Code, Camera, Action

Umair Haque: Apple's Real Achilles Heel

How different, as a linchpin of the economy, is Apple from the Ford of 1930, the GM of 1950, the P&G of 1980, or the GE of 1990? In economic terms, not so much: all are built on the same set of institutions: mass production, mega-marketing, “profit,” hierarchy, opacity, “innovation.” via hbr.org

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July, 17 2010 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Post: Forgive us for thinking we live in the promised land

Back at the office Tuesday after a long holiday break. So lots of questions for me, and a busy day. Good to be back. It was also the day that Google announced a new mobile phone, the Nexus. Early reviews all say it’s fabulous, as good as the iPhone in many ways. It’s got a much better screen, they say, but correspondingly worse battery life. Not to be outdone, Apple has been leaking details of their next big thing – a tablet of some sort, to be announced late this month. There’s been lots of speculation about that on the blogs, of course. We can’t figure out what earth-shattering feature might differentiate an Apple tablet from previous, ho-hum tablets. Consensus is that it’s got to be different or Steve Jobs wouldn’t do it. Different and useful. More than “surfing the internet on the can” – which the iPhone and MacBook handle quite well, thank you. If anybody can, I am sure that Steve Jobs and company will figure out what a tablet is good for – or at least how to wow us enough that we’ll want one, too. But, wow, that it has come to this. Three years ago, the iPhone turned the cell phone handset business upside down. Now that the competition has caught up, Apple is moving on to something completely different – presumably an entirely new product line. They’ll still be printing money with iPhones. And we have come to expect that the Steve Jobs won’t do something that’s not revolutionary.

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January, 7 2010 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

The App Economy

There are roughly 20 times more people playing FarmVille these days than there are actual farms in the U.S. via businessweek.com

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October, 27 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

The perverse economics of DRM in the book business

Brian O'Leary -- But if we care about readers paying more for content, we have to recognize that DRM restricts use and lowers the value of the content inside.  Teaching our best customers to pay less for things does not seem like a good idea. via magellanmediapartners.com  

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October, 26 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Niall Ferguson: U.S. Empire in Decline

"But let's face it: If you're trying to borrow $9 trillion to save your financial system...and already half your public debt held by foreigners, it's not really the conduct of rising empires, is it?" via finance.yahoo.com

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October, 23 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Do we need this many charities in America?

Paul Lamb writes: So how we can innovate the sector as a whole so any nonprofit can do better regardless of the prevailing economic winds? One radical idea is to adjust the nonprofit model and begin to let communities engage directly with causes and people in need. Taking a page from the playbook of peer-to-peer services such as eBay, charity "buyers" and "sellers" could engage directly without the need for a middleman. Instead of giving money to the United Way to support food banks, why not give the money...

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October, 7 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

For Americans, Plastic Buys Less

U.S. credit cards lack a special chip, now commonly used in many foreign countries, causing them to be rejected by some merchants and kiosks. via nytimes.com Whoa there, isolation.

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October, 2 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Even bad product reviews boost sales

AlpacaDirect.com, always offered a page full of cherry-picked customer comments raving about the site's alpaca sweaters, socks and yarn. But recently Hobart, [the owner,] decided to take the idea a step further: He hired PowerReviews, whose software lets shoppers write their own product reviews directly on the retailer's Web site. It was a risky move for the four-year-old company, based in Brentwood, Calif. Hobart was effectively paying to host bad press -- such as posts by customers who described AlpacaDirect's...

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September, 30 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves

Post: Google Sidewiki - Danger, says Jeff Jarvis

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and...

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September, 23 2009 • 1 Comment • 0 Faves