Last week the Internationale Funkausstellung was held in Berlin. This is the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe, equaling and perhaps surpassing the CES show that occurs every January in Las Vegas. One of the central themes behind major new product launches was the Internet and the central role it is now beginning to play […]
It was just reported that, as expected, there are now more Internet users in China than in the U.S. As of last month there were 253 million Internet users in China as compared to 220 million in the U.S. What is striking is that in just the last year, the number of new users in […]
The tag line of this blog is “A Future Look at Today”. It is not a political blog, nor is this a political column. I have assiduously kept politics out of this space leaving partisan conversations about campaign issues to others. There is a lot of heat around partisan politics and such heat can prevent […]
In the column “2007/2008” published on January 1, 2008 I made a prediction concerning media that is worth revisiting. At the beginning of the year the entertainment industry was in the middle of the writer’s strike. I wrote: “The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it […]
The electronic media is a wonderful invention. The forty year old vision of Marshall McLuhan of a global village where the electronic media connects us all and becomes an extension of our brains is now truly a reality. The power to educate, connect and inspire are all inherently available on radio, television and the internet. […]
As mentioned in the last column I have had the opportunity to attend several conventions this year. In January I attended the Consumer Electronic Show and the NATPE television conference, both in Las Vegas and in February the Chicago Auto Show. This past weekend I was in New York attending the BEA book publishing convention. […]
Last week it was reported that the ratings board of the motion picture industry is now going to factor in cigarette smoking as part of the overall rating of a film. Films with excessive smoking will now certainly get a PG-13, if not an R rating. The goal is to cut down on the influence […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]