Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring This lively Very Short Introduction reviews the central events, machines, and people that feature in established accounts of the history of computing, critically examining received perceptions and providing a fresh look at the nature and development of the modern electronic computer. The book begins by discussing a widely accepted linear narrative of the history of computing, centred around innovatory highlights that start with the use of knotted cords to aid calculation, all the way to the smartphones of the present day. It discusses the problems and simplifications present in such a narrative, and offers instead an account, centred on users, that identifies four distinct historical threads: calculation, automatic computing, information management, and communication. These threads are examined individually, tracing their paths and the convergences of related technologies into what has come to be called 'the information age'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This groundbreaking book analyses the geography of the commercial Internet industry. It presents the first accurate map of Internet domains in the world, by country, by region, by city, and for the United States, by neighborhood.
Demonstrates the extraordinary spatial concentration of the Internetindustry.
Explains the geographic features of the high tech venture capital behind the Internet economy.
Demonstrates how venture capitalists' abilities to create and use tacit knowledge contributes to the clustering of the internet industry
Draws on in-depth interviews and field work in San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.

Due to the dramatic increase in competition over the last few years, it has become more and more important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to run an efficient business and offer an adequate Quality of Service. "The Competitive Internet Service Provider" is a comprehensive guide for those seeking to do just that.

Oliver Heckmann approaches the issue from a system point of view, looking not only at running a network, but also at connecting the network with peering and transit partners or planning the expansion of the network.

"The Competitive Internet Service Provider: " Offers an advanced reference on the topic, drawing on state-of-the art research in network technology. Clearly defines the criteria enabling ISPs to operate with the greatest efficiency and deliver adequate Quality of Service. Discusses the implications of the future multiservice Internet and multimedia applications such as Voice over IP, peer-to-peer, or network games. Delivers a comparative evaluation of different feasible Quality of Service approaches. Explores scientific methods such as queuing theory, network calculus, and optimization theory. Illustrates concepts throughout with mathematical models and simulations.

This invaluable reference will provide academic and industrial researchers in the field of network and communications technology, graduate students on telecommunications courses, as well as ISP managers, engineers and technicians, equipment manufacturers and consultants, an understanding of the concepts and issues involved in running a successful ISP.

"Uberization," "digitalization," "platform economy," "gig economy," and "sharing economy" are some of the buzzwords that characterize the current intense discussions about the development of the economy and work around the world, among both experts and laypersons. Immense changes in the ways goods are manufactured, business is done, work tasks are performed, education is accomplished, and so on, are clearly underway. This also means that demand for careful, first-rate social scientific analyses of the phenomena in question is rapidly growing. This edited volume gathers distinguished researchers from economics, business studies, organization studies, medicine, social psychology, occupational health, pedagogics, and sociology to put particular work in both public and private sectors and education in both academic and vocational settings at the focus of the emerging digitalized platform economy. The authors anchor their analyses and conceptual and theoretical work in distinctive empirical developments that are taking place in one of the leading countries of digitalization processes: Finland. Finnish case studies reflect general global developments and show their particular, context-related actualization in multiple ways. This double exposure enables the authors of this multi- and interdisciplinary volume to advance conceptualization and theorization of the key phenomena in digitalizing platform societies in novel, creative, and groundbreaking directions. This book will without doubt be of great value to academic researchers and students in the fields of economics, business studies, work studies, social sciences, education, technology, digitalization, platforms, occupational health, entrepreneurship, and professions.

This groundbreaking book analyses the geography of the commercial Internet industry. It presents the first accurate map of Internet domains in the world, by country, by region, by city, and for the United States, by neighborhood.
Demonstrates the extraordinary spatial concentration of the Internetindustry.
Explains the geographic features of the high tech venture capital behind the Internet economy.
Demonstrates how venture capitalists' abilities to create and use tacit knowledge contributes to the clustering of the internet industry
Draws on in-depth interviews and field work in San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.

This is the first study of business ethics to take into consideration the plethora of issues raised by the Information Age.
The first study of business ethics to take into consideration the plethora of issues raised by the Information Age.
Explores a wide range of topics including marketing, privacy, and the protection of personal information; employees and communication privacy; intellectual property issues; the ethical issues of e-business; Internet-related business ethics problems; and the ethical dimension of information technology on society.
Uncovers previous ignored ethical issues.
Underlines the need for public discussion of the issues.
Argues that computers and information technology have not necessarily developed in the most ethical manner possible.

