Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple’s phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of valuable public spectrum remain free of any oversight. While the iPhone is a raging success, the wireless market is headed towards total failure.
Nilay Patel at The Verge. As they say, read the whole thing.

Interesting Academic Papers: May, June and July 2011

“Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod” by Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer from the Journal of International Commerce and Economics.

“Proceed at Your Peril: Crowdfunding and the Securities Act of 1933” by Joan Heminway and Shelden Hoffman.

“Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain” by fifteen researchers from four institutions—the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics.