The notion of tapping into crowds as a means of improving creative activity has become, dare I say it, "all the rage." Reviews of restaurants are crowd-sourced by Yelp, Zagat and others. The Wikipedia model crowd-sources knowledge collation. There is Kickstarter, that crowd-sources, well, crowd approval and with it funding for new products. There are various attempts …
Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship
[This is a guest post by Tim Bresnahan, the Landau Professor in Technology and the Economy at Stanford University; Ed.] Steve Jobs has died. We should remember his accomplishments and the vision of American entrepreneurship he embodied. The PC business was founded by a ragtag band of outsiders. Steve, a lotus-eating less-than-successful Atari employee, was …
Continue reading "Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship"
The Representative Agent in the Technological World
I live in a world of economics where we tend to doubt the power of the individual. To be sure, there are individuals who are in positions of power and who can inflict damage on the world. But in the world of business, these tend to wash out. Leaders may come and go but very …
Continue reading "The Representative Agent in the Technological World"
Lunchtime videos: anticipating the future
A common theme in innovation is how much uncertainty there is about innovations that will be achieved in the future and, in particular, about their value. The classic reference is this piece by Nathan Rosenberg that documents many cases where people got it wrong. The flip-side are situations where the future was well anticipated. For …
Continue reading "Lunchtime videos: anticipating the future"
Dampening iPhone upgrade expectations
Product life cycles are a tricky business. Car models often have a five year lifespan. Computers have a couple of years. But somewhere along the way, the world decided that iPhones should have a yearly cycle. Today, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. It's an upgraded iPhone 4 and labelled as such. During the announcement Apple's …
Online science and the speed of review
Steve Landsburg alerted me to an amazing set of interactions in Mathematics this week. A very distinguished Princeton professor, Ed Nelson, announced what may have been the most profound mathematical result of the century (right up there with Godel's Theorem last century): that the Peano axioms in mathematics were inconsistent. Nelson announced his finding on …
Patent Reform without Congress
Paul Graham is an accomplished entrepreneur and is the founder of Y-Combinator — perhaps the most successful of the start-up incubator projects in recent times. (Here is a write-up from Wired.) His essays and thoughts about the tech sector are always worth reading. Graham's latest focus is patent reform. Why does the patent system need reforming? Well, just listen to …
Network Neutrality and Bank of America's charges
There has been much discussion over the last few days about Bank of America's decision to charge consumers for debit card transactions. It's an odd fee in that you pay $5 for the first transaction each month and then the rest of the month is free. While this is related to the Durbin reforms that …
Continue reading "Network Neutrality and Bank of America's charges"
Is there a bias to user reviews/ratings?
Sometimes I wonder whether XKCD is just better at commentary than all of us. Today's cartoon demonstrates a great understanding of equilibrium combined with a real issue with regard to consumer incentives. It raises the puzzle that if you like, say, a hotel you have an interest in not saying so because that either reduces …
Upside down business models for the Kindle
Matt Yglesias has a way of identifying great questions quickly. Responding to Erik's widely discussed post on the low Kindle price yesterday, he writes: That said, this seems arguably upside down as a business model. The marginal cost of distributing a digital copy of a book, song, TV show, or movie is $0. A company with …
Continue reading "Upside down business models for the Kindle"
Digitopoly 