The collapse of complex business models?

Read Clay Shirky’s latest epistle on the ‘collapse of complex business models’, here. Are the parallels between Tainter’s comments on complex societies and businesses compelling? How would you critique this analogy?

News on news

We discuss the case of the Guardian Media Group’s foray into e-business in Long Case 6.2. The past few weeks have seen an enormous amount of attention and angst devoted to News International’s proposals – about to be implemented – to put a paywall around the UK Times and Sunday Times websites. £1 a day [...]

The end of the world as we’ve known it … but not just yet

January saw the publication of consultancy firm Deloitte’s annual TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) predictions. Three publications are available for free download in each of the three component areas of the firm’s practice. Whilst generally long on assertion and anecdote and somewhat shorter on detailed evidence, the reports are aimed at ‘starting or stoking a [...]

1984 and all that

One of the retail stories you may have missed late last year was the mysterious overnight disappearance of George Orwell’s 1984 from thousands of Kindle e-book readers. For one US schoolboy who had been working on the novel as part of a homework assignment, it must have come as an excuse from heaven: “Kindle ate [...]

Location, location, location

Two developments in the market now mean that location-based e-business services are now ripe for development. These are the growth of GPS capability in handsets and the exponential growth of free of cheap downloadable third party applications and mobile web interfaces being designed increasingly as part of an integrated go-to-market package, rather than as an [...]

The real story on newspaper circulation

The conventional wisdom has it that newspaper circulation is in terminal decline, thanks to the Internet. There is considerable debate about possible business models, ranging from free online/charge for hard copy, to charge online/free hard copy to everything in between, including micropayments. It’s always useful to go back and look at the data. Here’s a [...]