News came through recently that Facebook will host news sites’ content. Apparently, Buzzfeed and the New York Times are first off the block for this. While we don’t know precisely what it will mean, there is much consternation about news sites losing their distinctive brand and eventually being beholdent to Facebook. John Gruber even invoked …
Continue reading "Hosting Content on Facebook is about Ad Tracking"
https://static.medium.com/embed.jsAn insight into the future: What happens when Disney’s Magic Band system goes down?
Check out this WSJ article by Tim Aeppel, involving a few quotes from yours truly at the very end.... 50 Million Users: The Making of an "Angry Birds" Internet Meme.
https://static.medium.com/embed.jsA quick remark on the Apple Watch Edition (the $10K+ one) A lot has been said about the Apple Watch Edition which costs more than $10,000. I initially thought it wouldn’t be priced like that as it would be out of character for Apple whose identity was more mass market — with technology being widely available. To …
Continue reading "A quick remark on the Apple Watch Edition (the $10k one)"
Short answer: it isn’t obvious that it can. Let me back up a second and explain why I am revisiting this issue again. Tim Harford published an article a few days ago that took his masterful econsplaining skills to the issue of net neutrality. But in providing his characteristically clear exposition, he crystallised where many …
It turns out that it can tell you a lot. This is what I took away from a very interesting talk given by Princeton sociologist, Janet Vertesi, on “the social life of robots.” As it turns out, it is not about the robots but about the people that control them — as opposed to the opposite that …
Continue reading "The Organisational Choice of PowerPoint versus Excel"
Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson and BlackBerry were all victims of disruption. During the 1990s and 2000s, they led the cell phone during its period of take-off into ubiquity. Then in the last five years, they have lost their leadership and are on the verge of irrelevance. The common culprit was the 2007 launch of Apple’s iPhone. …
Continue reading "Why the iPhone confounds disruption theorists"
As Internet service providers – both wired and wireless – continue to lose ground in the net neutrality debate, they have retreated to engineering requirements rather than economic arguments. Where previously it was all about incentives to invest in infrastructure – arguments that don’t hold up by the way – or the sufficiency of competition – for which …
Continue reading "Net neutrality should apply to mobile networks"
Geek Dad is a large parenting/geek blog. They recently opened up to a few more contributors. Given my interests, this seemed like a potentially good fit for me. My first post is on digital free-range parenting and may interest some readers.
It has been a week and the Apple Car rumour hasn’t been denied by Apple. (Here’s the background in case you have been living under a rock). So what are we to make of all this? Much of what has been talked about is complete speculation. That it will be electric, autonomous, a mini-van (!) …
