Posts with keyword: economics

6 entries

Personal Data, Freedom, and Value Creation

Thu Apr 29 14:31:00 2010

Image by mkrigsman via Flickr Data is big business. Whether its demographics or FICO score, people know things about you and sell it to people who want know about you. If you're read my blog post on the Power of Pull (or listened to the podcast) then you know that I believe we haven't even scratched the surface of where data exchange is going. As more and more of our life goes online there will be more and more semantic, structured data available about every aspect of our lives. For example, your golf clubs will automatically register your strokes,
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Connected Platforms for Connected Applications

Mon Nov 3 14:25:00 2008

Ian Davis, the CTO of Talis is speaking about connected platforms. He starts with a lesson in economics. In the pre-industrial era, most goods were produced by individuals or small groups working together. consequently, most trading was local. Trading to a large market required a very large company capable of vertically integrating all its functions. The East India company is an example: ships, docks, towns, armies, and even currencies were all done by that one company. Transactional costs for a given market size were usually much larger than the associated value in the pre-industrial era. Transaction costs fell with
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Silver Lining

Wed Oct 15 15:52:00 2008

Fareed Zakaria has a nice little article at Newsweek on the silver lining to this whole economic crisis. He says: If there is a lesson to be taken from this crisis, it's a simple and old rule of economics: there is no free lunch. If you want something, you have to pay for it. Debt is not a bad thing. Used responsibly, it is at the heart of modern capitalism. But hiding mountains of debt in complex instruments is a way to disguise costs, an invitation to irresponsible behavior. At some point, the magical accounting had to stop. At
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InfoWorld Ends Print Publication

Mon Mar 26 09:02:00 2007

As was rumored last week, InfoWorld announced today that it would end the print side of its business. Its sad for those involved and apparently, many didn't know until it came out in rumors. On one hand I'm surprised, as you always are, an on another I'm not. Let me note that I'm a contributing editor at InfoWorld, which means that I write for them, but I have no inside knowledge Heaven knows I wasn't consulted on this. Even so, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see a business where more and more of the revenue comes from
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The Role of Intellectual Property in Protecting Reputation

Fri Feb 9 10:37:00 2007

Today in class, we went over a paper called The Value of a Reputation System by John Kennes and Aaron Schiff (both of The University of Auckland). The paper presents a complicated mathematical model of markets that are similar to eBay and other auction sites, although the example in the paper is "pick-your-own" orchards. I've also been reading Peter Navarro's book The Coming China Wars recently and the two ideas got me thinking about the value of intellectual property in properly functioning markets. In Keenes and Schiff's paper, they model markets where there are product with high and low
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Virtual Market Ponzi Schemes

Mon Jan 29 16:16:00 2007

Randolph Harrison has an interesting article asking whether SecondLife is a revolutionary virtual market or a ponzi scheme. Duane Day sent me the link and also this one defending SecondLife.
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