Last week, I noted that former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun enrolled 160,000 students in an online computer science class. That inspired him to set up a new company, Udacity, to pursue online education. A new article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek adds some additional color to the story. Barrett Sheridan and Brendan Greeley answer a question many folks [...]
Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
Online Education and Self-Driving Cars
Posted in Internet, Teaching, Technology, tagged Auto, Education, Google, Teaching, Technology, Wired on January 30, 2012 | 7 Comments »
Zanran: Google for Data?
Posted in Data, Economy, Internet, tagged Data, Google, Search, Wolfram Alpha, Zanran on May 13, 2011 | 6 Comments »
Zanran is a new search engine, now in beta testing, that focuses on charts and tables. As its website says: Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a [...]
The Attention Deficit Society
Posted in Internet, Life, Technology, tagged Internet, Technology on May 4, 2011 | 5 Comments »
One highlight of the Milken Global Conference was an excellent panel discussion of how new communication technologies are changing the way that people think and interact. Moderated by the amusing Dennis Kneale of Fox Business, the panelists were: Nicholas Carr, Author, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. [...]
Why Free Is a Bad Price
Posted in Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged Apple, Instapaper, Internet, Pricing on April 29, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Marco Arment is the brains behind one of my favorite apps. Instapaper allows you to store articles off the Web for later reading; very useful, for example, when I am surfing and come across an article I want to share with my students or use in a future blog post. And the editor of Instapaper periodically shares excellent reads that I might [...]
Yahoo’s Self-Inflicted Winner’s Curse
Posted in Auctions, Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged Auctions, Microeconomics, Yahoo on April 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Over at Managerial Econ, Luke Froeb highlights a nice example of the winner’s curse. Like Google, Yahoo uses automated auctions to sell ads. One wrinkle is that some advertisers prefer to pay for impressions, some prefer to pay for clicks, and some prefer to pay only for resulting sales. Yahoo thus needs some mechanism to [...]
Curation versus Search
Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged Curation, Google, Search, Twitter on January 12, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I love Twitter (you can find me at @dmarron). Indeed, I spend much more time perusing my Twitter feed than I do on Facebook. But it’s not because I care about Kanye West’s latest weirdness (I followed him for about eight hours) or what Katy Perry had for lunch. No, the reason I love Twitter is that [...]
Google More Popular Than Wikipedia … in 1900
Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged Google, Humor, Wikipedia on December 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Google unveiled a new toy yesterday. The Books Ngram Viewer lets users see how often words and phrases were used in books from 1500 to 2008. Other bloggers have already run some fun economics comparisons. Barry Ritholz, for example, has does inflation vs. deflation, Main Street vs. Wall Street, and Gold vs. Oil. In the [...]
No, the Web Isn’t Dead (Yet)
Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged Internet, Technology on August 23, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Wired’s cover story this month, “The Web is Dead,” features the following chart showing the portion of internet traffic in different uses: Over the past few years, peer-to-peer services and video have gobbled up an increasing share of traffic, while the “traditional” web — you know, surfing from site to site, reading your favorite blog [...]
Three A’s of E-Book Pricing: Amazon, Apple, and Antitrust
Posted in Internet, Microeconomics, tagged Amazon, Antitrust, Apple, Internet, Microeconomics, Pricing on August 3, 2010 | 7 Comments »
A few months ago, I noted that Amazon and book publishers were tussling over the pricing of electronic books. Amazon had originally acquired e-books using a wholesale pricing model. It paid publishers a fixed price for each e-book it sold, and then decided what retail price to charge customers. Retailers usually sell products at a mark-up above the wholesale [...]
Speculating on the Greek Crisis, Internet Edition
Posted in Internet, tagged Greece, Humor, Internet, Spain on May 10, 2010 | 1 Comment »
At the recent Milken Conference, I attended a panel moderated by Mike “Zappy” Zapolin. His claim to fame? He struck internet gold by developing generic web domains like beer.com, music.com, and the all-too-timely debt.com. It’s much harder to follow in Zappy’s footsteps today since the obvious names are all gone. Except when new developments create [...]
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