with antitrust law. As it happened, I read a relevant book on the subject by Alex Tabarrok. It is a short eBook, Launching the Innovation Renaissance. It deals with a …
EC launches eBook collusion investigation
The European Commission has launched an investigation into possible anti-competitive practices in eBook publishing. The European Commission has opened formal antitrust proceedings to investigate whether international publishers Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing, France), Harper Collins (News Corp., USA), Simon & Schuster (CBS Corp., USA), Penguin (Pearson Group, United Kingdom) and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck (owner of …
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News Zealots: Old and New
Over the last few days a debate has emerged (or more accurately continued) between those who think newspapers in their current form are socially desirable and should be supported to continue in more or less their current form and those who think that the entire institution has come to an end and is in the …
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