364 products in Books

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

In responding to the financial crash of 2008, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have relied on prescriptions developed by John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist since Marx. But should we be relying on Keynes? What did Keynes actually say? Did he make his case? Hunter Lewis concludes that he did not. If Keynes was wrong then so are the economic policies of virtually all world governments today.

There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty. And that’s when things got interesting…. You have in your hands the strange, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. It begins as the story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of her mother and then again by a child welfare system that separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands of an epically sadistic foster parent. But there comes a point in her preteen years—maybe it’s the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once—when Cupcake’s story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark comic blues opera. As Cupcake’s troubles grow, so do her voice and spirit. Her gut-punch sense of humor and eye for the absurd, along with her outsized will, carry her through a fateful series of events that could easily have left her dead. Young Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, partying like a rock star, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs. But Cupcake’s unlikely tour through the cubicle world was paralleled by a quickening descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine use, till she eventually found herself living behind a Dumpster. Astonishingly, she turned it around. With the help of a cobbled together family of eccentric fellow addicts and “angels”—a series of friends and strangers who came to her aid at pivotalmoments—she slowly transformed her life from the inside out. A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read. Moving and almost transgressive in its frankness, it is a relentlessly gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contem-porary urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and utterly original storyteller who will guide you on the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll ever take. When it came time for me to talk, I wasn’t sure which parts of my past to tell, which to keep secret, and which to pretend never happened. Uncle Jr. had already seen the welts on my back, so he wasn’t too surprised when I told them about some of the physical abuse I endured at Diane’s. Everyone else hit the roof, except Daddy. He got really quiet and started balling and unballing his fists. I continued my update. Experience had taught me that adults have trouble accepting the idea of children having sex. I decided that from then on, that part of my life never happened. I picked up the story by telling them about Fly, the Gangstas, and getting shot. I was dying for a cigarette. So it seemed a good time to announce that I smoked cigarettes—and weed. After a moment Sam looked at me, smiled, and handed me one of her Marlboros. I preferred menthols, but beggars can’t be choosers. I kicked back, took a long drag, and closed my eyes. Daddy and Jr. were silent. They seemed a bit shocked and unsure about how to respond. “Well, Cup,” Jr. said, “it’s a little too late to be trying to raise you now. But those cigarettes will kill you. And weed will only lead you to stronger drugs.” He didn’t know how right he was. But for me, it was too late to be worrying about stronger drugs—the only worrying I did was whether I could find a connection to get some. So I just smiled, nodded, and took another hit off my cigarette. The eerie quiet returned. —from A Piece of Cake Also available as a Random House AudioBook and eBook.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the internet—and how that affects us all—from influential technology entrepreneur and startup investor Chris Dixon “A must for anyone who wants to better understand the real potential of blockchains and web3.”—Robert Iger, CEO, Disney “A compelling vision of where the internet should go and how to get there.”—Sam Altman, co-founder, OpenAI The internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a decentralized, democratic network of innovation, connection, and freedom. In the past decade, it has fallen almost entirely under the control of a very small group of companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In Read Write Own, tech visionary Chris Dixon argues that the dream of an open network for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship doesn’t have to die and can, in fact, be saved with blockchain networks. He separates this movement, which aims to provide a solid foundation for everything from social networks to artificial intelligence to virtual worlds, from cryptocurrency speculation—a distinction he calls “the computer vs. the casino.”   With lucid and compelling prose—drawing from a twenty-five-year career in the software industry—Dixon shows how the internet has undergone three distinct eras, bringing us to the critical moment we’re in today. The first was the “read” era, in which early networks democratized information. In the “read-write” era, corporate networks democratized publishing. We are now in the midst of the “read-write-own” era, sometimes called web3, in which blockchain networks are granting power and economic benefits to communities of users, not just corporations.   Read Write Own is a must-read for anyone—internet users, business leaders, creators, entrepreneurs—who wants to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going. It provides a vision for a better internet and a playbook to navigate and build the future.

TCP/IP Illustrated, an ongoing series covering the many facets of TCP/IP, brings a highly-effective visual approach to learning about this networking protocol suite. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 contains a thorough explanation of how TCP/IP protocols are implemented. There isn't a more practical or up-to-date bookothis volume is the only one to cover the de facto standard implementation from the 4.4BSD-Lite release, the foundation for TCP/IP implementations run daily on hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide. Combining 500 illustrations with 15,000 lines of real, working code, TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 uses a teach-by-example approach to help you master TCP/IP implementation. You will learn about such topics as the relationship between the sockets API and the protocol suite, and the differences between a host implementation and a router. In addition, the book covers the newest features of the 4.4BSD-Lite release, including multicasting, long fat pipe support, window scale, timestamp options, and protection against wrapped sequence numbers, and many other topics. Comprehensive in scope, based on a working standard, and thoroughly illustrated, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone working with TCP/IP.

