The emerging “disruption economy” and “regulatory hacks”. Is this where Business 3.0 is heading?

This is definitely an interesting article on the emerging “disruption economy”. I am particularly intrigued by the concept of businesses such as airbnb and Uber being “regulatory hacks”. This smacks of on interesting PhD thesis for an economics grad student!

Gigaom

By now, we’ve gotten pretty used to the disruption that the rise of the social web has created in the media industry, where it has upended traditional business models and allowed creators of content to connect directly with their audience. But that same wave of socially-driven disruption is now moving through the rest of the economy too — particularly in services that can be easily socialized, such as the hotel business, the taxi industry or the education market. As that wave progresses, we’re seeing companies like Airbnb and Uber and Coursera run into more and more regulatory hurdles, but the writing is already on the wall: service businesses that don’t use social features to lower barriers and increase efficiency will likely not survive long.

Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require…

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Why Amazon customers might think twice about going east — Cloud Computing News

“Why is it that Heroku, Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram et al are still so heavily dependent on Amazon’s aging and problematic US-East region? Very good question. Here are some potential answers.” via Why Amazon customers might think twice about going east — Cloud Computing News.

This article (and the issues Amazon’s customers are experiencing) point our that the Cloud does not make a company’s infrastructure magically bullet proof.

Contingency planning, Disaster Recovery plans, good Service Level Agreements, and business interruption insurance are all key considerations for companies moving products and services into the cloud.

Are you fully prepared if the cloud goes down?

A healthy reminder from Amazon: You don’t buy ebooks, you rent them | GigaOm

Gigaom

Updated: Sometimes the language we use fails to capture the essence of what we’re doing when we are online, or lulls us into a false sense of security about our behavior and what it means. For example, we’ve gotten pretty used to the idea that we can “buy” ebooks from Amazon (s amzn): we just click a button and pay with a credit card and there it is on our Kindle. Except that we aren’t really buying it in the traditional sense of the word; we are merely renting it, or paying for access to it under a specific set of circumstances — and a recent incident in which a woman’s account was blocked and all of her books removed without explanation is a healthy reminder of that.

Norwegian technology blogger Martin Bekkelund describes how his friend Linn Jordet Nygaard found that her Amazon account had been shut down…

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Andy Grove Sounds Off on Data Transparancey in Helathcare | GigaOm

Gigaom

Andy Grove, the legendary and longtime CEO of Intel (s INTC), wants to light a fire under healthcare providers and patients.

In an article in the latest issue of Wired magazine, he argues that, in healthcare, “1950s-era thinking still rules the day, and irrational and inexplicable pricing is routine.”

“The health care industry plays a gigantic game of Blind Man’s Bluff, keeping patients in the dark while asking them to make life-and-death decisions. The odds that they will make the best choice are negligible and largely depend on chance. Patients need to have data, including costs and their own medical histories, liberated and made freely available for thorough analysis. What health care needs is a window sticker—a transparent, good-faith effort at making prices clear and setting market forces to work,” he writes.

Grove’s interest in healthcare isn’t new. Over the past couple of decades, after being diagnosed with prostate…

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end patent wars like Apple v Samsung | Metro.co.uk

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end patent wars like Apple v Samsung | Metro.co.uk.

Another major mover and shaker (this time, no less than Jeff Bezos), joins the chorus of voices recognizing that the time has come for patent reform!

Analytics Frim Outs Intellectual Ventures Shell Companies

Interesting….

Gigaom

Patent troll king Intellectual Ventures is notorious not only for its size but also for the invisible way it stalks its victims. That could change, however, thanks to a crowd-sourced project that will identify the shell companies that IV uses as tentacles.

For the unfamiliar, IV is the dark empire of Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft (s msft) executive who gamed the patent system by amassing tens of thousands of often-flimsy patents and then threatening to sue everyone in sight. IV and other trolls have reportedly drained $500 billion from the economy and created widespread disenchantment with America’s patent policies.

While IV has been at this for years, its activities are often undetected thanks to a clever use of a reported 1,300 shell companies. This means that the start-ups and tech companies who receive “pay-up-or-else” letters for using things like emoticons are confronted by patent owners with futuristic names…

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Why Google Was Right And the Authors’ Guild Wrong on Fair Use

Gigaom

The seven-year fight between authors and publishers over Google’s attempt to scan and digitize millions of books as part of its Google Library Project is almost certainly one of the longest-running copyright battles of the web era. The company recently agreed to settle a lawsuit launched by the Association of American Publishers, but a similar lawsuit with the Authors Guild is still under way — and now Google has just been given what looks like some powerful ammunition from a federal court in a related case, involving a group of universities known as the Hathi Trust, who were helping the search giant with its scanning program for research purposes.

There are elements of the Hathi Trust decision that make it different from the issues raised by the Google case, since it involves universities rather than a corporate entity, but the bottom line is that a federal court has decided scanning…

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Study: Trolls account for 40 percent of patent lawsuits — Tech News and Analysis

Study: Trolls account for 40 percent of patent lawsuits — Tech News and Analysis.

A recent article on GigaOm.com discusses a recent study which documents a significant spike in the number of patent suits being brought by NPEs (or “trolls” in common parlance), with such suits now making up nearly 40% of all patent litigation.

Even more disturbing is the fact that typical costs in patent litigation are now ranging from $650,000 to $5 Million (depending, largely, on the amounts of money at stake). This is a huge amount of money being tied up in IP fights that could otherwise be used in R&D or to otherwise drive innovation or fund job growth.

Of course, filed patent lawsuits are only the tip of the iceberg. This does not not include the impact of IP disputes which do not even reach the litigation stage involving threats, forced licensing deals, and disputes which settle on other bases before litigation.

UN sponsored “patent peace negotiations” underway. Is there hope on the horizon?

Here is an opportunity for there to be real and substantive dialog regarding reforming and harmonizing patent law. Sadly, it appears unlikely and true progress will be made here, but one can hope.

Exclusive: Anatomy Of A Brokerage IT Meltdown – Security –

Exclusive: Anatomy Of A Brokerage IT Meltdown – Security –.
InformationWeek.com has an excellent article up which details the breakdowns in IT policy and procedure which lead the now-defunct stock brokerage, GunnAllen Financial, become the first company to be fined by the SEC for failing to protect customer data.

The article is a hair-raising read and the actions of both GunnAllen and its IT company, The Revere Group, would be almost comical if not for the incredibly serious implications of the cavalier way in which they dealt with sensitive client information.

While this instance is an extreme one, it is an object lesson for companies handling sensitive client information. The consequences of poor data management and data security are dire!