In the last year I have written often about disintermediation. It is a force that is affecting numerous industries. Residential real estate, as I have written here, is one of those businesses. Any business that has historically inserted itself between buyer and seller and has also kept market information to itself is a business that […]

Book Expo America is the large annual convention of the book publishing industry.  For the past few days, thousands of people descended on the Javits Center in New York for the annual ritualistic gathering of the tribes of this 500 year old business.  As regular readers know, this year I have attended the Consumer Electronic […]

Last week it was announced that Life magazine would cease publication, again. This is the third death of the magazine since it was founded in 1936. Life was a weekly from 1936 to 1972, when it first stopped publication. It was revived as a monthly in 1978 but then shut down again in 2000. It […]

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show there are hundreds of companies touting new gadgets that are “revolutionary” “innovative” “at the cutting edge” and “totally cool”.  I will leave the descriptions of all these to the mainstream media as they already excessively cover this convention.  Instead I will give you some view on the larger […]

One of the trade offs we seem to have accepted during the past 20 years is a loss of privacy.  None of us say we approve of that, but we have embraced technology in such a way that a diminished sense of privacy has occurred.  The portability of storage and computing, as discussed on this […]

The mid-term election was certainly a shining example of Democracy in all its imperfect beauty.  The will of the people was clearly apparent.  A President and his war were clearly rejected.  The American political conversation moved back to the middle.  The founding fathers vision of a government of checks and balances has been taken up […]

It was twenty-five years ago this month that the PC was born.  In August of 1981 IBM launched the Personal Computer.  This of course was five years after Jobs and Wozniak came out with the Apple 1, but it was the PC, and it’s rapid acceptance first in the corporate world and then in homes […]

This was one of those news stories that prompted an initial “What! Are you kidding?”. Hey, over the weekend the VP shot someone. We all have pop songs that rattle around in our brain only to pop up at odd times. The late 90s’ OMC song “How Bizarre How Bizarre” popped up in my brain […]