Amber made a very thoughtful comment on a post a couple of days ago, which I thought deserved more attention than it would get buried in the comments. So I’m posting it here, and also trying to answer a couple of her questions. She said: Tim, since your post on Crocs and their sudden obsolescence […]
Alex Steffan has a really interesting idea over on worldchanging.com – that maybe we should have Special Innovation Zones to encourage major social innovations. His main point is that many green innovations are stymied by zoning regulations, resistance from established interests like power companies, or other systemic reasons. His proposal is that we should take […]
thereifixedit.com has many examples of bad ideas, which, probably, won’t spread… When I talked about Voodoo Histories by Aaronovitch the other day, I maybe stretched things a bit when I talked about Crocs as a bad idea that spread. In fact, several parts of that post weren’t very clear. I think a better description of […]
I’ve written a bit about newspapers here, and here, mainly discussing how they might change their business models effectively. As is often the case, it looks like it is new entrants that are coming up with the genuinely innovative business models. Two recent pieces have addressed this. The first is an article by Michael Wolff […]
Another book that I read on my trip is Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch. It looks at a number of conspiracy theories from around the start of the 20th Century up to the present time. Some of them have had deadly consequences (e.g. the myths […]
As I discussed in an earlier post, Kristin Hersh has been very innovative in developing a new business model for music production and distribution. This is an industry that is very much in flux, and it’s hard to tell what business model will end up being dominant. When I’ve talked about Hersh’s approach in my […]
In light of earlier discussions about the plight of newspapers, this article from The Atlantic on how The Economist is thriving is quite interesting. The article contrasts the recent fates of Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report, who are all struggling (or gone, in the case of USN&WR), with that of The Economist, […]
Doyne Farmer is pretty much a genius. And a very engaging speaker. This is a talk he gave a couple of months ago, reviewing ten years of physicists’ work on finance. I saw Farmer speak at one of the first conferences that I went to, on econophysics in Canberra – and he was absolutely captivating. […]
