Tag : Umair haque

It’s been a tough month for Umair Haque. First, he conducted the world’s most boring and pointless interview at SXSWi, and now he blogs his extraordinarily muddled thoughts on theiPad.

It’s tough to sum up what he’s saying because it’s so confused. He seems to want the iPad to be more open both physically and in terms of installing apps and content. This is understandable in some ways, but he’s an economist, and his argument seems to be saying that Apple will not succeed with the approach they’ve chosen for fundamental market-based reasons. It’s just that he fails to provide any evidence at all that this is so.

Let’s take it one paragraph at a time.

I wrote a week or so ago about what I wanted to get from South by South West.

Now it’s all over, the hangover has faded but the jetlag is lingering longer than would be ideal, there are a few observations from my first sxsw that I would like to share.

The standout moment for me was Clay Shirky’s talk “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” He captivated the audience for an hour, weaving together seemingly unrelated topics and themes (underwear, weather balloons, spherical trigonometry, Napster and the printing press, amongst others). He created a beautifully articulate argument for how abundance breaks more things than scarcity and raised the question around how much value we can get out of civic sharing.

Not enough people in this industry talk about the economy. Charles Frith wrote an interesting post on this a while ago. On Wednesday, I spotted two more pieces that discussed the ongoing financial crisis but in completely different ways (not from the media/communications industry exactly), that got me thinking. One was Umair Haque’s piece on the Finance 2.0 manifesto. Two points in his post particularly stood out for me: how the edge fund economy should replace the hedge fund economy, and the issue of open source modeling.