Paul Graham is an accomplished entrepreneur and is the founder of Y-Combinator — perhaps the most successful of the start-up incubator projects in recent times. (Here is a write-up from Wired.) His essays and thoughts about the tech sector are always worth reading. Graham's latest focus is patent reform. Why does the patent system need reforming? Well, just listen to …
Network Neutrality and Bank of America's charges
There has been much discussion over the last few days about Bank of America's decision to charge consumers for debit card transactions. It's an odd fee in that you pay $5 for the first transaction each month and then the rest of the month is free. While this is related to the Durbin reforms that …
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Organic Listing + Paid Ad = Effective Ad?
Is an organic listing a substitute or complement for an ad? More precisely, if a firm had a high listing on an organic listings in Google's search engine, would there be much gain to having an ad as well? Or would that merely provide traffic that would have come anyway? That is the question addressed …
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Lunch Break: Robot ball controlled from your iPhone
Here's an interesting way for the digital and physical worlds to interact: Sphero is a robot ball controlled from your smart phone. I could make a connection to the unexpected power of combinatorial innovation in the digital economy, but the truth is, it's just kind of fun to watch on my lunch break. Enjoy!
Is there a bias to user reviews/ratings?
Sometimes I wonder whether XKCD is just better at commentary than all of us. Today's cartoon demonstrates a great understanding of equilibrium combined with a real issue with regard to consumer incentives. It raises the puzzle that if you like, say, a hotel you have an interest in not saying so because that either reduces …
Upside down business models for the Kindle
Matt Yglesias has a way of identifying great questions quickly. Responding to Erik's widely discussed post on the low Kindle price yesterday, he writes: That said, this seems arguably upside down as a business model. The marginal cost of distributing a digital copy of a book, song, TV show, or movie is $0. A company with …
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Online class participation
As any MBA teacher will tell you, classroom participation is great for learning but incredibly hard to assess. Keeping track of activity let alone the quality of contributions in a transparent manner is very difficult. For my new Network and Digital Market Strategy course at Rotman (both MBA and undergrad), I decided to 'go virtual' …
How to measure Online traffic
The commercial online world has quietly gone through its teens doing what every teenager does -- measuring their growth. This is all for the good. It is a sign of the maturation of Web commerce that some stability has started to emerge in measuring online traffic and activity. Which introduces this little post: AdAge MediaWorks …
Amazon's pricing play that leverages the cloud
Amazon.com have a tremendous set of assets. They have millions of customer accounts. They have a ton of existing relationships with publishers and content providers. Behind the scenes they are one of the leading cloud computing service providers servicing start-ups and established firms alike (including Netflix). And they have a market leading product -- the …
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Kindle-ing Competition
We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service. – Jeff Bezos The analysts predicted that Amazon would introduce its new Kindle Fire tablet today with an aggressive low price of $250 to $300, in line with low margin competitors like Samsung. They were wrong. Amazon priced …
