CordeliaShackleton's Profile

Sidney!!!!! Great post. I think Mr. Zuck has a strong PR team. As much as I believe him to be the “nice” guy he is so often portrayed in the press, I do think that his “free internal to all” campaign has some business ties for Facebook. Whoever manages to be in control of the provision of internet for any country has the ability to control a nation. Perhaps India was correct is suggesting that they would rather provide the service themselves than let Mr. Zuckerberg dominate what it’s citizens were seeing.

Thanks for this BB! Can you please come to London and try and get TfL to buy some of these and get our Tube fairs down? RMT, the Tube drivers union, is notorious for striking at the prospect or mention of driverless change for fear of losing their jobs. As a former London Tube commuter, it drives me mad!

Thanks for this LG! I wonder if this business creates the potential for people to adapt their social media identities to gain a better credit rating and therefore access to money. At least with the conventional old-fashioned credit assessment, hard facts are required with subjective evidence, thus making it hard to create a “fake profile” and dodge the reality of what one’s true credit score should be.

Thanks for this! I find this blockchain technology so confusing, it’s so hard to get my head around what’s actually going on. I don’t understand if there is no third party, who is enforcing a contract or chasing the party who hasn’t stuck to the agreement? Am I going to be held accountable by Blockchain lawyers? and if so, if the system has to fall back on a human to enforce it’s terms then isn’t it in effect using a third party anyway?

Nikki! I am responding because I thought that your article was super and I am very interested in the logistics of airports. A secondary motivation was that I wanted to give the perspective of a non-ex-consultant…

My concern with the finger printing is that terrorists and illegal immigrants will be able to access the technology to mimic someone else’s fingerprint and with the huge number of people travelling, each individual passing through an airport will not be able to be checked, and the fraudulent activity will go unnoticed. I would almost wait longer in the passport control queue!

Thanks for this Orianne. I have a few thoughts. Firstly, given the expense of paying rent in a prime location, which a book store needs to do, how can this machine help The Harvard Book Store compete on price? Surely, an online retailer can have equivalent inventory costs by having a similar machine in a cheaper location and print books as they receive the orders. Secondly, if a consumer knows what they want, more often than not they don’t need to go to a book store to get it printed, they can just order on line. This machine will surely only capture consumers who know what book they want? If they didn’t they would have to browse the shelves of the book store and make a purchase based on a book they came across and liked i.e. they would not need the help of the EBM.

Finally, how can you monetise, “the experience of browsing, spending time in, or visiting a book store” – it is free at the point of consumption to the consumer but not to the bookstore.

Thanks for this Long. I am interested to know how many of the Singles Day discounts are real discounts i.e. for how long the products that are on discount traded at the non-discounted price for. Also, in considering whether the West cold adopt Singles Day in to it’s retail calendar, I wonder if Western cultures could support such a large retail day so close to Thanksgiving or Christmas. I think that it would be a push for consumers to spend a lot of money on two dates which are so close to one another in terms of affordability and also guilt!

Thanks for this Amelia! I find the Airfrov business model somewhat unconvincing. I can’t imagine another place on Earth where this business model will work other than Singapore. Take Abercrombie & Fitch for example. The price differential between Abercrombie & Fitch products in the USA vs. UK is the same as the exchange rate i.e. a top for £10 in London will cost $10 in New York. Apple products are equivalently priced. Now, if I pay someone who is in NYC to bring me back an A&F top or an iPhone, they surely have to declare it to customs as bringing in goods for someone else or selling imported goods to them if they are not? I think in a globalised free market world that the difference in price between equivalent products in different jurisdictions is simply as a result of different taxes i.e. given transparent pricing a rational consumer would purchase a product abroad and have it delivered if the cost saving justified the inconvenience and shipping costs and I don’t see how Airfrov could offer a better service given they are not getting wholesale prices and are taking some commission for the service.

Interesting, I can’t help thing what the prospects of rising sea levels are on other cities, namely my own town, London. Sea levels are rising but surely technology can keep up with the pace and something will be invented to come along to protect our coasts and riverbeds?

Great article. Just as the iPhone destroyed the Blackberry, I wonder what the electronic driverless car could destroy – Uber, car parks, Deliveroo, Ocado, Instacart… the list is endless.

It has been well known that for years airplanes have been the worst polluters on the planet. It’s great that hopefully this CORSIA treaty will force Airbus and Boeing to develop better, more fuel efficient planes. I hope that the money they airlines save on using less fuel per flight they re-invest in customer experience by taking out some seats in the cabin and allowing for more leg room!! On, “scheduling in real-time, meaning remove waste, cost, and ultimately emissions through a demand driven network. In terms of routes, it could remove or add routes in real-time as sales demand fluctuates. Similarly, it could dynamically adjust which planes are scheduled on which routes and try to optimize the number of seats on that route.” – this poses a great business opportunity for an HBS grad. The ability to schedule flights real time would mean that whenever there is an HBS trip, be it Ski Trip or Spring Break or Thanksgiving we could increase the size of the scheduled plane earning more money and meaning that students wouldn’t have to pay so much on flights!

Interesting read. I can’t help but wonder whether Carnival would have made/proposed to make the fuel saving changes had they been costly to implement. If I were a cynic I would suggest that they are piggy-backing their environmentally friendly programme on a strategic economic money saving programme and benefiting from some good PR in the process…

Thanks for this MayC, it touches on a topic that I try not to think about – genetic manipulation scares me. I worry that if we interfere with nature we will perturb the eco-system that supports the world and create an environment where uncontrollable disease can survive. I am somewhat Darwinian and believe in survival of the fittest and that “playing mother nature” is not wise because we will force nature in a direction that is not natural and therefore can be detrimental on a wider scale. A direction that the eco-system has avoided going in in the first instance – I think that nature evolves to takes the best path for the most species in it. The system is so tightly correlated that the slightest interference can have huge repercussions elsewhere. I just don’t think that it can be good, as lawgu2016 mentions, to grow fish in a tank in the dessert. I am sure that it affects the meat of the fish and on a moral level I find it somewhat inhumane. I am fine with a field of potatoes being grown to be harvested but treating fish in the same way by fish farming on such a large scale, with all the chemicals used to make the fish grow faster and have the characteristics that are deemed ideal will surely affect the evolution of man too. We will end up paying for our dabbling in the long term.