Jimmy Guterman

Jimmy Guterman is the senior editor of Harvard Business Review. Before that he was executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review. Before that, he was editorial director of the Radar Group at O'Reilly Media, where he edited Release 2.0, among other things. And before that he was an editor at large for a team at Harvard Business School Publishing that publishes the online and print publications he works for now, thus closing the circle.

New Release 2.0 on Money 2.0

One year ago, we published an issue of Release 2.0 entitled "When Markets Collide" (download a PDF), in which we considered what Wall Street and Web 2.0 might have to teach one another. Quite a bit, it turned out: the key parallels we uncovered include latency (both have to do their jobs more or less instantly), connectivity (it's the liquidity…

SpongeBob SquarePants Supports O'Reilly Research Finding

In O'Reilly Radar's recent reseach report, Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, we contend that virtual worlds will go mainstream. The most powerful data point supporting our argument is that the most active and popular virtual worlds nowadays tend to be those populated by children. The next generation is growing up playing virtual worlds. And now one of the biggest purveyors…

Goodbye, New York Times

I love The New York Times. I've read it almost every day of my life since I was in high school. For all its recent flaws — the weirdo profiles of the major presidential candidates are the most high-profile — it is still full of the most outstanding reporting. And, on the days that Gail Collins files, it offers up…

Dan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin"

I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain. Yet, like everyone else in business and technology, I need to communicate. As so many studies — and common sense — show, we make decisions better (or,…

Commentary on Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

Extra features won't make ebooks mainstream.

Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, "will come with recipes from the era, copies of the book's first reviews, and a primer on social…

Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk

At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted: Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going…

New O'Reilly Radar Report: a Business Guide to Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life, have generated much excitement — and much skepticism. In Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, the newest O'Reilly Radar report, Ben Lorica, Roger Magoulas, and the O'Reilly Radar team get past the hype (and the anti-hype), detail what is happening in Second Life and other virtual worlds, and lay out what businesses need to do to…

@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes

Another day, another set of expansive keynotes. John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture "speech acts," which I'll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One…

@ETech: fire eagle Launches

Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering service. You can share your location online with sundry sites and services. It's liberal with what it takes in, but…