Ye Olde Social Media

→  July 18th, 2011  →  Blog

I’ve written before about my love for the Economist. One of the reasons I stated before were their irreverent titles/illustrations/covers. As a social media aficionado, I had to share this amazing cover. This will hopefully tickle you as much as it did me [apologies for the poor resolution, this is the best quality cover I [...]

Replicating Taiwan’s Success

→  June 27th, 2010  →  Blog

I’m always a fan of stories/articles highlighting the importance of Taiwan in the technology industry, so I was especially pleased that one of my favorite publications recently put out an article highlighting the very key Computex industry conference, the role of the Taiwanese government’s ITRI R&D organization in cultivating Taiwan’s technology sector, and the rise [...]

Tails of the TV

→  June 21st, 2010  →  Blog

A few months ago, I posted on why the Long Tail hypothesis that technology would reduce the importance of general “hits” in favor of the “long tail” of niche products was wrong and how businesses should respond. In the Economist’s recent coverage of the television industry, they note how this has played out when it [...]

Just a bad situation

→  June 16th, 2010  →  Blog

The recent Economist piece on the situation in North Korea is simultaneously a good read and also incredibly depressing. From my read, the following chart is pretty much the “million dollar slide” which explains why the situation in North Korea is so grim: The figure highlights the bind that the US, South Korea, Japan, China, [...]

Reading for value

→  May 10th, 2010  →  Blog

My buddy Bill shared an article on Google Reader about the demise of Newsweek which linked to this New York Times article (does anyone else find it ironic that one newspaper experiencing financial problems is calling out another publication’s financial problems?): American newsweeklies were built on original reporting of Large Events, helping readers make sense [...]

Sushi and soft power

→  April 26th, 2010  →  Blog

When I was in college, I had the fortune of sitting in on a talk by Joseph Nye, a famous Harvard professor who helped popularize the concept of “soft power” in foreign policy. The idea in a nutshell is that traditional conceptions of power in foreign policy (or “hard power”) around force, coercion, and payment [...]

Russia dreams of Silicon Valley sheep

→  March 22nd, 2010  →  Blog

The Economist has an interesting article on the Kremlin’s latest push to modernize Russia’s economy and kick-start a wave of innovation which would supposedly lead to a “Russia with nuclear-powered spaceships and supercomputers.” Far-fetched as this premise sounded, the article raised many thought-provoking questions on whether or not (and how) Russia could hope to build [...]

Heads and tails

→  February 8th, 2010  →  Blog

I just read a really interesting Economist article which, at first, I thought was very counter-intuitive. In the early days of television, there was very little in the way of network selection for the average TV-viewer. There were only a handful of stations and, regardless of how bad the content on a given station was, [...]