Category: Internet

  • My 2017 in Books

    This is the fourth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2016 list here,…

  • Death Star Scenario: Amazon Prime Bank

    If Amazon decided to move into the world of commercial banking, would the company then revolutionize how people relate to their money as profoundly and irrevocably as it has already changed how people read? Why do I pose this question? A provocative finding from our forthcoming Future of Money and Banking report inspired it: when…

  • From the archives: the Amazon Tip Jar

    My Amazon obsession is longstanding, as evidenced by this piece from way back that I stumbled across today. The date was October 6, 2009, and the original title was “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Please Create an Amazon.com Tip Jar.” If you want to see the original context and comments you can find it here…

  • Email: a modest proposal

    Here’s a sentence that I have yet to hear: “Y’know, I just don’t get enough email.” I do hear the opposite quite a bit. “Dear Lord, I’ll never get through all this email.” “I have 7,000 unopened messages.” “I want to declare email bankruptcy and just start over.” Occasionally, some optimistic soul achieves the Nirvana…

  • What comes after smartphones?

    With all the press and the inescapable ads for new iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel and other snazzy devices, it’s hard to think of the smart phone as a transitional technology. But it is. Here are three recent indicators: The Third Generation Apple Watch that was announced last month does not need to be anchored…

  • Brief Rant about Email: Change the Topic, Change the Subject Line

    Look, you’re busy. I know you’re busy. I’m busy too.  We’re all busy. But there’s one inviolable rule of email communications — the prime directive, the Federation’s highest law — and it’s simple. If you change the topic of an email thread, then you have to change the subject line too. That is, you have…

  • Car ownership is changing, not dying (yet)

    On Monday, Business Insider published an article with the headline, “Uber and Lyft could destroy car ownership in major cities.” It’s a provocative headline, but it misrepresents the carefully worded findings of a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan, Texas A&M and Columbia. The study took shrewd advantage of a “natural experiment”…

  • Open Letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Please Cancel the President’s Accounts

    Dear Jack Dorsey, Please cancel U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter accounts– both the official @POTUS one and @RealDonaldTrump. Twitter does not have to persist in giving the president a platform where he lies in verifiable ways that responsible media outlets — real news — have detailed time and again. Twitter does not have to…

  • Liquid Behavior

    Anybody who has tried to lose weight, quit smoking, or train for a marathon knows that creating a new behavior or getting rid of an old one can be very, very challenging. But it’s not hard to pour a behavior from one container into another, and this has implications for anybody trying to launch a…

  • Smart Phones and Drained Brains

    As we use our mobile phones to do more and more things, we are paradoxically able to accomplish less— even when the phones are face down and turned off. My last column explored how smart glasses (“heads up display” or “HUDs”) will increase the amount of digital information we look at, with the ironic twist…