Competition in the Digital Age
If you’re interested in technology, employment and the economy, you might be interested in three events happening in the next few weeks. The first is the Compass Summit in Palos Verdes, California, on October 23-26. There will be an impressive array of technologists, business leaders, visionaries and policymakers coming together to discussion how innovation can …
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Information technology has created a data explosion. We now record virtually every click of every visitor to every website, every search on Google or Bing, every transaction at every cash register, every call or text on cellphones, every inventory change in our supply chains and petabytes of other data on what we buy, sell, or …
Thanks, Steve, for all you've done for the world. You lived a life true to your ideals.
Here's an interesting way for the digital and physical worlds to interact: Sphero is a robot ball controlled from your smart phone. I could make a connection to the unexpected power of combinatorial innovation in the digital economy, but the truth is, it's just kind of fun to watch on my lunch break. Enjoy!
We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service. – Jeff Bezos The analysts predicted that Amazon would introduce its new Kindle Fire tablet today with an aggressive low price of $250 to $300, in line with low margin competitors like Samsung. They were wrong. Amazon priced …
Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
Most people are familiar with Moore's Law, the doubling of computer power roughly every 18 months. But as technology becomes more mobile "Koomey's Law" may be more relevant to consumers. Dr. Jon Koomey and his colleagues recently completed a study showing that energy consumption for computing is improving just as fast as processing power. At left, is …
Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
Japan's newest pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital creation. For the past couple of decades, digital technologies have been responsible for skill biased technical change, automating and replacing routine, low-skill work while augmenting the demand for more skilled workers. Bank tellers, clerks and assembly line workers were early targets of automation, while rock stars and CEOs benefited from being …
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If the last big revolution was replacing muscle power with machines, the next one is automating and augmenting more mental tasks. Henry Ford and compatriots replaced the horse, now Google is working to replace the driver. According to John Markoff in the New York Times, their self-driving cars have now logged over 140,000 miles on California …
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Digitopoly 