Insights

musica.ly was one of the hottest apps of 2015 and 2016 — and hasn’t left the App Store Top 40 ever since. Are its 15-second videos a one-hit wonder, or are they here to stay?

Written by Sonali Bloom, HBS ’17. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. Craigslist grew rapidly by leveraging hyper-local network effects — but now faces market share erosion as other platforms enter niche segments. Who will win, and how?

Written by Yuval Gonczarowski, HBS ’17. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. What started as a place for disgruntled employees to share their frustrations with the people upstairs anonymously, quickly became a money-making machine. 

On March 8th, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Andrew Mao from Aarhus University. Andrew gave a talk called “Studying Teamwork and Cooperation in the Virtual Lab.”

Much fanfare has been made of the promise and potential of the platform economy, predominantly for its flexibility and efficiency, but for workers in the “gig economy,” is it really a reasonable way to earn a living? This is the central question at the heart of Juliet Schor’s (Boston College) research on some of the big six providers: Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Favor.

On March 22nd, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Gerald (Jerry) Kane from Boston College. Jerry gave a talk called “Wikipedia: The Canary in the Coal Mine for Online Collaboration.”

Presented at the Digital Initiative 2017 Future Assembly, in this flash talk, Richard Dulude from Underscore VC, explores problems with adopting the technology of VR and possible ways to address these challenges.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg explore data visualization’s many applications — from analytics to art.

On December 4th, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Siobhan O’Mahony and Rebecca Karp from Boston University.

What if you could spin up an entire organization of qualified experts in a matter of moments? This is precisely what Stanford’s Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein aim to accomplish with their research on Flash Orgs (crowdsourcing complex work using reconfigurable organizational structures).