Adam Thierer's Blog, page 176

Perry Chen on Kickstarter

This week on the podcast, Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, an online platform for funding creative projects, discusses the enterprise.  Chen talks about the inspiration behind Kickstarter and its business model, how project creators convince backers (not investors) to fund them, funding success rates, and the most interesting projects funded so far.

Related Readings

How to Use Kickstarter to Launch a Business, at Inc.comThe Kickstarter Effect: Fundraising as Game Theory, at...

Livetweeting Another Senate Online Privacy Hearing Today (2:30pm EST)

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold yet another hearing today (7/27/10) at 2:30pm Eastern with two panels:

Witness Panel 1

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski


Witness Panel 2

Guy "Bud" Tribble, Apple's VP for Software Technology
Bret Taylor, Facebook CTO
Alma Whitten, Google's Privacy Engineering Lead
Jim Harper, Cato Institute
Dorothy Atwood, AT&T's Senior Vice President, Public Policy & Chief Privacy Officer
Prof. Joe Turow, University of Pennsylvania

Join m...

Harmony Institute & Free Press Seek to Create Net Neutrality Propaganda

Interesting article in the New York Times today about how the radical media activist group Free Press is now working with an organization called The Harmony Institute toward the goal of "Adding Punch to Influence Public Opinion."  The way they want to "add punch" is through entertainment propaganda.  The Times article notes that Harmony's mission is "aimed at getting filmmakers and others to use the insights and techniques of behavioral psychology in delivering social and political...

Crovitz on the First Amendment, Parenting & "The Technology of Decency"

The always-excellent Wall Street Journal "Information Age" columnist L. Gordon Crovitz has another editorial worth reading today, which builds on the Second Circuit's recent decision to reverse FCC content regulation for broadcasting.  In "The Technology of Decency," Crovitz explains "parents don't need the FCC to protect their children." "Technology makes it easier to block seven or any number of dirty words," he notes. "Taking the FCC out of regulating indecency might just lead to more...

The Horses are Gone—So Let's Close Some Other Barn Door

The White House and the Federal Communications Commission have painted themselves into a very tight and very dangerous corner on Net Neutrality.  To date, a bi-partisan majority of Congress, labor leaders, consumer groups and, increasingly, some of the initial advocates of open Internet rules are all shouting that the agency has gone off the rails in its increasingly Ahab-like pursuit of an obscure and academic policy objective.

Now comes further evidence, none of it surprising, that all this ...

Digital, Electronic, and Online—Each is Different

The Economist has gotten on the wrong side of a favorite pet-peeve of

mine: confusing "digital" with "electronic." Fear the blog post, Economist.

When I read in the story "Digitisation and Its Discontents" that the works of the Beatles are "scarcely available digitally," I was struck. How does that square with the Beatles CD I have in my CD collection? All the others for sale on Amazon? Is this some mass bootleg operation?

No, what's going on is that the Economist is confusing the words...

Livetweeting Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2010 Conference: Watch Livecast Now!

I'm in the Valley today livetweeting the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2010 conference. Check out the exciting agenda or join the discussion on Twitter (#NewSpace2010). Watch it now!

The conference runs all weekend, 8:30-5:30 Pacific time. As readers may know, I've been involved with the Foundation since 2005, was chairman 2008-2009 and was just re-elected to its Board of Directors. Here's the Foundation's credo:

The Space Frontier Foundation is an organization of people dedicated to...

Amazom.com Switches Sides on Net Neutrality

In a startling guest column on CNET yesterday, Paul Misener, vice president for global public policy at Amazon.com, for all practical purposes reversed his company's stand on network neutrality, particularly the controversial non-discrimination rule, which would prohibit ISPs from creating and charging providers of large-scale content, applications and commerce for faster broadband connections and tiered quality of service.

In his column, Misener concedes what many TLF bloggers and...

The Battle for Media Freedom: A Conflict of Cyber-Visions

Over at MediaFreedom.org, a new site devoted to fighting the fanaticism of radical anti-media freedom groups like Free Press and other "media reformistas," I've started rolling out a 5-part series of essays about "The Battle for Media Freedom." In Part 1 of the series, I defined what real media freedom is all about, and in Part 2 I discussed the rising "cyber-collectivist" threat to media freedom.  In my latest installment, I offer an analytical framework that better explains the major...

NRO Op/Ed: Government v. Google: Why Free Marketeers Should Rally Against Search Neutrality

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Thus did Ronald Reagan capture the essence of big government. The two biggest challenges facing defenders of free markets in technology policy lie in Reagan's second point:

Telling the "Good News Story" about how "it" (human ingenuity—what the great economist Julian Simon called our "Ultimate Resource") keeps "moving" (by...