Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.9: Xerox PARC

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was sent up by Xerox in 1970 to establish leadership in the “architecture of information”, a sufficiently vague but enticing term coined by Xerox CEO Peter McColough. Drawing on Xerox’s great wealth, PARC harvested the fruits of ARPA’s continuous funding by hiring one of their former directors and by recruiting some of computer science’s top researchers. At PARC, Xerox developed the Alto and the Star, personalized computers with a GUI interface, mouse, and even Ethernet data networking. These PARC innovations inspired companies like Apple, Cisco and 3Com to develop new technologies like the Macintosh and data routers.

Is Cyberpunk Making a Comeback?

Admittedly that sounds quite weak given the “virtual” reality of recent games like Halo or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 not to Second Life or or the military simulations used these days, but it helped sparked imaginations at the time and changed the culture of telecommunications from one dominated by telephone company engineers and Washington DC lawyers to the promise of the web and creative imaginations tech-savvy multimedia designers and entrepreneurs of the 1990s and the zeroes.

Flash: Multimedia Embraces HTML 5

Steve Jobs in an open letter last April criticized the legacy media platform for being power hungry, non-proprietary, lacking in security, unfriendly to mobile applications, non-touch, and just wrong for the future of multimedia applications development.

Money and Motivation in Star Trek

A perennial SF question of mine was asked in the movie Star Trek: First Contact (1996), when the starship Enterprise E of Star Trek: Next Generation fame goes back into time to Earth, circa 2063, about a decade after World War III ends. They are following a Borg ship that is attacking early Earth to […]

Revisiting “Multimedia”

The term “multimedia” has struggled over the years to keep its relevance but continues to be one of the major monikers of technological change in the media area.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.4: Global Money and Spreadsheet Capitalism

Spreadsheet technology was foundational for digital monetarism because it provided a calculative tool that became universally available and provided immediate feedback via the accessibility of the personal computer.

The Meaning Makers: Google

Television’s global advertising revenues of $151 billion are expected to grow significantly. That figure represents a major growth potential for Google. As TV becomes part of the link economy, every click represents an intention, an interest, a bit of meaning that is stored in Google’s huge data bases.

Back from Hawaii and the EWC Conference

I mention this because I think there is an interesting economic linkage between grandmother-mother-President that bares some scrutiny. I have no idea if they had contentious or controversial discussions. But I do wonder if the President’s mother’s emphasis on entrepreneurship had been influenced by her own mother’s experience as a banker.

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  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

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    apennings70@gmail.com
    anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr

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    The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers, past or present.