What is the future of the book and the book publishing industry? That was the question that was in my mind while attending the Book Expo America convention this past week end. In a business that is mature, flat to down in unit sales, and seems to dearly hold on to past business practices, what […]
One of the many unique aspects of the time in which we live is that it is no longer unusual to have more than one career in a lifetime. Since the beginning of the Information Age 30 years ago it has been increasingly common for adults to have two or even three careers during their […]
There have been many posts on the subject of disintermediation in this blog. For those new to evolution shift, please check out this post and this post. I firmly believe that we are living in one of those short periods of time when the world gets rearranged in large part due to historically powerful agents […]
We are now into the global stage of humanity’s evolution. When viewed over the span of the past 10,000 years it is clear that we have moved from tribe to village to city, to state, to country to planet. In speeches I give around the country I discuss this “Flow to Global†as one of […]
In an earlier post, I wrote that the cell phone was a transformative technology. The cell phone, the personal computer, and the Internet are the three most transformative technologies of the last twenty years, as they have altered the fundamental concepts of time and space as it relates to human communication. The interesting current phenomenon […]
This is the second week in a row of attending an important convention in Las Vegas. Last week was the largest consumer electronic convention, CES. This week a Television convention that is in its forty-fourth year and which, for the past two decades has been very important and influential, NATPE.. Last week a convention about […]
Ten years ago the word convergence was most often used when predicting the convergence of the television set and the computer. Granted there were things like PDAs that synched up to a computer, but the PDA could go into the pocket and the computer could not. As we all know, it was the cell phone […]
This week at the Consumer Electronics Show there are hundreds of companies touting new gadgets that are “revolutionary†“innovative†“at the cutting edge†and “totally coolâ€. I will leave the descriptions of all these to the mainstream media as they already excessively cover this convention. Instead I will give you some view on the larger […]
In my last post I listed four General Trends and Dynamics that would gain power in this New Year. The third one listed was the about alternative energy and Global Warming. The fact that we reached a tipping point on this in 2006 will become much clearer this year. It will be a dominant story, […]
As a futurist I am always asked to make predictions. Often somewhat in jest, people ask me who is going to win the election, how much will the stock market go up in the next three months, who will win the Super Bowl, things like that. While I have been accurate in such predictions, it […]