Category: Internet

  • Does what we buy represent who we are?

    This week’s episode of the delightful NPR podcast “Hidden Brain,” “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are,” explores how the stories that companies tell about their products impact our lives and intertwine with our identities. In the podcast, host Shankar Vedantam interviews Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed about how branding…

  • The challenge of deepfakes

    The original Star Trek show from the 1960s has proved prescient again and again. Starfleet’s pocket communicators and slightly larger tricorders anticipated smartphones. Hospital beds today with their sensors and screens look a lot like the diagnostic beds in the Enterprise’s sickbay. We talk with Siri, Alexa, and other digital assistants the way the Enterprise crew…

  • A better streaming model

    On July 26th, “Veronica Mars” will return for a fourth season, twelve years after the end of the third and five years after a movie that had a slender theatrical release. Instead of UPN or the CW, which broadcast the first three seasons, the fourth will premiere on streaming service Hulu for a short, eight-episode…

  • Ride-Hailing’s “iPod moment”

    As I write this sentence, Lyft’s stock is worth $56.02 per share, which means that the stock has lost 41% of its value since its March 29th debut on the Nasdaq. Likewise, Uber will make its Initial Public Offering in the coming weeks, and it can expect a similarly bumpy ride as its filing has shown,…

  • Why Amazon’s house brands will win big

    On Monday, a pair of Bloomberg articles by Spencer Soper surfaced a recent Jungle Scout study arguing that Amazon’s house brands aren’t selling well. For example, in apparel, “only one percent of Amazon’s total sales account for its private label brands.” One of Soper’s articles, “Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds,” ends in a…

  • Why Google Should buy eBay: Digital Assistant Wars

    Last week, Allison Prang reported in The Wall Street Journal that eBay, under pressure from activist investors, is planning a strategic review of its assets, including its classified ad business and StubHub, in order to “drive meaningful shareholder value.” This is code for “we want to sell off a bunch of things in order to…

  • Why direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies fail

    Three popular letters this month are DTC, which stands for “direct to consumer.” DTC is an exploding category for low consideration products that we used to buy in person at the pharmacy or grocery store. Then we got Amazon and could order online. Now, we can also go directly to the manufacturer, cutting out the…

  • No algorithm for serendipity

    What do Mister Rogers and artificial intelligence have to do with each other?  This is a column about the nature of human expertise. That sounds like airy philosophy, but it’s actually an urgent practical question facing us as a species today because of the pressure that algorithms (artificial intelligences and machine learning) put on what we…

  • Analog Pleasures in a Digital World

    At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…

  • The Flip

    It may be the most heartbreaking half hour ever seen on television. “Time Enough at Last,” a 1959 episode of the legendary anthology series The Twilight Zone, features Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a thick-glasses-wearing bank teller who loves nothing more than reading, but whose wife, boss, and other circumstances interfere with his ability to…