So we got our Bye Bye Facebook event last night. It seems to have rocked the Facebook boat somewhat but a first estimate shows that only some 10000 Dutch FB accounts have been cancelled. Expect some more and also expect some repentants who just felt that after a few days their life seemed strangely empty…
Privacy breaches, information dragnets, darknet, hacks, cybercrime, leaks, sometimes it makes you wonder what good information technology actually brings to human kind. Sure, media has always focused on things that can go sour; our first interest is in what disasters or negative effects inventions and innovations bring to us. And, they usually do. Alfred Nobel’s…
With the Bitcoin exchange rate going skyhigh (1 XBT = € 2232 at 4/7/17) one could easily forget about the underlying technology: the blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain technology can be regarded as a distributed ledger system in which the transactions are permanently time-stamped and stored on many computers simultaneously and made secure by cryptographic means.…
3 weeks ago the METISfiles reported on the ruling of the EU court on case C-174/15, which stated that the lending of an electronic book (e-book) may – under certain conditions – be treated in the same way as the lending of a traditional book. After Angela Ruiz Robles patented the idea of the electronic…
Back in 2012 a study “E-Lending Public Libraries”, carried out on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of OCW (Education, Culture and Science), concluded that the existing lending right regime of the Dutch copyright act did not apply to e-books. Moreover the study also concluded that the current European law and regulation framework does not offer…
Jack Dorsey’s first tweet was “just setting up my twttr”. We are talking March 21st 2006 and everybody is about to get their 140 characters of fame. Ten years later Twitter shows some impressive stats. There are some 310 million active users out of a total of 1.3 billion accounts sending 500 million tweets per…
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 $…
With Jack Dorsey back in the saddle Twitter is trying to get some grip on its future. Not a small effort for Dorsey as he is also CEO of Square who just announced its IPO. But Twitter needs quite a bit of work as investors are not really happy with how things are going. Dick…
A few weeks ago The METISfiles reported on the intensified battle in the world of advertising. While it seems that the fight is limited to adblock software developers on one side and publishing, media and advertising agencies on the other hand, there is more to it. Let’s take this from the top. To sell stuff…
Last year The METISfiles reported on the business model for social media – advertising – and the increasing annoyance it causes with users. As advertising budgets follow the eyeballs, online advertising is growing at the expense of offline advertising. eMarketer estimates that $ 574 million is spend on advertising in 2015 of which 28% is…