Wherever You Go, There You Are From a remove of 12 years, it’s clear The Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) offers an accurate prediction of things that were then yet to come. Although the authors focus primarily on physical world retail and dining business as staging grounds [...]
Like The Who, I Sell Out In 2002 Richard Florida’s concept of a “creative class” resonated with many readers. In his book “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” he had identified that in the latter decades of the 20th Century many of the more lucrative [...]
Introduction There are many ways to approach studying the business of mass market entertainment. Approaches in material I’ve recently read ranged in focus from a business history of American movie studios written for a popular audience (Epstein, 2005), to sociological perspectives on the culturally transformative nature of creative work (Peterson, & Anand, 2004), to business [...]
I felt very honored when I received a message from my UW Master of Communication, Digital Media colleague Peter Luyckx that my post Every Company is a Media Company was selected as the MCDM “Flip the Media” blog’s best post for 2009. I also was the only author to have two posts in the “best [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
This is my final paper for the Master of Communication in Digital Media program’s Emerging Markets in Digital Media class, taught by the insightful and capable Anita Verna Crofts. I had a lot of time for research and preparation in writing this paper, and was drawing on topics in which I have considerable professional experience [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
This animation illustrates a simplified hypothetical case for using mobile phones to provide the payment and distribution infrastructure for ecommerce consumer cooperatives in emerging markets. For more on this proposed business model, please read: eCommerce Co-operatives for Emerging Markets.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The fallout of the Iranian elections was a Twitter moment for me. As protestors took to the streets of Tehran, clashing with Basij on motorcycles, I followed the #iranelection hashtag. After a young woman’s death from a sniper’s bullet was seen around the world, her name became another search column I kept open in TweetDeck, [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
In reading the articles When Radio Meets Mobile in Pakistan and Mobiles in Citizen Media, I found myself having a strange reaction for a media technologist. I became excited by the first article as it described the ways in which the widespread use of cellphones with built-in FM radio receivers in Pakistan has enabled access [...]
In his article, “Connecting a Nation: Roshan Brings Communications Services to Afghanistan,” Karim Khoja provides a fascinating first-person account of the challenges of introducing a mobile phone network to Afghanistan. What little communications infrastructure the country had did not survive decades of war, so when Khoja arrived in 2002 he was part of an effort [...]
The role of mobile phone technology in creating a conduit for the transfer of funds in countries with emerging markets is not a technical surprise. As far back as the 1970s, prognosticators accurately described how someday home personal computers would allow online banking. Even the cheapest cell phone available today has more processing power than [...]