NEW YORK: Two months ago, I was introduced to a start-up called CityMart, a for-profit marketplace dedicated to helping vendors and city managers to find one another — and to spreading municipal innovations outside of their home turf. This month, in (...)
NEW YORK: Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” Will it be controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, or will it remain “open” to all? Will individuals be able to reach any (...)
NEW YORK: In mid-December, while trying to understand what was happening in Russia, I checked Twitter and found a tweet that somehow signified everything. It was from a young woman, and it said, in Russian: “Gotta sleep! Tomorrow I go to [face] (...)
NEW YORK: Unfortunately, many new technologies and business models make money for investors without creating jobs for workers. That causes unemployment and increases what the blogger Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus” — unused brainpower.
I (...)
NEW YORK: Last month I was in Kyiv, speaking at a conference focused on entrepreneurs. I wanted to give a talk that would be of general interest but also concrete. So I started with one of my favorite parables.
It is a familiar folk tale. A (...)
NEW YORK: Normally, you need a distinctive first name not to need a last name, but in this — as in everything that he did — Steve Jobs was different. He was always just “Steve.”
In the personal-computing business — which moved from the bulky (...)
NEW YORK: It is a well-known — though questionable — truth in the online community that consumers won't pay for privacy. Accordingly, most companies regard the entire issue warily, seeing only expensive disclosure requirements, constraints on their (...)
NEW YORK: The Internet is an extraordinarily powerful tool. It has changed how we do business, how we do politics, and even how we change our leaders — at least some of the time.
But the ease with which we now communicate, the efficiencies we (...)
NEW YORK: Internet firms are supposed to be all about the cutting edge, but reality and buzz sometimes conflict. Consider Groupon: its focus is the power of groups, but its actual business is the old standby of direct-mail marketing and coupons. But (...)
CAPE CANAVERAL: More than 50 years ago (1957), the Soviets launched the world's first orbiting satellite, beating the US into space. For Americans, the so-called “Sputnik moment” was a wake-up call that pushed the United States to increase (...)
NEW YORK: Long ago, I wrote about the internet pioneer Julf Helsingius, who ran a precursor to WikiLeaks called anon.penet.fi. As I said then: “Anonymity in itself should not be illegal. There are enough good reasons for people to be anonymous that (...)
NEW YORK: Earlier this month, I sat on a panel in Monte Carlo, a hotspot of the establishment, discussing the question, “Why can't Europe be more like the US?” The formal name of the panel was “Silicon Envy: Will Europe ever build the next new media (...)
NEW YORK: For those of you who have seen the (American) movie “Up in the Air,” think of the scene where George Clooney meets Vera Farmiga. He's an outsourced human-resources executive who flies around the country firing people on behalf of timid (...)
NEW YORK: Suppose a group of workers frequently communicate among themselves, and then suddenly one of them gets left off all the “copy-tos.” “It could be that they're planning a surprise birthday party,” says Elizabeth Charnock, whose company, (...)
NEW YORK: Imagine that Googling an address gave you a list of the closest buildings, ranked by distance. Not exactly what you were looking for, most likely. But that is pretty close to what we still accept for most Internet searches. You don't get (...)
NEW YORK: Last week, I learned that I don't have cancer. My doctor called and said, “I have some good news!” Fortunately, we were in the middle of a fire drill in my office at the time, so no one noticed as I blinked back tears of relief.
I had (...)
NEW YORK: Long ago, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school, I wrote a book (Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age) in which I lauded something called “P3” (now p3p), the platform for privacy preferences. I was sure (...)
NEW YORK: Let me disclose my biases up front: I did not dream of going into space as a child. I took it for granted. My father was a (genuine) rocket scientist, and I figured that just as airplanes had become commonplace over the course of his life, (...)
MOSCOW: I was recently part of a US State Department/White House delegation to Russia. Our mission was to foster US-Russian cooperation, in fulfillment of the US's policies of "21st-century statecraft and citizen diplomacy. That sounds high-minded, (...)
PALO ALTO: My close friend Kris Olson died last week. It wasn't after a long illness, or even after a car crash. She just went to bed at home one night, and was dead when her son tried to wake her in the morning. No drama, no long goodbyes, (...)
NEW YORK: Usually, disclosure statements go at the end of an article, but let me start with mine.
I sit on the board of Yandex, a Russian search company with a roughly 60 percent market share in Russia, compared to Google's 20 percent or so. I am (...)
SAN FRANCISCO: Last week, I wrote a 140-character hotel review on Twitter: "Galleria Park Hotel SF rejects noise complaint from ill-trained guest: 'Next time, ask for an interior room, not just a quiet room.'
I was frustrated because the hotel (...)
ROME: Back in the late 1980s, I attended a conference on "revenue management, or the art of pricing airline seats to maximize yield. Too high, and you lost business; too low, and you got less than people were willing to pay. Most of the speakers (...)
BUDAPEST: At a recent conference of newspaper editors in which I took part, a small crowd gathered to talk about journalism and new media. When I told the group that I had begun my career as a magazine fact-checker, several of them grew misty-eyed, (...)
DALIAN, China: Last month, a company called Complete Genomics announced 10 new customers for its genome-sequencing service. The price was not specified, but the company said its goal is to offer the service for $5,000 within a year.
What struck (...)