Competition in the Digital Age
Why was Google invented in the US and not the UK? Jonathan Haskell, Professor at Imperial College in London, asked that question in his most recent blog post. What motivated him to ask it? He got a little nudge from his Prime Minister, David Cameron, who asked the same question. Haskell justifiably hesitates to put …
Continue reading "What would you say to David Cameron about Google?"
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 -- …
Continue reading "Mobile mergers and insider baseball conversations"
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
