Competition in the Digital Age
It was just a little skirmish, a mere tit-for-tat in the presidential race. It made headlines for a day and it also made Wikipedia just a little bit better. To be sure, Romney and Obama infrequently appear in the same sentence as Wikipedia, so this is worth a look. How did the-encyclopedia-that-anyone-can-edit get mixed up …
Continue reading "Wikipedia, Mitt, Barack, and a Hand over the Heart"
Why was Google invented in the US and not the UK? Jonathan Haskell, Professor at Imperial College in London, asked that question in his most recent blog post. What motivated him to ask it? He got a little nudge from his Prime Minister, David Cameron, who asked the same question. Haskell justifiably hesitates to put …
Continue reading "What would you say to David Cameron about Google?"
If you have been musing about the misguided policies in SOPA and PIPA that generated protests, what do you make of misguided international governance of the Internet? This article in Politico raises an interesting possibility, that the ITU will assert itself into Internet governance, ostensibly to coordinate security and taxation across countries. As is well …
What better way to mark the end of the year than to give out a dozen awards! This post contains a baker’s dozen. The awards go to firms and managers who took notable actions in technology markets in 2011. There are three criteria for these awards. It had to involve something in 2011. It had …
There are no second acts in life, but the American system of entrepreneurship has provided many second chances. That flexibility is, perhaps, one of the greatest strengths of the US system of value creation. For example, a less-flexible system would never have given Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, an opportunity to have much impact later …
Continue reading "Steve Jobs and the Economics of One Entrepreneur"
<sarcasm alert> Tired of the self-referential and self-important? Then do not attend a conference on communications policy in Washington D.C. (or watch the latest debate among the Republican candidates for president). What is the next best anecdote to that tone? A bit of humor to punctuate the bubble, of course!<End of alert> Need some humor …
During the first week of December I visited Tokyo, Japan, and spoke about platforms. This was my first visit to Japan. Accordingly, this post mixes commentary with a bit of travelogue. Platforms are reconfigurable base of components on which participants build applications. Platforms have a long history in computing and electronics, with examples going back …
Here is a fact. The FCC recently announced it would move to have a hearing about the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. In response, AT&T withdrew its application from the FCC, delaying the hearing indefinitely (or until AT&T resubmits the application). What is that all about? At a procedural level it is just a detail -- …
Continue reading "Mobile mergers and insider baseball conversations"
For better or worse, a decade of development in web technology enables the fast sharing of imagery. "Word of mouth" used to occur verbally, but some part of it now occurs online. What has moved online soonest? Things that are easy to share with one click. It tends towards the quick hit: Pictures that tell …
The other day I came across an article at Ars technica about ReDigi. You may have heard of ReDigi. They resell digital goods. Me, I was puzzled, so I emailed Ben Shiller, who has just finished his dissertation about resale digital markets. His dissertation is called “Digital Downloads and the Prohibition of Resale Markets for …
Continue reading "Are Digital Resale Markets Legal? Should They Be?"
Digitopoly 