http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/cascading_syste.html
The article, “Cascading System Failure,” by John Robb, pulls social networking theory and information cascading ideas from harmless social networks into today’s terrorist groups. Its main points are about modern nations’ fragility in losing key nodes and how it affects their distribution […]

The Technology Adoption Lifecycle
When Google Talk came out a few years ago, I jumped right on it.  It had a clean user interface and easy-to-use voice chat.  I coerced a few close friends and family members to download it and give it a try… and it stuck.  Now, granted, that switch was fairly simple for […]

As technology evolves and consumer demands spur further innovation, there is often an advantage to adopting a format standard.  When a new technology emerges, it can be confusing for consumers to understand differences between competing formats in next-generation technologies.  Additionally, using the same format as your peers eases consumer problems, as illustrated in the early […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506027.stm
As we have been discussing in class operating systems are one of the products that shows positive network effects with expanding user base. This makes sense because with a larger user base reduceds concerns of interoperability which is a concern for business users. Also once there is a larger user base then more […]

Reference: “Innovations and Technological Spillovers” by M. Ishaq Nadiri – pdf at http://ideas.repec.org/p/cvs/starer/93-31.html
Recently in class we began discussing the idea of diffusion in networks. This notion of diffusion can be useful for modeling many things including the spread of information or rumors, the epidemiological problem of disease outbreaks, or (as mentioned in class) the […]

In a recent press release by Google, the company announced that they will be expanding their advertising ideas to television.  The article can be found at Google’s Press Center:
 
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/tv_ads_trial.html
 
By using a similar model of their online advertising, the television ad spots will be auctioned off and advertisers will only pay for how many people viewed […]

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_5580010?nclick_check=1
It was recently announced that Google signed a television ad sales partnership with Echostar, a satellite-TV company. With their most successful invention of Generalized Second-Price Auctions in web-based advertising, they are looking to use their online selling techniques for selling TV ads.
         There are some capabilities that Google plans to implement into TV advertising. One of which is […]

A personal anecdote as I search for a viable voIP service to call from my computer to my grandparents’ landline in Florida… and encounter network effect marketing along the way!

Skype is a rather popular program that offers free text chat, free calls to other Skype users, as well as a number of paid services such […]

Future of Web Searching
The link will lead you to an interesting artucle on the future of web search engines.
It outlines the latest trends that Search engines are doing to improve their engines, and generate more user traffic (So that they can make more money with advertising)
Three main categories that are improving are:
- […]

In class, we’ve started to study network effects and externalities.
In this post, I’m primarily looking to explore two questions. Firstly, how can we better describe network effects in terms of quantifying them? Secondly, what would it look like to filter the first question through a web lens?
It turns out that the process of quantifying the […]