Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
From Dead to Digital
There is something about Google's latest partnership -- the digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- that says it all about the digital age. Google have taken these 2000 odd year bits of parchment and have converted them to high resolution images. Now, rather than being forced to study them in sealed rooms in Israel …
Is Koomey's Law eclipsing Moore's Law?
Most people are familiar with Moore's Law, the doubling of computer power roughly every 18 months. But as technology becomes more mobile "Koomey's Law" may be more relevant to consumers. Dr. Jon Koomey and his colleagues recently completed a study showing that energy consumption for computing is improving just as fast as processing power. At left, is …
Facebook moves to secure the platform
At its F8 developer's conference this week, Facebook announced some very extensive changes. Steve Levy's write-up covers the main details. All over the place, Facebook is moving to secure itself as a platform. Deep integration with application developers: most notably, integration with music services (Spotify and Rhapsody -- where are you iTunes?), integration with news …
Puzzling over Big Wireless Carrier Mergers: An Editorial
Let’s talk about AT&T proposal to merge with T-Mobile. Why do the parties involved still consider this merger viable? Executives at AT&T seemed to think this merger was a good idea many months ago. For all I know, that might have been the right conclusion with the information they had then. But that was then, …
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Smart phone patents and platform wars
Firms in the smartphone market have been suing one another over patent violations. I cannot recall any other platform war that involved as many intellectual property disputes. Look, society grants patents as part of trade-off. A patent enhances the incentives to generate new invention by giving the inventor a temporary monopoly. That trade-off should never …
What CAN'T computers do?
Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
Sports stories written by algorithm
Have you suspected for some time that most writing about sporting events is formulaic? Well, suspect no more! It is possible to have a computer write a sports story merely from the box score. No seriously. It is. And there is some pretty interesting business economics in that example. Some professors from Northwestern figured out …
The Lexicon of Networking Economics
Economics rarely improves with reference to etymology, but an exception should be made for the economics of networks. Many valid but distinct definitions of “network economics” compete for attention. That causes confusion in academic writing and in public discourse. There are many symptoms of this confusion. Consider this one. When the late Senator Ted Stevens …
Google buys Zagat. Thinks outside the algorithm
Today, Google announced that it had acquired Zagat, the popular restaurant ratings provider. It's an important move, more for what it tells us about Google and the evolution of its strategy than it does about the restaurant rating game. Let's step back and consider the previous narrative on Google and Zagat. Zagat rose to prominence by providing …
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Digitopoly 