Entrepreneur, Philosopher
Every country is going to regulate tech —and they’re not going to do it in the same way the US is; nor do they necessarily care what the US does. The EU is well down this path, as I’ve written before. A lot of that regulation is about protecting user privacy. Apple announced a bunch of … Continue reading “Privacy, Profit, and Tech Regulation”
Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have released preliminary stage III results of their COVID vaccine trials, and both look really good (over 90% efficacy). They both also represent a totally new kind of vaccine. Vaccines work by giving your body a “sheep in wolve’s clothing” — something that your body sees as a virus, which it … Continue reading “What the COVID vaccines would mean for biotech”
It used to be the case that much of “high tech” was considered a national security issue. This wasn’t just about ballistic missiles and targeting software. Today, everyone has strong encryption, but through the 1990s, cryptographic software was considered “munitions”, and was strongly controlled. The same applied to microchips. With the collapse of the Soviet … Continue reading “The resurgence of national tech wars”
First, there was Ma Bell. Then, deregulation of the phone company happened in the U.S. and phone calls went from being very expensive to very cheap (my dad ran a small business in the 1980s, and telephone bills could often be thousands of dollars — in 1980s dollars!). Then came the Internet, and ISPs (think … Continue reading “Should cable companies build smart TVs? (or, how do cable companies avoid the fate of telcos?)”
Although there are still some lawsuits to be settled, and several recounts to be done, it appears that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (really), will be the 46th president of the United States. After four seismic years under Donald Trump, it will probably mean a lot. Although not entirely unmitigated, Obama’s presidency was largely a foreign-policy … Continue reading “What will a Biden presidency mean?”
Many of us have quickly become accustomed to our phone acting as our credit card (Google Pay, Apple Pay), but pretty soon we may be putting our official IDs onto our phones as well. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO — which you might think is a confused acronym, but comes from the fact that … Continue reading “Electronic driver’s licenses are coming”
The whole business-news world was awash with speculation this week that Apple is building its own search engine (The Telegraph ($/2), Financial Times ($), Forbes, Forbes again, c|net, etc…). These sites all point out that Google is under anti-trust scrutiny, and part of that is the purported $8–12 billion that Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on Apple devices; and … Continue reading “Apple is building a search engine?”
Remember way back in February — before even COVID — when I wrote about this weird ideathe EU had about a “single data market”? Well, of all the possible ways they could have pursued this, it looks like they picked the dumbest of the dumb. Here are some tidbits. The Internal Market Commissioner for the EU, … Continue reading “Pan-European Cloud”
The WSJ ran an article on the effect of COVID on small businesses. Some of the information is shocking — from the difficulty of getting capital (even through government subsidized loans), to the fact that perhaps as many as 1 in 5 businesses that were open in January may have shut their doors permanently. But … Continue reading “Is the Internet killing small businesses?”
Cable providers, fresh off their media company acquisitions, are getting hit hard by COVID — advertising revenue is way down, and cord-cutting has joined the long list of transitions that were already happening but got accelerated by the pandemic. But just because a trend is accelerating, doesn’t mean that the incumbents have any idea what … Continue reading “NBC reorgs cable networks, or, where is the value in entertainment?”
I’ve written quite a bit about China’s international moves to expand their sphere and scope of influence, and about the US’s and EU’s response — and all of that is certainly of global economic import; but this week China made a really interesting internal move. Remember, China is the second largest economy in the world … Continue reading “China is becoming more communistic”
I’ve never been a fan of Evernote. I’ve probably tried it a dozen times, and I never end up using it for more than a day or two. But 250 million people disagree with me, and the reason I’ve tried more than once or twice is that a lot of people in my circle display religious fervor … Continue reading “The new Evernote is here! (?!)”