Can an iPhone app keep businesses honest? Apparently so when it comes to the accuracy of self reported information about skiing conditions. That is the finding from a new paper by Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz. Here is the abstract: Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore …
The Range of Linus' Law
After more than a decade of successful growth, Wikipedia continues to defy easy characterization. It receives more than 400 million viewers per month. Close to four million articles grace its web pages in English alone. Volunteers built the entire corpus of text. This experience suggests that Wikipedia has done something right, but begs the question: …
Reach vs readership: It's the advertising, stupid!
Felix Salmon has been getting lots of attention this week for his posts on 'quantity versus quality' in online news. It started with this post about the New York Observer [should it get italics if its mostly a website?] who Salmon argued has gone all in on a quantity strategy. Basically to publish more and not …
Continue reading "Reach vs readership: It's the advertising, stupid!"
Wikipedia, Mitt, Barack, and a Hand over the Heart
It was just a little skirmish, a mere tit-for-tat in the presidential race. It made headlines for a day and it also made Wikipedia just a little bit better. To be sure, Romney and Obama infrequently appear in the same sentence as Wikipedia, so this is worth a look. How did the-encyclopedia-that-anyone-can-edit get mixed up …
Continue reading "Wikipedia, Mitt, Barack, and a Hand over the Heart"
How many customers does Facebook have?
That appears to be the question taxing analysts at the moment. The reason is that they want to work out if Facebook is worth $100 billion or not. For this, they guess that Facebook needs to make $5 billion a year in profit. Why? Well, if we go to its nearest neighbour, Google, it is …
Does Zuckerberg need to fail?
The forthcoming Facebook IPO gives us lots to talk about. It is likely to be the largest in history (cool). It is predicated on an established business model (good), plus a future growth path into the mobile space that is uncertain (not so good). And it will make its 27-year-old founder incredibly rich (good, for …
What would you say to David Cameron about Google?
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?"
A quick feed on the Facebook IPO
Facebook's user base is huge (845 million) but its growth rate is slowing. The main opportunities for growth appear to be in Asia. Facebook make most of their revenue from advertising (87%) and the rest from payments for app use. As a result, last year they made $1 billion. Zygna earn revenues 25% of Facebook's …
Publishers and chickens
There has been lots of discussion this week about Amazon's growing power. This NYT piece heralded Barnes and Noble, once the thing that was supposedly destroying book selling, as its saviour. And today, there was this post on the Authors Guild blog that compared the plight of publishers/authors to that of chicken growers. Here is …
Invasion of the Internet body Snatchers
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 …
Digitopoly 