Regulating the Internet
Call it Karma. A week after we celebrated the ignominious back down forced on the congressional supporters of PIPA and SOPA and their corporate feeders, The New York Times ran a story about how even, or especially, on the Internet, some things have not improved since Roman days. Caveat emptor, buyer beware. I call your [...]
In Mild Dissent and Some Agreement
Re: Larry Dignan’s ZDNet Piece “Apple’s supply chain flap: It’s really about us” When he died, the cover of the New Yorker had a cartoon of him checking into heaven and St. Peter looking him up on, what else? An iPad. So began the mythologization of Steve Jobs. There was a lot to like about [...]
IPad, Mercantilism and the Chinese Plantation
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald This is not a post about CRM. If you could apply Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence to a thing or group endeavor—always a dubious [...]
Good On You
My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part complement and part benediction. Good on you. They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like goo-don you. At any rate, good on you. Last week’s smack down of the PIPA [...]
Welcome to Strike Wednesday
When the French have a problem with particularly egregious government regulation or sometimes even when one is proposed, they call a general strike or perhaps just a slow down. Farmers have been known to drive their tractors to Paris to parade them down the Champs Elysees to protest farm policies. I was there nearly a [...]
Lithium’s Eye-Popping $53.4 Million
Last week Lithium Technologies announced completion of its D round of financing valued at $53.4 million. You can read the press release to get the details but the big question I have is what’s going on in the industry? Lithium is not the only company in the last six months to pull in sizable sums [...]
MIT Traced Twitter’s Rise Through Conventional Social Nets
Researchers at MIT have concluded from a research study that the spread of Twitter occurred through traditional social channels. That might not seem earth shaking because, well, how else would a new social technology spread? As the report notes, “MIT researchers who studied the growth of the newly hatched Twitter from 2006 to 2009 say [...]
Peak Software?
It is an iron law of physics. A component of a closed system is limited in size to the size of the closed system. For instance everything on this planet is bounded by the size of the planet and nothing on this planet can grow forever. This gets us right into economics because the economy [...]
Coming in 2012 or Not, Predictions for the New Year
There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair a magazine I’ve come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than me. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics as well as the glossy pictures and stories [...]
2011 Say Bye-bye!
Every year around this time I write two columns one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. There is no methodology for this process and I believe this lack of method is important. I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been [...]
