The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for ride-sharing services; it appears therefore as a typical two-sided platform. As Evans (2011) explains it, a business opportunity emerges for a two-sided (or multi-sided) platform when three conditions are met: There are distinct […]
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How do comparison shopping sites make a living?
By 6 March 2014 23
Comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping robots or shopbots, have been around for about two decades. Sites such as Shopping.com, Shopper.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Vergelijk or Kelkoo help us find goods or services that are sold online by providing us with loads of information (products sold, price charged, quality, delivery and payment methods, etc.). As they […]
Prezi: a successful freemium model?
By 24 February 2014 25
Last year, I had to deliver a speech about the economics of Internet to a non-technical audience. To make my presentation (hopefully) more pleasant for this audience, and to seize the opportunity to learn a new application, I decided to use Prezi. The application was rather new at the time (it had been launched in 2009 […]
Can IPdigIT start a snowball effect?
By 12 February 2014 12
In a previous post, I described the success story of Alex Tew who managed to raise $1 million for his university education by selling one million pixels on a web page, at at price of $1 per pixel. In exchange for the pixels that they bought, purchasers had the possibility to display tiny images on them, […]
Will the new Belgian Telecom Act lead to lower prices?
By 31 January 2014 9
Since October 1st 2013, a new ” Telecom ” Act transposes into Belgian law a series of European directives to better protect consumers in the telecommunications market. A key measure of this law is the opportunity that is now given to consumers to switch operators (fixed and mobile telephony, Internet and television) without any penalty after […]
The hidden treasure of piracy?
By 2 December 2013 41
You probably know “Game of Thrones”, the most popular TV series of the moment. The first two seasons were a huge hit and the third season premiered on March 31, 2013 on HBO (the American premium cable network that produces the series). There are about 4.5 million subscribers who follow the series. But overall, the […]
The smartphone patent wars: nothing really surprising…
By 28 November 2013 42
(This is an updated and slightly modified version of this post, published on April 25, 2012.) In April 2012, Lucy Koh, a US District Court Judge, tried to force a truce on one of the fiercest fronts of what is now commonly known as the “Smartphone Patent Wars”. She ordered Tim Cook and Choi Gee-Sung, […]
A closer look at the Google Books decision
By 21 November 2013 0
Last Thursday Judge Denny Chin of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [yep, the same one who rejected the proposed settlement agreement in 2011, holding that it was too unbalanced in favour of Google] issued his much-awaited ruling in the Google Books Library Project saga, which started back in 2005. It was then that the Authors’ Guild and the Association of […]
Will ‘Patent trolls’ soon appear on the European market?
By 18 November 2013 60
It is under this title that a series of articles (published in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique on October, 19 2013 and prepared by Laurent Lambrecht; see here) wondered if the future unitary patent and unified patent court might attract “trolls” in Europe. “The risk is not negligible“: this is my answer, summarized in the […]
Browser War: The Return
By 10 November 2013 0
This is the fourth post adapted from term papers that my master students submitted in June 2013. This post (originally written by Fanny Avaux, Maxime Georgin, Marie-Laure Le Déodic & Sophie Naert) has been honed and complemented by Olivier Simons. The first browser war took place in the late 1990s when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer replaced Netscape’s […]