Chris Dillow points out that the late Reg Varney was the first person in the UK to use a cash machine. This leads him to speculate on the impact of the development of the cash machine on consumer spending and inflation. It is possible that the invention of the cash machine reduced the 'shoe-leather' costs of inflation and so made it more likely that inflation would rise. Also, the ease of getting ...

Whether product placement should be allowed in TV shows or not. Hmm, difficult question. …ministers are consulting on whether to implement part of a European directive, which would allow product placement in the UK from as early as 2010. Under the proposals advertisers would be able to pay to have products

The unfolding farce over government funding for college building limped along after the country's biggest quango announced cash for a mere 13 projects across England

As some regular readers will know, your humble Devil is working on a product in his day-job. Said product is not a particularly original product (it's a content management system, if you must know) but the way in which it operates (and particularly the user interface) is, I think, something rather special. I have been working with one of our developers on this project, partly because he knows code...

The Big Society must be the product of people, not of government, argues Ruth Porter.

When evaluating a product’s feasibility in the market place, and the returns one hopes to generate from an investment in such a product, it is crucial to ascertain the percentage probability that the first few owners die horribly.

By Professor Nick Bosanquet The recession is a product crunch – it confirms and intensifies the end of a twenty year product cycle. In the past decade a number of US icons have seen a fall in shareholder value. Microsoft,...

Marketing a cash cow/mature product to a "hole" new customer! As the joke goes, cemeteries are a great business that people are just dying to get into. But how does one cemetery differentiate itself from the one across the street? Babbling brook! Huge shade trees? Celebrity residents? What could make one hole in the ground so much more desirable than another hole in the ground? How about reaching ...

But whilst the rest of the world is pumping cash into research, the UK spends less than one per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on developing new technologies. In comparison the US spends three times as much of its national income on green

If a major corporation in the defense industry makes their case for their product, we are interested. I don't want to see my tax money spent on a company that won't stand up for their product. Say what you want about Lockheed Martin, but we give them huge props here for one reason, Fred Moosally and several others from Lockheed Martin put themselves out there and sell their product to the American...