In the last column I wrote about the National Hydrogen Association annual conference and that it was both informative and generated unprecedented attendance from the public. One of the most exciting aspects of the conference was the opportunity to drive hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, a first for me. I drove three vehicles, and the experience […]
Hydrogen has long been looked at as the ‘fuel of the future’. The general impression is that it will be a marketplace fuel in the future but not for a decade or more. Well, surprise, hydrogen is coming into the fuel marketplace today, albeit slowly. Last week I attended the National Hydrogen Association annual convention […]
The automotive industry of the 21st century is making promises and delivering on them. As I wrote in a column four months ago, if the federal government is thinking about spending tens of billions to prop up the remnants of last century’s automotive industry, it should also spend billions to support the innovative auto industry […]
Back in early December I wrote a column entitled “The Financial Golden Age of Sports: 1996-2008″. In it I predicted that professional sports were going to go into a financial decline that would last for years. I don’t make forecasts unless I have a very strong sense of them being correct. Well, this forecast has […]
Last week I wrote about being pleasantly surprised by a short speaking tour of Saskatchewan. In every other place I have visited in the past three months there has been extreme pessimism and concern about this Great Recession of 2008-2010/11. In last week’s column I described how three different groups of CEOs, business owners and […]
The fundamental force dominating the global economic condition right now is fear. The equity markets seem to have no other reality. Any rally of a day or two when buyers enter the market to take advantage of historic lows in share prices is then wiped out by the longer term, more powerful emotion of outright […]
As a futurist, part of what I do is to present the future to audiences and readers around the world. Presenting a vision of the future, making predictions and developing forecasts is what a futurist does. Regular readers of this column know that since last September I have presented you with a number of economic […]
The Great Recession of 2008-2010/11 is going to be a very tough time economically. As I wrote in my Forecast for 2009, this economic collapse brings four words to mind. The first word is contraction, which is the standard way to view a recession. Economic activity contracts and we are in a recession, economic expansion […]
We have all lived through a lifetime of technology changing the media and content landscape. Satellites allowed cable television and later satellite television to erode and then eviscerate the traditional broadcast network business model. Then the analog to digital transition eliminated the physicality of the product in the music industry. Then the universal, immediate and […]
The current media and advertising recession will be more severe and more transformative than any one of the last 80 years. This will be a time when it won’t be just about how far down ad spending goes, but also about what media entities and even business sectors will survive. Historically, advertising recessions have been […]