The annual TED conference, held last weekend, used to be a small, exclusive, intimate affair in Monterey California. But it just moved to be a much larger event in Long Beach. It is pricey to attend and, no, I didn't actually do so. But TED's history tells us much about how publishing has changed. TED — that's …
Newspapers are completely out at sea
The Pew Research Center released a new report today that brings together survey and other data on the plight of the newspapers. The data underlying it looks interesting. Sadly, the summary is more casual. Nonetheless, it largely confirms what we already knew: digital ad revenue is not making up for the decline in traditional ad …
Retractions and the function of a journal
With all of the discussion over the pricing of journals, one thing that has come up is their supposed decreasing importance. With online repositories of working papers, scholars and others no longer need access to the journals to get access to the research. To be sure, publication gives with it certification and that helps but …
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What if mobile app developers could pay for data?
That's the scenario being put forward by AT&T today. "A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage." Currently, mobile users pay for data. You want to consume more mobile data …
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Cloud computing and the "me versus you" problem
This week I was invited to speak at a “guru forum” of managers and academics who work in information technology. Among the many issues that were discussed, two conflicting trends were identified. On the one hand many corporate organizations are moving towards cloud services and all-in-one outsourced solutions (Oracle, SAP, IBM, …). On the other …
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Does it Matter?
There has been much discussion over the last couple of days regarding Matter; the new long-form journalism experiment by Jim Giles and Bobby Johnson. The main news is that they made, virtually instantly, their $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter and are still going. That tells us that there are 787 people out there who would …
Everything but the monitor and keyboard in the cloud
I've written about OnLive desktop before; the iPad app that gives you Windows and, most importantly, Microsoft Office on your iPad (for free). Yesterday, OnLive launched a paid version that added Internet Explorer and with it Flash to their platform. In the process, that gave users a 1Gbps connection to the Internet right on an …
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Before the year is out, Google will have acquired Pinterest
That's a prediction not a fact. And I know predictions are dangerous but this one seems to have a solid rationale. I'll explain. First of all, if you missed the last month in social media, it was all Pinterest all the time. What is Pinterest? Well as David Pogue points out, it is exactly what …
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Apple moves the Gatekeeper offsite
Mac users live in a wonderful world relatively free of viruses, malware and all manner of other computer security threats. To be sure, they are there but it is very rare to be taken down by a virus. Apple, however, seem to be aware that as their star rises, so does the challenge they present …
The Marquee Result of the "Reel Piracy" Study
Brett Danaher of Wellesley College and I have a new working paper (Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Piracy on International Box Office Sales) attempting to find evidence on whether piracy, in particular movie downloading via BitTorrent, depressed international movie box office revenue. Our approach is based on the following two insights. First, Hollywood movies …
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Digitopoly 