September 23rd, 2014
At the end of 2012 I published a post called “Read & Watch the Future of Publishing at the New York Times.” That post considered John Branch’s award-winning “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” The New York Times continues to innovate, this time in the travel section. The short title is “Norway the Slow Way.”
September 18th, 2014
I last covered the topic “What Can the Music Business Teach the Book Business?” in a November, 2011 blog post. Today, in response to a fascinating blog entry on Brian O’Leary’s site I found myself revisiting the issue, leading to a comment I posted there.
September 18th, 2014
I’m thinking about two very different products each apparently well on the road to oblivion. Here’s a graph (roughly) illustrating the decline in the use of traveller’s cheques (aka “travelers checks” and several other spellings). There was tremendous growth through the mid-1990s. The drop-off is severe. Wikipedia details that “travelers cheques are no longer widely accepted…
August 5th, 2014
How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling is a thought-provoking interview with Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale online at the Harvard Business Review. Marc Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape. Jim Barksdale is a veteran of IBM, FedEx and AT&T Wireless “brought on a few months after Netscape’s founding to provide adult supervision as its CEO.” Both are now…
June 18th, 2014
Several journalists took a small segue today in their coverage of the launch of the Amazon Fire Phone to note that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has been extinguished. Or nearly so. Based on IDC’s May report, the Kindle Fire has only 1.9% of worldwide tablet shipments, down 47% year-to-year.