Chris Anderson

Big data: shifting the bell curve to the long tail

Chris Anderson from Wired opened the DMA conference in Las Vegas focusing on a subject on everyone’s mind this year: big data. For Anderson, big data isn’t just little data, bigger. It’s a major shift of mind set that he predicts will be a necessary core competency for businesses and the work force alike. 

We’ve come from a world as marketers where there is a right and wrong. A single hypothesis that we test or a good model that we want to scale. But big data isn’t about that. We have to think like Google.

TED launches new YouTube channel as part of education drive

The non-profit organisation TED is responsible for some of the most inspiring talks relating to technology and innovation in circulation today.

Unsurprisingly, videos of these often become viral hits within relevant communities online. But many believe TED is ignoring an important audience: youngsters.

As TED curator Chris Anderson explains, “Over the past few years…we’ve seen these talks spread over the Web and a recurring theme from people in the community has been, ‘These are great, but could you do something more for the kids?'”

Are we all destined to become manufacturers?

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has a knack for spotting and popularizing interesting business trends that are driven by the internet. He’s most famous, of course, for his book The Long Tail, which has inspired legions of internet entrepreneurs.

But at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, Anderson revealed that he’s thinking more about the physical than the virtual these days.

Will Chris Anderson’s publisher profit from “Free”?

How do you sell hardcovers for $26.99 when your book argues that information wants to be free? When you’re Chris Anderson, you give away “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” online.

Anderson takes issue with critics — most notably so far Malcolm
Gladwell — who think his book argues that “information wants to be free.”
According to Anderson, “Some information wants to be
free. And some information wants to be really expensive.”

And the “LongTail” author and Wired editor is hoping that while readers can access the online version of his book for free, they’ll still want to pay to read the book in hardcover form.

The strategy stands to gain Anderson some points in the attention economy for walking his talk of free, but will his publisher make any money giving away his goods for free?

Chris Anderson re-evaluates the economics of ‘free’

He may be selling books, but reality has not been kind to Chris Anderson. His theory that the future of business is selling more of less as presented in his best-selling book, The Long Tail, is refuted by observational data.

And his latest
novel idea – that the future of business is $0.00 – looks downright
absurd in today’s economy. That’s the thesis behind his upcoming book, Free. In fact, it’s so absurd that Anderson had to address the elephant in
the room in a recent guest piece in The Wall Street Journal.