Category: Internet

  • Paging Dr. Alexa

    Two personal events over the summer made me realize that one of the most compelling use cases for digital assistants concerns senior citizens. I was primed to think this because this week the Center has released a mini-report — Sharpest Edge: Digital Assistants — that explores how programs like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Eva, and…

  • Why the NRA should worry about “ghost guns”

    Whatever your politics and however you feel about private gun ownership, the “ghost gun” debate that has emerged over the last few weeks has implications for every kind of business in the digital age. What is a ghost gun? In brief, activist Cody Wilson won a round in his long-running legal action against the Federal…

  • Streaming superheroes and the DC Universe

    DC Entertainment — home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and a part of the recent AT&T acquisition of Time Warner — has announced a new streaming video on demand service called DC Universe that will premiere in 2019. The service is a competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other Over…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • Will Oculus Go kill the TV set?

    Smart glasses, heads-up display, augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality: no matter what you call them, computer screens that you wear on your face are poised to change how we interact with information, the media we consume, and how much reality we share with people around us. It’s reasonable, for example, to expect that the…

  • The future that’s already here

    The digital revolution is just getting started: more changes to more facets of our everyday lives are coming. In the same way that it would be challenging for us to explain life in 2018 to somebody in 1968 (what — no phone booths?) my kids’ kids will look back on our lives today as if…

  • The challenge of OOOIO: opting out of information overload

    I keep a list of nagging questions like, “why can’t Google organize all my different video services (HBO, Starz, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.) so I can browse through all of my viewing options at the same time?” The obvious answer is that Google wants users to watch movies on YouTube and subscribe to its…

  • Why it’s easy to label things as “fake news”

    On March 10, a MarketWatch story, “How biased is your news source? You probably won’t agree with this chart,” featured the remarkable Media Bias chart created by patent attorney Vanessa Otero. (go here FOr a larger version.) This is the third version of Otero’s chart. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with how she rates…

  • The not-caring economy

    Inside every positive statement is a negative counterpart. In the second sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The sentence doesn’t mention women. In his sweeping, seemingly universal statement, Jefferson only includes half the population. A similar gap lurks…

  • It’s not information overload: it’s information hoarding

    Hi, I’m Brad, and I’m an information hoarder. Here’s an example. During this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, I was drinking my morning coffee from a mug that I’ve owned since the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Back then, my high school sport was fencing, which was as obscure as sports got in the…