The Impact of Globalization on Competitiveness within the Consumer Tech Market

The world is truly becoming flat when it comes to consumer tech and that has had (and is having) profound ramifications on the competitive nature of the global marketplace for consumer tech.  The global tastes and preferences of consumers are becoming homogeneous and while some subtleties still exist between geographic markets, these differences are quickly becoming marginalized. Take for example […]

Monetizing Digital Structure

In the last year or two there has been an explosion of massive online open courses (MOOCs).  These have come from a wide assortment of institutions. To date there has been tremendous experimentation but business models are still forming. As Cisco’s executive director for AsiaPac Andrew Thomson recently suggested one potential business model “could be that the content […]

Chief Digital Officer

A recent study from Gartner suggests nearly one in five business leaders expect to recruit a chief digital officer by 2014 and about 17 percent foresee appointing a chief data officer within the same time frame. The development of the CDO position today is akin to the development of the chief information officer position a decade […]

Digital Safety Nets: When our Devices Know More about Us then we Know about Ourselves

At the end of January, Facebook announced they would partner with the suicide prevention group Save.org. The goals of the partnership are to research the online behaviors of suicide victims in the days and months leading up to their deaths in order to identify and detect patterns of potential suicides. If successful, the research will identify […]

Sizing the Market Opportunity for Connected Wristwatches

I wrote early this month about the features of connected wristwatches. Since this time there has been significant digital ink spilled discussing the connected wristwatch space with a focus on Apple’s potential foray into the market (see: 100 people are working on the Apple watch, Apple’s entry into wearable tech, On the Apple Watch watch, Apple watch that […]

Engineering Doesn’t Necessarily Win in the End

There is a misconception that engineering wins in the end.  It doesn’t. Perhaps it once did.  Certainly over the last 60 years of technology engineering won out more than it does today. But today, pure engineering is simply less powerful in influencing adoption and consumer use. This has become acutely evident over the last 24 […]

Scaling Disruption

On my flight over to Helsinki a day ago, I read the December issue of the Harvard Business Review.  Several articles focused on disruption and I want to spend a minute sharing my thoughts on the topic. Disruption is a fickle influence on business and while we often talk about about disruptive change being binary […]

Web Technologies – Things to Look for in 2013

Earlier this week, CNET wrote about 5 Web Technologies to Watch in 2013. I completely agree with the 4th one listed: High-res images on the Web. Prevalent at CES next week will be what I’m referring to as “HD Everywhere.” We’ve already seen the resolution on mobile phones increase and we are now seeing that spread […]

The Changing Landscape of Entertainment on the Web

Yesterday I was Los Angeles to participate in an event announcing several new additions to Entertainment Matters at CES which is entering it’s third year at CES.  In 2013, Entertainment matters will feature a variety of events and conference sessions, including: TweetHouse Presents, Innovations in Social Business, Digital Hollywood, Content in the Cloud, Variety‘s Entertainment Summit: Film […]

The Digitization of the News

Recent research from Pew shines light on the digitization of the news: consuming the news digitally now surpasses physically reading the news.  In 2004, 24 percent of respondents got their news digitally while today 39 percent do the same. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they watched the news on TV yesterday which is still the […]