One of my all-time favourite books on the implications of the new technologies for business is Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian's Information Rules. Although it's now eleven years old, I still refer to it. The authors were incredibly prescient in their predictions for the viability of existing business models – if only music industry execs had read it. Anyway, I noticed that over at VoxEU there is a podcast featuring an interview with Hal Varian in his role as Google's chief economist. Worth a listen.
Thanks for the podcast pointer. There's an article in the Economist about some of the work that Varian is doing now on using search statistics to improve economic predictions that looks really, really interesting to me.
Thankyou for that – I'll have to retriev The Economist from my son who sneaks away with it each week. Hal Varian is one of my favourite, favourite economists.