Transitive Data Privacy: Behind Golden State Killer DNA and Cambridge Analytica
What you don’t share can still hurt you We are spending a lot of time discussing what happens to data when you explicitly or implicitly share it. But what about data that you have never ever shared? Your Cousin’s DNA We all share DNA — after all, it seems we are all descendants of a few tribes. But […]
Facebook’s vulnerabilities
Adam Smith famously referred to “the invisible hand” of the free market in his landmark book “The Wealth of Nations” and with that made himself one of the very first political economists. Smith’s observation was so on point that today most of us assume markets run through the agency of individuals pursuing their enlightened self-interests. […]
The last straw
The multiple issues/scandals/problems facing companies in Silicon Valley could drive you to ask if the wheels falling off the collective tech wagon. A recent article in the DealBook section of the New York Times asks the question, Are we witnessing the end of a mania? Investors, always willing to believe in technology companies, spent the […]
Mark meet Larry
Ok, this is kind of long. Go get a cup of coffee. Amid the anxiety and revelations of the Russia scandal including the Cambridge Analytica story that showed how easy it was to steal 50 million Facebook user profiles, it’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Importantly, Facebook wasn’t hacked or broken into but […]
The social utility
If you study economic cycles you can watch the evolution of a disruptive technology throughout its lifecycle from a specific product, to a competitive industry. The last phase in the evolutionary chain is often the formation of a utility. For example, over a couple of centuries we’ve seen the evolution of electricity from a curiosity, […]
Should we regulate social?
I was a guest on the Gillmor Gang last Friday hosted by Steve Gillmor and available for streaming on Tech Crunch here. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s an hour of discussion at the nexus of technology, business, and current events and well worth seeing. For the last few weeks we’ve devoted time to […]
A long good-bye
I’ve been a user of social media for more than 10 years and I was among the first to write about its potential long before there were social media products. The original research on 5 degrees of separation and the Kevin Bacon game that illustrated the power of social networking fascinated me. I started writing […]
Taming the world’s wild web
Facebook is big, profitable, growing, and at a crossroads. The little social network that started in a Harvard dorm room is no longer the cute app that people can use to hook. It’s going through its terrible two’s as in its second decade and there’s plenty of evidence that the world wants it to use […]
5 reasons why 2007 was a Tipping Point (and a Turning Point) in our Digital Journey
Both really. 2007 was pivotal. A big year in our digital history. It was also the year “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for best documentary, and Al Gore told us we only had 10 years to save the planet. It was the year my literary hero Kurt Vonnegut died. The Police and the Spice […]
Why A Bi-Modal Approach to Digital Transformation Is Just Stupid
Multi-Modal Approach Key to Successful Digital Transformation Like fake news, the over hyped, bi-modal approach to IT and digital transformation is a flawed fallacy perpetuated by ivory tower, non-pragmatic legacy research firms. Lessons learned from successful digital transformation projects emphasize an organizational design comprised of six key virtual or physical teams (see Figure 1): Figure […]
