If you have been musing about the misguided policies in SOPA and PIPA that generated protests, what do you make of misguided international governance of the Internet? This article in Politico raises an interesting possibility, that the ITU will assert itself into Internet governance, ostensibly to coordinate security and taxation across countries. As is well …
Technology market awards for 2011
What better way to mark the end of the year than to give out a dozen awards! This post contains a baker’s dozen. The awards go to firms and managers who took notable actions in technology markets in 2011. There are three criteria for these awards. It had to involve something in 2011. It had …
Best apps
As it is the holiday season, I thought it might be useful to list my favourite iPhone/iPad apps that for work. Their primary selling point is that fact that they actually get used by me. Due: Due is an iPhone app that solves a particular problem: I need to remember to do something at a certain time …
Mobile mergers and insider baseball conversations
Here is a fact. The FCC recently announced it would move to have a hearing about the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. In response, AT&T withdrew its application from the FCC, delaying the hearing indefinitely (or until AT&T resubmits the application). What is that all about? At a procedural level it is just a detail -- …
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Word of mouth and pepper spray parody
For better or worse, a decade of development in web technology enables the fast sharing of imagery. "Word of mouth" used to occur verbally, but some part of it now occurs online. What has moved online soonest? Things that are easy to share with one click. It tends towards the quick hit: Pictures that tell …
Are Digital Resale Markets Legal? Should They Be?
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 …
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Limits to broadband diffusion?
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 …
Technological Plateau or Promise?
http://s.marketwatch.com/media/swf/main.swf Have we reached a technological plateau or is innovation still going strong? If you've read my book with Andy McAfee, you know where I stand. David Wessel of the WSJ discusses the pros and cons of the argument and ties it to our current economic woes in this five minute video.
Not All the Economic News is Bad
The past decade has been terrible in terms of job growth and median wage growth, and sadly that was true even before it culminated in the worst recession since the 1930s. But not all the news is bad. Although it’s not much discussed, this has actually been the best decade since the 1960s for productivity …
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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Digitopoly 