Yesterday, Apple announced new mobile products: a new iPhone 5 and iPod touch (in their taller modes) and a new iPod nano. Of course, the views on the iPhone to all this ranged from "it's only an incremental improvement, but that's OK it is still leads the field" to "it's only an incremental improvement, Apple …
Should fact checking be part of journalism?
Earlier in the year, Arthur Brisbane, then public editor of the New York Times, drew the ire of the Internet for this post: I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. The answer was a resounding 'yes, and …
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An eBay shipping/salience experiment
It is August and plenty of my friends have mobile phone contracts up for renewal but want to wait for the new iPhone. In this situation, what they do has hand off to me their brand new iPhone 4S and I put it on eBay for them with the proceeds being put towards a new …
AT&T arbitrarily restricts communication on FaceTime
The latest version of Apple's iOS operating system will allow its FaceTime function (it is not an app on the iPhone but is built in) over cellular. For the last two years it has been wireless only (although Aaron Sorkin's researchers appeared to have missed that in a recent version of The Newsroom). Of course, …
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Is SPAM a public policy problem?
Justin Rao and David Reiley have a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on "The Economics of Spam." It is a very interesting read; especially for the historical overview of the phenomenon. I had the opportunity to discuss the paper at the NBER Summer Institute and so I thought I'd record my thoughts …
Something isn't adding up with apps
Last week, the makers of the popular Sparrow email app (available on both Mac and the iPhone) were acquired by Google for a reported $25 million. I used this app on my Mac as it was a very neat email client but I stopped when Apple upgraded its own Mail app last year. By all …
A Quick Rant About Apple
Last week, Google released its Chrome Browser for iOS. A few weeks earlier it had update its main search app for iOS. Both are extremely good. The Chrome Browser does something important, it synchronises data and also open tabs across devices. That means that when I am on my iPad I can now see what …
Facebook Credits and the Perils of Research on Digitisation
I never thought very much about Facebook Credits until an MBA project team decided to explore them more fully last year. The team tried hard but I really could not understand why Facebook wanted people to buy credits when they made purchases (of, say, virtual sheep) on Facebook. They explained that you could now earn …
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Why don't scammers say they are from somewhere else?
I must admit that sometimes when I'm going through the junk mail filter, I like to look at the narratives of scammers to see how creative they are being. However, it is so sad that they are so obvious. And there is very little variation in the narrative. It just seems that there are an …
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Paying by sharing is a bad idea
From Katherine St Asaph, an observation that AdWeek have set up what she calls a 'trollwall' for some articles (see her screenshot to the left). The idea is that you can read the full article if you share it. While this seems like a novel approach compared with a paywall, I have to point out …
Digitopoly 