The internationalisation of information and communication has accelerated since the 1990s in Europe and worldwide. Taking a close look at the empirical analysis of competitive trade positions, trends in foreign direct investment and the internationalisation of research and development in ICT brings many new insights about the expansion in the EU's most dynamic sector. Moreover, the analysis discusses case studies on key players in ICT and suggests major policy

Digital innovation - involving the Internet, its content and ecosystems of global users - is a rapidly evolving way of creating strategic and societal value. The phenomenon of Open data is on the rise and transforming the fundamental nature of how many industries, companies and governments connect with each other and the end-users of products and services - from increased customer-centric innovations, to winning political campaigns, and managing public health concerns. Open data holds the promise of greater transparency, greater accountability and empowerment of stakeholders. Yet curating and publicly sharing data can be difficult, requires substantive investments in knowledge infrastructures and incentives to do so are not well understood. Who is driving and enabling the open data movement? What motivates organizations to release data and how are they using it to create value? What are the current challenges and how are they being mitigated? What are the decision-frames adopted for sharing data? What are the possible applications and lessons to be learnt from current practices? What is the role of organisational ingredients and culture as a catalyst for adopting and facilitating open data practices? What is the possible impact of semantic web application? By exploring the multiple dimensions of open data and the interplay of economic utility, governance, societal values of fairness and trust, this volume seeks to entice readers by providing evidence-based answers to these questions, among others. Readers are tempted to a progressively revealing and enlightening journey from the conceptualisation to cultural proliferation of the latest trends in knowledge management: open data.Digital Innovation: Harnessing the Value of Open Data draws on practical experiences, bringing together widely distributed and latest knowledge of open data practices as case studies from researchers, academics, industry leaders, policy advisors and practitioners. In exploring the economics and technology paradigms, data governance and management practices of digital-centric private and public organizations, this volume sheds light on why there exists a need to embrace open data, what is needed to optimize the value of open data in driving digital innovation and how it is being currently conceived. The book draws a thought-provoking conclusion on open data as a purpose-driven phenomenon, with its disparate applications in a world of where global convergence on information sharing, storing and management are increasingly becoming a norm.Related Link(s)

Information Technology and Organizational Transformation is arguably the key challenge facing corporate executives and business school academics alike as we approach the millennium. Much that is superficial has been written on the topic in recent years. The siren call of the more popular literature in this area — seductive in the simplicity of the message of radically improved business performance brought about by IT and process re-engineering — has led to the unwary foundering on the rocks of the realpolitik associated with organizational change. But organizational innovation is possible — as the case studies included in this book amply demonstrate. While ‘best practice’ solutions may be illusory, the examples given herein, taken together with the fruits of research undertaken by leading academics from Continental Europe, Scandinavia, North America and the UK, provide key lessons that one ignores at one’s peril. This is a highly important contribution to knowledge. Bringing together such key themes as organizational learning, knowledge management, IT and business strategy alignment, the management of change, inter-organizational communications, corporate innovation and business process change, this book provides significant learning for those willing to challenge much of the received wisdom on this fascinating topic.

This is the story of Microsoft(R) and how it rose to become the first monopoly of the information Age. The text is assembled from Ted Lewis's columns published in "IEEE Computer" (1994-1998), "IEEE Internet Computing," and "Scientific American," "Microsoft Rising" is a tale of great, emotion, and techno-marketing hype in one of the fastest growing, mainline industries of the world. It is an eye witness account to the changing computer industry and the story of Silicon Valley and how it works, a revisionist history of computing, circa 1990-2000. "Microsoft Rising" is ultimately about Microsoft's domination of the computer industry.

This book reports the author's personal history through the early 1990's to the end of the decade. These stories often try to predict or explain the chaos of Silicon Valley. Lewis analyzes the industry and shows how high-technology industry is constantly changing in turmoil and upheaval. He also examines the art of software development and deals with innovation and the emergence of techno-society. The book does not promise any answers, but rather concludes this short journey into the recent past with a number of provoking ideas about the future of hi-tech.

In the estimating, planning and management of any project, large or small, an understanding of the impact of risk is critical. This book explains how the growing number of people choosing to or forced to organise their work as projects can make realistic assessments of the uncertainty affecting costs, timescale and revenue, before commitments are made. A clear analysis of the role of uncertainty is combined in this concise and practical handbook with simple, cost-effective techniques for measuring and modelling the overall risk to a project’s budget and schedule. There is advice and help here for the whole project team, including project managers; bid managers; project sales professionals; planners; estimators; managers running a project-based business; and consultants and auditors advising a projects business. Drawn from the author’s extensive experience on projects ranging in scale from a few man-months to hundreds of man-years, the book will beelevant to anyone involved in a project-based business. Examples are presented as simple models, built in spreadsheets using the @Risk software package. No more than basic knowledge of Lotus 1-2-3^® or Excel^® will be required by the reader.

"Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how." -Lawrence Lessig "Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace-explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order... Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It's also a moral one." -Fortune Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you "mine" money from ones and zeros? The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create "smart contracts," to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities' ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking. "If you...don't 'get' crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you." -Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution "De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address." -James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

In Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, Deepa Das Acevedo and a collection of scholars and experts show why government actors must go beyond mass surveys and data-scrubbing in order to truly understand the realities of gig work. The contributors draw on qualitative empirical research to reveal the narratives and real-life experiences that define gig work, and they connect these insights to policy debates being fought out in courts, town halls, and even in Congress itself. The book also bridges academic and non-academic worlds by drawing on the experiences of drivers, journalists, and workers' advocates who were among the first people to study gig work from the bottom up. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in gig work, the legal infrastructure surrounding it, and how that infrastructure can and must be improved.

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

The 'end of history' has not taken place. Ideological and economic crisis and the status quo of neoliberal capitalism since 2008 demand a renewed engagement with Marx. But if we are to effectively resist capitalism we must truly understand Marx: Marxism today must theorise how communication technologies, media representation and digitalisation have come to define contemporary capitalism. There is an urgent need for critical, Marxian-inspired knowledge as a foundation for changing the world and the way we communicate from digital capitalism towards communicative socialism and digital communism. Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism does exactly this. Delving into Marx's most influential works, such as Capital, The Grundrisse, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, Christian Fuchs draws out Marx's concepts of machinery, technology, communication and ideology, all of which anticipate major themes of the digital age. A concise and coherent work of Marxist media and communication theory, the book ultimately demonstrates the relevance of Marx to an age of digital and communicative capitalism.

This book, originally published in 1988, reviews the development of high technology industries at global and selected national and local levels, providing a unique insight into reasons for and consequences of such modern industrial development. It appraises government policies for assisting the development of this sector and focuses on the fact that high tech industry tends to be concentrated in particular regions of countries which attain the status of 'successful populations'. High technology industry seems to offer little benefit to declining manufacturing areas and the book offers explanations for these regional concentrations and assesses the likely consequences.

Published in 1984, this book reviews British industrial policy towards information technology within the context of the international trading system. It argues that the incoherence of British policy stems from the clash between its core liberal ideology and its centralised political system and that unless Britiain's traditional liberal ideology in trade policy was abandoned within this market, Britiain was set to become a mere technological dependency of America. It discusses how the British government needed to develop effective non-tariff barriers in the form of 'industrial policy' to minimise the political and economic costs of technological dependence.

How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love-and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web. Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet.

Public Service Information Technology explains how all areas of IT management work together. Building a computer-based information system is like constructing a house; different disciplines are employed and need to be coordinated. In addition to the technical aspects like computer networking and systems administration, the functional, business, management, and strategic aspects all are equally important. IT is not as simple as expecting to use a software program in three months. Information Technology is a complex field that has multiple working parts that require proper management. This book demystifies how IT operates in an organization, giving the public manager the necessary details to manage Information Technology and to use all of its resources for proper effect.

This book is for technical IT managers and non-technical (non-IT) managers and senior executive leaders. Not only will the Chief Information Officer, the IT Director, and the IT Manager find this book invaluable to running an effective IT unit, the Chief Financial Officer, the HR Director, and functional managers will understand their roles in conjunction with the technical team. Every manager at all levels of the organization has a small yet consequential role to play in developing and managing an IT system. With practical guidelines and worksheets provided in the book, both the functional team and the technical team will be able to engage collaboratively to produce a high-quality computer-based information system that everyone involved can be proud to use for many years and that can deliver an effective and timely public program to citizens.

This book includes:

• Multiple layers of security controls your organization can develop and maintain, providing greater protection against cyber threats.
• Job-related worksheets you can use to strengthen your skills and achieve desired program results.
• Practices you can apply to maximize the value of your contracts and your relationships with for-profit companies and other contractors.
• New method for deciding when contracting or outsourcing is appropriate when internal resources are not available.
• Improved method for estimating intangible benefits (non-financial gains) attributable to a proposed project.
• An approach to deciding what parts of a business process should or should not be automated, paying critical attention to decision points and document reviews.