The news out of Detroit last week was that GM had given up the title of the world’s number one auto company to Toyota. This was a development that had been expected, but when both companies reported first quarter sales last week, the numbers made it official. Toyota sold 2.35 million cars and trucks, about […]
The New York Times is my favorite newspaper. Amidst all the media that I consume, it holds a disproportionately influential place in my life. It is a pleasure to read. In fact a number of columns I have written for this blog have been reflections on an article that I read in the Times. So […]
It is often valuable to have a grasp of history when looking to the future. Too often those that don’t have a historical perspective think that everything is new when in many cases what is new is a refurbished version of a past success model. The other day Clear Channel Communications announced that a station […]
A recent column discussed the historical context for the emergence of intellectual property as the new and most important valuation of a company. While this point of view is becoming more main stream every day the current problem is that there is no liquid market that can help determine actual valuations. Corporations and individuals can easily […]
In the last 10,000 years there has been three ages of humanity. The first age was the Agricultural Age which began around 8,000 B.C. when humanity stopped be nomadic and began to put down roots, literally. The advent of agriculture allowed humanity to start to build a social fabric that was placed based and that […]
Last week I wrote about an incredible energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future. As one of a select few invited to observe and participate in the conference, I had the incredible experience to listen to and meet with 15 of the top thinkers and scientists in the world today on the subject […]
Last week it was announced that Life magazine would cease publication, again. This is the third death of the magazine since it was founded in 1936. Life was a weekly from 1936 to 1972, when it first stopped publication. It was revived as a monthly in 1978 but then shut down again in 2000. It […]
In the prior post I gave a general definition and overview of peak oil for those that have yet to track this development. Until recently, the brightest minds unencumbered by vested oil interests have strongly suggested, and with good documentation, that the world could well run out of extractable petroleum sometime around the mid twenty-first […]
In my last post I wrote about GM and the presentation it made to some of us in the media about the new battery technology they are developing along with several other companies. At the end of that post I highlighted the two distinct lines of challenging questions that have come up in response. I […]
One of the most important research and development efforts in the world today is the quest for the perfect battery to power electric cars. We all know that there is global warming, air pollution, and an increasing dependence on imported oil. We know that petroleum is a finite resource that will be depleted in this […]