In a previous post we alluded to an impending ad block block war. Last week can be regarded as the starting point of an open war between adblockers and publishers. Facebook, claiming 1.7 billion users currently, decided that enough was enough; Facebook ad-blocking software had to be stopped. In 2015 Facebook’s revenue peaked at $ […] Read more »
Charting the Dutch Digital Economy Part IX: Is There More?
In our series on the Dutch digital economy we have analysed the Dutch B2C, B2B and C2C segments. While these are the largest single online transaction segments there are other combinations possible as we can see from the table below. But do these other segments exist only theoretically or are they just small for the […] Read more »
The Dutch Digital Economy: Death of Retail
Retail has always been a good indicator of the state of the economy and consumer confidence. The economic crisis following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 saw a sharp decline in consumer household spending on consumer goods. Even in 2015 spending on consumer goods was still 4% under the all time high of € […] Read more »
Rise of the Machines Part 4: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
In our series on the future work we watch the development of innovative robotized functions hitting the market. So far we covered the robotized prison guard, burger flipper, order pickers and cars as innovations where robot technology redefines an existing function. But innovations that really captures people’s imagination are drone based appliances; for the sake […] Read more »
The Ethical Machine Versus The Ruthless Samaritan
In TV series “Person of Interest” protagonist Finch has built a software system that is capable of predicting crime by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with access to all kinds of public and private data. He has designed the machine code in such a way that it values the life of individuals. The Machine has been […] Read more »
The Real Reason People Pirate Software
Last May the Business Software Alliance (BSA) released its biennial global report on software piracy. The report gives an overview of the level of PC software piracy in 116 markets (111 countries plus 5 rest-of-regions) by calculating the piracy rate per country. The piracy rate is defined as the share of unlicensed software packages in […] Read more »