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Technology The Kindle Goes to B-School Waiting for an electronic book that will effectively replace traditional paper- bound textbooks? Amazon.com hopes that the Kindle DX, the lat- est version of its e-reader, will end that wait—or at least bring students one step closer to paper-free study- ing. After launching the DX in May, Amazon announced a pilot program to test its use in the university class- room—a first for the company. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business in Charlottesville will be the only business school to take part in the experiment, which starts this September. Four other institutions also are participating, including Arizona State University in Tempe; Princeton University in New Jersey; Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. During the two-semester pro- gram, faculty at all five schools will follow two groups of students— some will use traditional textbooks, while others will use the Kindle DX. At the end of experiment, students in both groups will be sur- veyed about their experiences. Each university will be testing a different segment of its student body. At Case Western, for example, students in its chemistry, computer science, and freshman seminar classes will be using the DX. At the Darden School, groups of students in its full- time MBA program and its MBA for Executives program will participate. 58 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2009 In addition to containing course materials in digital format, the device offers features such as wireless and cellular connectivity, note taking and highlighting capabilities, a search function, and access to a built-in dictionary. Students also will have the ability to purchase and download books from Amazon's Kindle library, as well as international newspapers, magazines, and blogs. The goal is to discover whether using an e-reader as a learning tool presents significant benefit to stu- dents, says Robert Bruner, dean of Darden. He notes that e-readers promise "to have a great impact on technology, environmental sustain- ability, student and school savings, teaching, and learning." With Social Networks, Size Doesn't Count Those who judge their status by the size of their social networks, listen up: The more Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts you have, the less social influence you may actually wield, according to the working paper, "Network Effects and Personal Influences: Diffusion of an Online Social Network." The paper was written by marketing professor Zsolt Katona at the University of Cali- fornia's Haas School of Business in Berkeley; doctoral student Peter Pal Zubcsek of INSEAD in Fontaine- bleau, France; and marketing profes- sor Miklos Sarvary of INSEAD. The researchers focused their study on a popular European online social network from its 2003 debut to 2006. They studied the site's first 138,964 clients to see how quickly each client was able to con- vince someone else to become a new friend. They found that the larger a per- son's list of friends, the longer it took that individual to recruit a new one. The researchers speculate that the more friends clients had, the less time they could spend on each relation- ship. That could weaken their social influence overall. However, the researchers also found that those who created "clus- ters" of friends—defined as groups of friends who also knew each other— wielded greater influence than those whose friends were not closely linked. This information is important for marketers who now target the users of social networking sites with the largest networks, says Katona. He argues that marketers may do better to target those whose networks are smaller but more interconnected, if they want to generate the most buzz about a new product or service. The complete white paper, which is currently under review with the Journal of Marketing Research, can be found at www.cs.bme.hu/~zskatona/ pdf/diff.pdf.