Topic: Business
Contrary to digital media, monographs are becoming financially nonviable to produce and maintain. Frances Pinter, Publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, argues that the only way to rescue monographs is to publish them under a Creative Commons license, provide open access, and charge customers for print-on-demand services. Will this be a sustainable business model? Pinter takes a critical position on several alternative strategies and plays devil's advocate on her own proposal.
No product is an island. People switch freely between desktop apps and web sites, so studying your product in isolation can't reveal the true pattern of your customer's behavior. Cameron Turner describes several kinds of user studies and the kinds of insight each can offer. It's now possible to capture every click and every change of context, so smart filtering and sampling are important. Studies must comply with privacy laws, a particular challenge with subjects in many countries. But the benefit of new analytics tools are worth the effort.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author, Don Tapscott, about his new book, MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. In it, he and his co-writer, Anthony Williams, illustrate how mass collaboration is changing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace.
Bringing along the consumer, Method and Zipcar have provided greener alternatives to our everyday lifestyles. By creating this catalyst for change, they moved their products and services ahead of industry leaders and scaled this impact with market success. In this Future of Green open call series from Stanford's Center for Social Innovation, founders Robin Chase of Zipcar and Adam Lowry of Method speak on building a company around a radical and sustainable business model.
Constant performance improvement is essential to converting page views to sales and Shopzilla has the numbers to prove it. After analyzing the impact of site performance slowdowns, they committed to improving their customer's experience and their bottom line. They succeeded. Through the changes, they proved that while constant attention to performance is not free, it pays in page views and conversions.
"Tap and pay" enabling cell phones to replace credit cards -- just one of the innovations Eric Schmidt sees coming soon. As mobile and internet markets grow at exponential rates, Google is building applications that will re-shape how we use that technology. Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits down with web pioneers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 to discuss Google's new Chrome OS, Google TV, mobile technology, talent acquisition, privacy, security and net neutrality. Whew!
From podcast to hardcover bestseller. Scott Sigler surprised the publishing world in 2007 when his book, Ancestor, released by small publisher Dragon Moon Press, appeared on the Amazon bestseller list. It was already available on line as a free serialized podcast, where it had gained 10,000 fans. In fact, all of his work is available free, but fans still buy. In this talk, he chronicles the publishing of his fourth book, The Rookie, a sci-fi football story, and the possibilities for authors who maintain an on-line following.
Cultural change is often the only solution. Technologists naturally turn to technological solutions to the problems they encounter at work. But many of our most difficult problems in the workplace are cultural, so truly effective solutions require changing the way we think. John Rauser, engineer and data miner at Amazon.com, offers three examples of how changing culture provided lasting, effective, and creative solutions to common workplace struggles.
"Move fast, be bold and take risks" is what Mark Zuckerberg tries to hammer home every day. A series of news-making revelations about Facebook's strategies broke at this talk. Facebook is going to build platforms to offer access to it's 500 million users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing and answered frank and challenging questions. The result was a cascade of new strategic decisions about "all the awesome stuff" that Facebook is launching.
Cross-sector collaborations are increasingly being seen as a means to foster innovation and solve entrenched social problems. In this audio lecture, Andrew Wolk, CEO of Root Cause, argues that the time has come for what he calls social impact markets. They would focus on single issues within specific geographic areas, and foster ties among government institutions, nonprofits, and businesses.
