Business
In praise of Small Law
I’m usually suitably supplicant in agreeing with future-of-law guru Susskind, but I take issue with the views implicit in his recent Times Online piece Does the Law Society know that there’s an internet generation? The report tells us that, in 2008, 85.9 per cent of law firms had four or fewer partners, while 44.2 per […]
Social business design
“Social business design” is a term you’ve probably not encountered before. I was introduced to it last evening by social computing expert and entrepreneur Lee Bryant at Headshift where I attended an event to explore the themes covered in the report Social Networking for the Legal Profession authored by him with Penny Edwards. I don’t […]
Never mind the content, feel the packaging
So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our […]
Free – radical or not?
“Free” is a word that has many connotations and arouses strong feelings. Giving away products and services for free in order to sell other products and services is a well-established marketing model. What is new in the digital world is how the marginal cost of delivering services has declined to near zero. That changes the […]
The Big Switch
More scary stuff. Just 100 years ago larger businesses generated their own electricity. The subsequent development of the electricity grid, delivering electricity as a commodity, profoundly changed business and society. In the same way, argues Nick Carr in The Big Switch, computer utilities will replace in-house facilities and business and society will be transformed again […]
Better than free
David Tebbutt at IWR neatly summarises a hypothesis from Kevin Kelly that in the digital age anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless and that therefore value resides only in associated non-copyable attributes. Kevin categorises these attributes as: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment (a non-digital representation, eg a book or […]
The price of free music
Here’s a couple of truisms in the digital age: once you digitise your content, you have to wave your content goodbye users are willing to pay for digital services that make their lives easier Current attempts to help the music industry dig itself out of its hole seem to ignore the latter, relying on advertising […]
Holiday reading?
Probably not in there with your Dan Browns, but here’s a some webby books I’ve read recently or plan to (listed oldest first). You could do worse than feed your brain with one of them this Summer. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (August 2000) A Brief History of the Future: […]
