This was a very interesting year from this futurist’s point of view. It felt like a year of transition, of new beginnings and of breakthroughs. New and clear trend lines were started in several areas that will continue next year and beyond. Starting next week I will take a predictive look forward to 2007 and […]
In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade. In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear. I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation […]
The other day Tivo announced that it had created software to allow Internet Video on Television. The expected convergence of video, TV and the Internet is now in full force. As I wrote in an earlier post about Apple’s announcement of iTV, everything is converging onto the big flat screen in the living room. Channel […]
The stock brokerage business was one of the first industries that was fundamentally disintermediated by the Internet. In an earlier post I both wrote about the history of the stock brokerage business and about William Yeh, the Chairman of Sogo Invest. Yeh was the man who, by launching SogoInvest where active traders could take advantage […]
Disintermediation is a favorite subject here. Regular readers know that I believe that we are in one of those historical eras when the world gets reorganized. As I have defined it in earlier posts, disintermediation always occurs during these significant periods and there is usually a dominant agent of disintermediation that forces the reorganization. In […]
This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post. The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising. Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people. The title of the conference was “The Internet: Back on Speedâ€, […]
Steve Jobs made the expected announcement that Apple would market the iTV , the gadget that will link the Apple computer in the den to the television set in the living room. Most of the reporting on this announcement was around the coming wave of downloading movies onto the computer and then transferring them to […]
A couple of months ago I made a post with this same title. I opened that post with the following language: “Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be […]
In one of my posts on disintermediation, I stated that the residential real estate industry is and will be undergoing restructuring due to this force. In that post and in another, when I defined disintermediation, I warned the real estate brokers that this was historically inevitable and that they needed to develop ways to be […]
It was twenty-five years ago this month that the PC was born. In August of 1981 IBM launched the Personal Computer. This of course was five years after Jobs and Wozniak came out with the Apple 1, but it was the PC, and it’s rapid acceptance first in the corporate world and then in homes […]