HBS Digital Initiative builds community and expertise around digital transformation and tech at Harvard Business School and beyond. We manage this forum to gather and share perspectives from the HBS student community.
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When Facebook made the decision to unbundle Messenger from the blue app, the internet went ablaze. How dare you make me download a new app that I can already access, we all cried. A few years later, the prescience of [...]
Companies seeking to connect with younger consumers or avid social media users should seriously consider their approach to Black Twitter, which has significant influence on cultivating trending topics and defining what is popular.
Multiple apps have appeared to solve the same customer need: to communicate via mobile. Yet, they all seem to pretty much do the same. So why is it that users don’t just stick to one single app?
Can consumers reliably select and purchase large-scale furniture items online without seeing the items in-person, and more importantly trying them out first? I thought this would be a definite no, though the recent successes of mattress start-up Casper and online [...]
Telemedicine is massively and intimately changing the way Health Care is delivered. Providers and payors will benefit from Telemedicine and cut costs, while maintaining the same quality standards. Will patients, too? Under what conditions?
Building and sustaining a for profit business based on open source software has been attempted by innumerable companies since the dawn of computing. However Red Hat, the company behind Red Hat Linux was the first and for a long time [...]
As voter engagement applications become increasingly widespread in politics, we need greater emphasis on education and participation, and less on winning campaigns.
Last month, I was babysitting my one-year-old niece and quickly ran out of nursery rhymes to sing to keep her entertained. That’s when YouTube Kids came to my rescue. A free, ad supported family app, it is Google’s YouTube platform’s offering focused [...]
The monolithic player in the sharing economy is once again in the front page; this time around for a not so appealing news story. UBER, the company that is breaking all the records imaginable, available in 58 countries and 300 [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iSlPoQm2XY ——A kiss is not a contract… but that’s only because you can’t upload a kiss to the blockchain (yet). I don’t know enough about the blockchain or smart contracts to decide whether the above youtube video/joke combo made any [...]
The U.S. eCommerce landscape is littered with remains of public and private companies that were once high flyers. Time and time again, players like Gilt Groupe, Fab.com, Zulily, and Overstock (to name just a few) have failed to live up [...]
During Field 3 last spring, my team started a two sided online marketplace. After some initial success and discussions about how to move forward, I finally decided to kill the idea and would like to document a post-mortem. This post [...]
As of January 1 2016, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has made it compulsory for all investors (Retail, HNI and Institutional) to apply for IPO shares electronically under the new ASBA (Application Supported by Blocked Amount) regulation. [...]