James Osborn

Many smart companies are now coming round to the point of view that the internet and open source isn’t a threat to their business model but, if utilised correctly a huge asset. The internet opens up vast new markets and opportunities to interact with some of the smartest knowledge workers in the world on a [...]

After the 115 heads of state and world leaders who met in Copenhagen in 2009 failed to come to a binding resolution for action to combat climate change, many thought that hope of ever coming to a global agreement on the climate was lost. The seeming unwillingness of nations, both developing and developed to bind [...]

On January 12, 2010, Google announced that a major attack launched against its network from hackers inside China (aimed at exposing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists) had prompted it to consider abandoning its Chinese operations and reconsider its 2006 agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results in the country. “Google [...]

In the old world businesses would make it as difficult as humanly possible for consumers to move from their service to a competitors. This makes economic sense, after all… people are less likely to want to move if it involves effort, if they don’t get the equivalent service elsewhere or if something (such as a [...]

One thing Facebook has learnt in the last few days is the importance of incremental updates rather than one large revolution in design. In a recent survey 94% of Facebook users said they disliked the new site design and Facebook for the first time ever announced that they were listening to users and are going [...]

Affluence.org has been proclaimed ‘Facebook for rich people’. Every niche demographic seem to have their own social network and Affluence.org has been designed for rich people who like to talk to rich people… exclusively. It aims to bring ‘the members-only country club‘ mentality to the web but whilst this may sound like a good business [...]

Remember FriendsReunited? Back in 2000 the UK spin-off of ‘Classmates.com’  in many ways laid the foundation of today’s biggest sites. It had a business model, a growth rate to rival that of Twitter and even made a profit of £22 million in 2007 – something Facebook and MySpace are still struggling to do.  So what [...]

One conclusion can be drawn from the current economic crisis… no one has a clue what to do. From Keynesian ‘Fiscal Stimulation’ (Plowing money into the economy to sustain jobs and ride the way through the recession until things pick up again. The famous quote is ‘putting money in bottles and burying them underground’ to [...]

Image via CrunchBase About 12 months back I was signed up to a great little tool called DocSycner which found all the word/excel/powerpoint documents on your PC and simply uploaded them to Google Docs. It was quick and easy and I found it incredibly useful as it allowed me to forget about carrying a memory [...]

Someone I met made an interesting point recently. When I was telling of my interest in the web industry instead of a vague look of comprehension that is common among ‘normal people’ I was greeted with an open hostility for those in the field. Although this is the first time I have seen such a [...]