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 […]

Oprah and The Secret
 
This article discusses the best-selling book The Secret. For those who do not know, The Secret, written by Australian talk show producer Rhonda Byrne, is a new self-help book that, in short, says putting out positive energy will bring positive things into your life. There have been many scathing criticisms […]

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:
- […]

Informational Cascades in IT Adoption
Xiaotong Li, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, writes about herd behavior in IT adoption and the decision making process involved. With new technologies continually emerging, businesses place great pressure on IT managers to adopt the latest and greatest to further streamline operations. IT managers often are in the […]

FON is a company that seeks to exploit network effects to supply free wireless across the globe. The working premise is that people often have wireless internet access at home, usually from a wireline internet service provider (e.g. cable or DSL). However, when away from home, people often have to pay to go online (e.g. […]

http://www.cjpf.org/crime/crime.html
 
There is a controversy over our current correctional system. Is it an effective deterrent to make people not commit crimes or not? There is evidence to show that it can go either way. For example we talked about in class how if clean up petty crimes people are less likely to commit bigger crimes, so […]

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 […]

In the mid-90s, when Larry Page was still a graduate student at Stanford University, he started pondering about the Internet and its structure. Before he ever dreamed of creating the world’s greatest search engine, Page was interested in the Web for its mathematical qualities, its network structure. With his deep roots in academia, […]

The success of the iPod is a result of information being passed through a network and some point, around the 3rd generation iPod the tipping point occurred and the iPod fad spread like wild fire. Other products with […]

http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2005/11/prices_law_and_.html
 
 
The network effects that explain the huge growth of peer-to-peer production and organizations should not be overestimated. Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law both give overly optimistic formulas for calculating the net value of a network. Metcalfe’s Law dictates that a network’s value is […]