We seem to have become much more of a coffee culture than ever before.  It is now hard to be in any large city in the United States where there is not an abundance of places to buy coffee. Twenty years ago you could buy coffee in any neighborhood, but it was at a restaurant […]

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 […]

In both the first and second posts with this title I stated that while in many areas it might be difficult to see into the future, in the area of technology the future can be readily seen.  The speed of technological invention and innovation moves so quickly that we have barely assimilated a recent breakthrough […]

The mid-term election was certainly a shining example of Democracy in all its imperfect beauty.  The will of the people was clearly apparent.  A President and his war were clearly rejected.  The American political conversation moved back to the middle.  The founding fathers vision of a government of checks and balances has been taken up […]

Last week the British Government released the Stern Report on Global Warming. As those of you who read about it know, the report suggested that, without immediate and aggressive spending, global warming will reduce worldwide productivity on the scale of the Great Depression. The report, commissioned by the British government is the most comprehensive study […]

Since the oil embargo of 1974, there has always been news coverage of OPEC meetings.  Usually it is about raising prices or cutting production.  These stories are usually accompanied by pictures of smiling or laughing men.  Until recently these articles usually caused a negative reaction in me, as they represented the fact that a small […]

The dramatic increase in gasoline prices over the summer combined with the perception that oil revenues fund terrorism has created a new perception on the need for the U.S. to import oil. It is now becoming clear to a growing number of Americans that dependency on foreign oil compromises our security. In a recent poll […]

I sense a tipping point in the realm of energy and alternative energy. In an earlier post I strongly argued that we need to solve the energy problem to save ourselves. That was back in May. Since then I have followed the subject closely and think that we may well be approaching a tipping point […]

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 […]