Competition in the Digital Age
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?"
The National Telecommunications Information Administration just published the findings from its latest survey about Internet use within US households. In case you missed it, here is a summary: broadband adoption among US households went up, but not by much. Actually, that is not entirely fair. Viewed at short intervals, broadband adoption will appear to be …
Richard Rosenbloom passed away on October 26th. He was a gentle soul, a wonderful person, and a insightful scholar. He will be missed. I will miss him. I had the great fortune to meet him several times. The first of these meetings occurred when I was a student. Those first meetings were informal because his …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "US Broadband in Maps, Graphs, and some Bars"
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Organic Listing + Paid Ad = Effective Ad?"
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 …
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 …
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, …
Continue reading "Puzzling over Big Wireless Carrier Mergers: An Editorial"
Digitopoly 