innovation course

Found this interesting article by Hal Varian (Google's Chief Economist …  well known to Economists who had to study his Advanced Micro book in grad school) in Google's quarterly magazine on some uber Google tools.  So I decided to look up 'interest' in Michael Porter.  Here is my chart:

"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. ... This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” ... and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection. See Smith, 442 U. S., at 749 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (“Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes”); see also Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352 (“[W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private,even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected”)."

Emphasis Added

Source: United States v. Jones   565 U.S. Supreme Court (2012)

Ok, it sounds like an obvious question, but Apple didn't always do their manufacturing overseas. The NYT explains how the manufacturing game changed.

"In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

the energy source of tomorrow, or too good to be true?

H/T: Fika

""Consumers weren't waking up in the morning going, 'I really need to have Nick Cave reading his book along with a soundtrack.' We were solving a problem that didn't exist," Mr. Collingridge says.

Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner, which recently released an enhanced version of Stephen King's novel "11/22/63," said her company is proceeding with caution.

"We haven't proven there's a big enough market for the enhanced e-book to justify the effort, time and money," she says.

The enhanced version of Mr. King's novel, which includes a 13-minute film written and narrated by the author, has sold 45,000 copies at $16.99. The hardcover version, by contrast, sold close to a million copies at $35.00, and the unadorned digital version has sold nearly 300,000 copies at $14.99. Most enhanced e-books sell in the low thousands, according to publishers."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204468004577169001135659954.html

The Economist wisely points out that:

"Merely counting pennies is no way to measure national prowess. Research spending is an input, not an output."

However, they do not propose an alternative metric.

It is also interesting to hear that:

"One reason why spending in Asia has risen is that American firms nearly doubled their R&D investments there in the decade to 2008, to $7.5 billion. GE recently announced a $500m expansion of its R&D facilities in China."

http://www.economist.com/node/21543170