consumers

Making money from the fallout over SOPA and PIPA by questioning assumptions

Sat, Jan 21, 2012 - 3:55pm -- Isaac Sukin

Recent discussion sparked by opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills has mostly been along the lines of "piracy is bad because it hurts the entertainment industries, but SOPA and PIPA go too far..." I agree with Jonathan Coulton that statements like this make too many unproven assumptions. So let's start from the beginning.

Assumption 0: People should pay money for art

I think most people would agree with this assumption, although for most of human history that wasn't true.

Trends in Physical Product Consumption due to the Internet

Sat, Dec 18, 2010 - 3:30pm -- Isaac Sukin

There's a revolution going on, and it's more than what people think. The new, social, virtual world in which we're increasingly finding ourselves has opened the door to a wide variety of physical extensions to that online reality. In particular, a slew of price and product comparison tools have arisen, facilitated by the rise in ultra-mobile computing (namely smartphones). Additionally, new sharing tools are allowing us to focus on the experience or result we want from a product rather than the physical object itself. When we share an item or buy collaboratively, we extend the life of the product and also get utility from it at a lower price than the physical object required to deliver that experience. In other words, we are increasingly buying the hole rather than the power drill, the movie rather than the actual DVD, the transportation to work rather than the car… perhaps one day the sleep rather than the bed, the home rather than the house. The possibilities for entrepreneurs are endless right now.

And yet…

How Internet has Changed Consumer Interaction

Mon, Nov 9, 2009 - 5:18pm -- Isaac Sukin

Rupert Murdoch has announced that News Corp will start completely blocking Google from its websites. Or something like that -- it's kind of hard to understand what he means, probably because he doesn't understand what he means. This is a man that doesn't get the internet, and he wants to impose an old-school financial model on it. My favorite tech blog, Mashable, had this insightful comment:

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