Star Trek fans and collectors will love this one-of-a-kind, mini-size collectible communicator with light and sound. The communicator is used for voice communication and serves as an emergency-signaling device for Starfleet. Kit includes a replica of the iconic communicator, with light and sound, and a 48-page book on the history of communicators, complete with full-color photos.

This little book was written to accomplish something big: economic literacy. It is intentionally kept very short to be inviting rather than intimidating. You will gain life-changing understanding of how the economy works in practically no time. Per Bylund will make you excited about what economics has to offer. Because economic literacy is mind-opening. Sound economic reasoning is an enormously powerful tool for understanding both the economy and society. Economic literacy uncovers what is going on under the surface and why things work out as they do. There is no magic to it. In fact, economic literacy is necessary to properly understand the world. Short, direct, axiomatically unassailable, and devastating to the mythology of modern economics. This book not only promote Mises' views, but refutes and attacks the tragicomic orthodoxy of today’s economics mainstream.

Unlike what usually passes for economics in many classrooms, government, the media and elsewhere, Choice is an engaging and intriguing book that provides something quite unique: a genuine treatise on economics that instructs and entertains both economists and general readers. Drawing on the seminal volume by the “Austrian School” economist Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, and comparing classical and neoclassical approaches, Choice is a creative, comprehensive, and unusually lucid book on economic science and market processes. The book illuminates free economies as underpinning civilization, the folly of government central planning, the primacy of entrepreneurship and innovation, the nature of money and banking, the causes of the business cycle, the failures of government intervention, and more. As a result, Choice teaches economic principles and exposes economic fallacies, and any reader will learn both the important truths about economics and the crucial value of individual choice, entrepreneurship, and free markets.

While many books explain the ‘how’ of Bitcoin, The Internet of Money series delves into the ‘why’ of Bitcoin. Following the world-wide success of Volume One and Volume Two, this third installment contains 12 of his most inspiring and thought-provoking talks over the past two years, including:Universal Access to Basic FinanceMeasuring Success: Price or PrincipleEscaping the Global Banking CartelLibre Not LibraUnstoppable Code: The Difference Between Can’t and Won’tAround the world, governments and corporations are increasingly pursuing a reconstruction of money as a system-of-control and surveillance machine. Despite the emergence of an interconnected global society and economy through the decades-long expansion of the internet, the trajectory of these bureaucratic policies foreshadows dire consequences for financial inclusion and independence.Andreas contextualizes the significance of Bitcoin and open blockchains amid these socio-political and economic shifts: What if money could be created without an authority? Are corporate coins the first step towards techno neo-feudalism? Is the real “darknet” run by state intelligence agencies? What if everyone could have a Swiss bank in their pocket? Can we build digital communities resistant to gentrification?In 2013, Andreas M. Antonopoulos started publicly speaking about Bitcoin and quickly became one of the world's most sought-after speakers in the industry. He has delivered dozens of unique TED-style talks in venues ranging from the Henry Ford Museum to booked-out meetups in the Czech Republic and Argentina.In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin (O’Reilly Media), widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. On 7 September 2016, Andreas launched his second book, The Internet of Money Volume One, on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (the interview has since been viewed more than 300,000 times).The Internet of Money offered something that was desperately needed: an explanation of the philosophy, economics, politics, and poetics behind this technology.Make this book part of your collection and see why the internet of money will continue to transform the world and the internet itself.

The New 2018  ebook best selling series has begun!  William D. Danko's True Prosperity ~ Takes More Than Money.~~~ Enter the new title and get your copy today!~~~~~~~~~The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don't live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. This new edition, the first since 1998, includes a new foreword for the twenty-first century by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley.

Widely respected and admired, Philip Fisher is among the most influential investors of all time. His investment philosophies, introduced almost forty years ago, are not only studied and applied by today's financiers and investors, but are also regarded by many as gospel. This book is invaluable reading and has been since it was first published in 1958. The updated paperback retains the investment wisdom of the original edition and includes the perspectives of the author's son Ken Fisher, an investment guru in his own right in an expanded preface and introduction "I sought out Phil Fisher after reading his Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits...A thorough understanding of the business, obtained by using Phil's techniques...enables one to make intelligent investment commitments." ―Warren Buffet

Social media is changing the community. Several may speak up, but under such apparent freedom of expression, an undercurrent of conformity, obedience, self-censorship, and fear dominates. This is how tolerance turns into intolerance and political freedom into totalitarianism. Distinctive attitudes and individuality are replaced by group affiliation, where those who think differently are ostracized. We sense something disturbing: A community moving toward greater control. And a growing risk of politics with totalitarian features that, instead of fighting for freedom, wants to curtail it.