Jun

10

In praise of Small Law

Filed Under Business

I’m usually suitably supplicant in agreeing with future-of-law guru Susskind, but I take issue with the views implicit in his recent Times Online piece Does the Law Society know that there’s an internet generation?
The report tells us that, in 2008, 85.9 per cent of law firms had four or fewer partners, while 44.2 per cent […]

By Nick Holmes, 10 June 2010

Sep

10

Social business design

Filed Under Business, Law 2.0, Social networking

“Social business design” is a term you’ve probably not encountered before. I was introduced to it last evening by social computing expert and entrepreneur Lee Bryant at Headshift where I attended an event to explore the themes covered in the report Social Networking for the Legal Profession authored by him with Penny Edwards. I don’t […]

By Nick Holmes, 10 September 2009

Aug

18

Never mind the content, feel the packaging

Filed Under Publishing, Business

So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our […]

By Nick Holmes, 18 August 2009

Jul

16

Free - radical or not?

Filed Under Business

“Free” is a word that has many connotations and arouses strong feelings.
Giving away products and services for free in order to sell other products and services is a well-established marketing model. What is new in the digital world is how the marginal cost of delivering services has declined to near zero. That changes the economics, […]

By Nick Holmes, 16 July 2009

Feb

8

The Big Switch

Filed Under Business, Society, Technology

More scary stuff.
Just 100 years ago larger businesses generated their own electricity. The subsequent development of the electricity grid, delivering electricity as a commodity, profoundly changed business and society. In the same way, argues Nick Carr in The Big Switch, computer utilities will replace in-house facilities and business and society will be transformed again by […]

By Nick Holmes, 8 February 2008

Feb

8

Better than free

Filed Under Business

David Tebbutt at IWR neatly summarises a hypothesis from Kevin Kelly that in the digital age anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless and that therefore value resides only in associated non-copyable attributes.
Kevin categorises these attributes as: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment (a non-digital representation, eg a book or […]

By Nick Holmes, 8 February 2008

Jan

30

The price of free music

Filed Under Business

Here’s a couple of truisms in the digital age:

once you digitise your content, you have to wave your content goodbye
users are willing to pay for digital services that make their lives easier

Current attempts to help the music industry dig itself out of its hole seem to ignore the latter, relying on advertising to support the […]

By Nick Holmes, 30 January 2008

Jul

13

Holiday reading?

Filed Under Business, Free culture, Technology, Search, Blogging

Probably not in there with your Dan Browns, but here’s a some webby books I’ve read recently or plan to (listed oldest first). You could do worse than feed your brain with one of them this Summer.
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (August 2000)
A Brief History of the Future: Origins of […]

By Nick Holmes, 13 July 2006