When I look at economics papers and reports, the graphical presentations have hardly changed. This is despite a sizeable change in the tools available to us to provide clearer graphs. To illustrate what I mean take a look at this animated gif presentation. It is very compelling.
Predicting start-up success with Google trends
The NYT published an article today on "Which start-up could be the next big thing?" Of course, who really knows. The NYT basically appears to be looking at "buzz." But what we would really want is some forecast of potential demand. This is where Google trends becomes useful. For instance, the NYT considers SnapChat and Whatsapp as two potential contenders. Both …
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Turning an iPad into a touch computer
Prior to yesterday, if you wanted an iPad that worked just like your computer, you pretty well needed to buy a Microsoft Surface. But thanks to Parallels Access that has all changed. This is an app on your iPad that allows you to control applications on your Mac or PC. But unlike some other remote …
KeyMe's interesting pricing model
A new app, KeyMe, has been released for iOS. The idea is that you take a picture of your keys and then, if you lose one, you can show the picture to a locksmith and get a new key. I tried it out and it is very straightforward to use. One can imagine that if …
Of flying cars and tweets
In a provocative piece, Peter Thiel wrote: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." This framed a discussion at the NBER Summer Institute on Monday as to whether we are about to run out of ideas. (By the way, apparently only Bob Gordon thinks we are or, perhaps like Tyler Cowen, the ideas …
Fighting back in cybercrime
Last year I discussed the economics of spam and suggested: Seen in that light perhaps we should see [spam] as criminal entrepreneurship. What is great about that is we know a lot about how to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation and so to deal with spam we just need to throw that into reverse. Countermeasures make …
Art wants to be shared
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam would like its art to be used properly even if that reduces its commercial opportunities: Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum here has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, T-shirts, tattoos, plates …
Reselling eBooks doesn't pass the sniff test
There is renewed interest in the idea of being able to re-sell eBooks and other digital content. First, Amazon and Apple have both entered the patent fray with exchange ideas that allow electronic content to be traded in much the same way that they can be traded as physical content. Second, the US Supreme Court …
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Gesture control and the QWERTY effect
How we interact with devices is evolving. We started with the keyboard for a century before we added the mouse. On mobile devices, it was the keypad so much so that I remember a tech exec playing futurologist to me around the turn of the century and claiming that the kids want devices that use …
First Impressions of Mailbox
Mailbox is a new app for the iPhone. It is one in a growing series of attempts to re-think what email is about. I have written about this previously here. What these new email solutions are doing is recognising that your inbox is really one big to-do list and trying to restructure how you deal …
Digitopoly 