Netopia contributor Ralf Grötker writes about William Baumol’s cost disease theory this week. I find this thought fascinating, but have some objections. First of all, it seems to be a cost-oriented ap... »
It may seem that all digital problems have a technological solution, often in the shape of cybersecurity. Worried your private images could spread across social media? Adjust access settings on Facebo... »
Netopia's report Can We Make the Digital World Ethical? has created quite a stir. I gave an interview to Brussels online news and opinion frontrunner EurActiv, which dubbed me "internet guru" (that's ... »
Last week I visited a telecoms tech conference. This time it was for the companies that supply telecom operators with hardware: fiber, routers, switches, those sorts of things. Always interesting to v... »
The digital revolution connects people. Or at least, so we’re told. Our assumption about the internet and digital technology is that it is about people communicating with people. Great benefits, anyon... »
Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf comments a new book by MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age (yes, Netopia will review it shortly). The question is whether ... »
In today’s news, Swedish mash-up service Lexbase combines public data on home addresses with court data on convicted criminals, creating a map where you can see if your neighbour was ever in trouble w... »
The Davos-connection. This week, I wrote about technology leading to job loss, the so-called Luddite fallacy. Not sure Google Chairman Eric Schmidt reads Netopia regularly (probably not, right?), but ... »
There has been a lot of criticism against how cloud companies abuse their customers privacy in doing their business. The phrase “If you’re not paying for a service, you’re not the consumer – you’re th... »
Many of us shook our heads thinking they had lost the marbles upon reading Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s and Kenneth Cukier’s theories on how prediction and probability will rule everything from insuranc... »