Competition in the Digital Age
Just over a year ago, I shelled out $149 for a Indigogo project called the MOD-t. Why? Well some of my friends had shelled out over $2,000 for MakerBot 3D printers but everytime I looked into those it seemed like they spent more hours on call to tech support than printing. Given how slow those …
Continue reading "MOD-t: A cheap 3D printer that's easy to use"
Chris Sacca, an investor who predicted Twitter's success ahead of everyone has penned some thoughts. If you are really interested, it is worth the read but he helpfully provides a summary. Twitter simply needs to: Make Tweets effortless to enjoy, Make it easier for all to participate, and Make each of us on Twitter feel …
Last year one of my kids needed a graphing calculator for school. We went to Staples and it seemed that the recommended one was a $130 TI-84 graphing calculator. I was outraged. Why would we need this? There was nothing this calculator did that you could not do for free on the web or through …
Possibly and since I want to make the case be warned this post is a tad self-serving. Back in March I wrote the following: What this means is that: (a) the fitness tracker, watch and any other smarts you want will have to work from one band; (b) there will have to be a routine …
Continue reading "Am I as good an innovator as the folks at Apple?"
After a weeklong re-examination of disruption theory, out of the blue comes a new venture, Tanium, that received $90 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz meaning that they, at least, value it in the billions. Contrary to what many people think, billion dollar companies don't just appear out of no-where everyday. For that reason, I thought …
Continue reading "Tanium will make money without disrupting anything"
Yesterday, a new app, Yo, took my Twitter stream and life by storm. It does nothing more than send of receive the message 'Yo' from people on your Yo network. For explanation, you can read here, for backstory here and for its $1m financing round, here. I've installed it and I have been sending and …
Amazon announced its own phone today -- the Fire Phone. The primary question is: why? Tim B. Lee offers a Voxplainer on it and argues that it is to give Bezos an option: Creating its own smartphone gives Amazon a kind of insurance policy. If customers ever have trouble getting Amazon content on third-party platforms, …
While seemingly not quite at the Paul Revere level of accuracy, “the iWatch is coming” has been a cry heard throughout the tech world for the last few years. There is a sense that this year might be The Year just like 2007 was finally The Year for the iPhone. This time, however, competitors have …
Continue reading "How to compete with a non-existent iWatch"
Coding is all the rage. Many are arguing it is an essential skill for the modern economy. They believe it should be an essential part of the school curriculum. Fundamentally, what is being asked in coding is a very difficult exercise requiring skill development that has applicability well beyond coding. These skills are familar to those who do …
Yesterday, Google pivoted on self-driving cars. Yes, I know we don't normally describe established firms as 'pivoting' but the notion applies when the same core idea (in this case, autonomous vehicles) is reapplied to a different customer set. For the self-driving car, this moved from retrofitting existing cars to Google building its own new and …
Continue reading "Will regulators really hold back self-driving cars?"
Digitopoly 