FTC Challenges Innovators to Do Battle with Robocallers Agency Offers $50,000 for Best Technical Solution as Part of Ongoing Fight Against Illegal Calls The Federal Trade Commission is challenging the public to create an innovative solution that will block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones. As part of its ongoing campaign against these …
Continue reading "A Contest to end Robocallers with Technical Invention"
[HT: Scholarly Kitchen] A new paper published in Science (of course, paywalled) examines publications in biological sciences from 2006 and 2008 to see how many were accepted at first instance and how many were initially rejected (or rejected at least once prior to acceptance). 75% were accepted first time around while many otherwise went through the system quickly. Not surprisingly, …
I have written before about Twitter's new rules and how they have backed away from platform promises. One of their new rules limits the number of user tokens a third party developer can issue before effectively being 'owned' by Twitter. (I say, 'owned' because Twitter apparently can then exclude them from the platform). Now the …
Continue reading "Twitter's policies cause prices on third party apps to rise"
This morning, I had a "someone is wrong on the Internet" moment. The someone was Clay Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth who wrote a long piece for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard entitled "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism." The report is about the woes facing the newspaper industry and …
Continue reading "Media disruption: it is not journalism, it is advertising"
Talk to the management at leading technology firms in the same market, and the similarities in opinions are striking. Most hold roughly the same set of opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how specific actions lead to successful business outcomes. For lack of a better phrase, I call this the “prevailing view.” The prevailing view is …
Open is better than closed. We all know that, right? If you are trying to get into a house, when the door is closed you walk right into it. That sounds bad. But if you are in the house, things are less clear. If the door is open, wind and rain and who knows what …
Continue reading "Being careful about openness as a strategy"
It is hard to predict what happens in markets and contests. But last night, I tweeted that I thought the Nobel prize for economics would be awarded for the field of practical market design. And, that is indeed what the Nobel committee announced today. I got that right and named Al Roth as one of …
In an interesting post today, Alexis Madrigal reminds everyone that the Internet was social well before MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and Twitter. He pointed out that for him, the Internet was always social with chat rooms, forums and, of course, email. He is hardly alone. That was certainly my experience. The communication elements of the Internet …
This is just a pointer to an interesting interview with Tim O'Reilly conducted by Edge. It related to the Clothesline Paradox previously discussed here by Shane Greenstein. Just a taste: But what's really interesting, when I dug into YouTube, is that it turns out that the monetary economy there is about to explode. It is …
There are lots of claims to the 'thing that the Internet was invented for.' My current nomination for winner is this post by Sir John Gurdon winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine this week. He had to wait 53 years to win a Nobel prize and to be fortunate enough that the Internet had …
Digitopoly 