Behind every successful technology lie many quirky stories showing how it grew like a teenager or barely averted disaster. With the passage of time, most of those stories fade into obscurity or, at best, become parts of verbal explanations accompanying countless resumes. The few events that find their way into public discourse, if any do …
US Broadband in Maps, Graphs, and some Bars
To be sure, most of us do not use government statistical reports as anything more than bedtime reading for inducing soporific reactions. It is cheaper than a sleeping pill. But those expectations would be too harsh for the most recent broadband report from the FCC. It contains a great deal of data, and it is …
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Postal Mail in the Shadow of Email
Postal mail and electronic mail have coexisted for years, sitting next to one another in an uneasy tension. That was so thirty years ago, as it is this year. Two recent posts -- one from Robert Cannon, and one from Randall Stross -- offered a quick reminder about how that tension has evolved. Robert Cannon …
Organic Listing + Paid Ad = Effective Ad?
Is an organic listing a substitute or complement for an ad? More precisely, if a firm had a high listing on an organic listings in Google's search engine, would there be much gain to having an ad as well? Or would that merely provide traffic that would have come anyway? That is the question addressed …
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How to measure Online traffic
The commercial online world has quietly gone through its teens doing what every teenager does -- measuring their growth. This is all for the good. It is a sign of the maturation of Web commerce that some stability has started to emerge in measuring online traffic and activity. Which introduces this little post: AdAge MediaWorks …
Should Google go back to Only Organic?
If you have a couple hours to burn on some political theater, go and watch the Senate hearings about Google. Here is a link. Actually, as someone who foresaw the inevitability of this event, I was rather disappointed. This hearing was pretty anti-climactic. To have found this interesting you had to be a serious junkie …
Puzzling over Big Wireless Carrier Mergers: An Editorial
Let’s talk about AT&T proposal to merge with T-Mobile. Why do the parties involved still consider this merger viable? Executives at AT&T seemed to think this merger was a good idea many months ago. For all I know, that might have been the right conclusion with the information they had then. But that was then, …
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Smart phone patents and platform wars
Firms in the smartphone market have been suing one another over patent violations. I cannot recall any other platform war that involved as many intellectual property disputes. Look, society grants patents as part of trade-off. A patent enhances the incentives to generate new invention by giving the inventor a temporary monopoly. That trade-off should never …
Sports stories written by algorithm
Have you suspected for some time that most writing about sporting events is formulaic? Well, suspect no more! It is possible to have a computer write a sports story merely from the box score. No seriously. It is. And there is some pretty interesting business economics in that example. Some professors from Northwestern figured out …
The Lexicon of Networking Economics
Economics rarely improves with reference to etymology, but an exception should be made for the economics of networks. Many valid but distinct definitions of “network economics” compete for attention. That causes confusion in academic writing and in public discourse. There are many symptoms of this confusion. Consider this one. When the late Senator Ted Stevens …
Digitopoly 