As a futurist I spend a lot of time looking for patterns — pattern recognition — and forces that may develop into trends. This is just the way I look at the world, trying to connect the dots into patterns and directions that suggest the future. However, in some cases it doesn’t take a futurist […]
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 […]
On a recent trip to Europe I was reminded of the fact that Europeans are so much more conservation oriented and energy efficient than Americans. The lights in hotel hallways are off until you walk by the sensor or push a button; they go on for two minutes and then go off again. Motion sensors […]
In this space I have been clear about where the price of gasoline is going and, more importantly, what Americans and all global citizens need to do regarding energy. The next twenty years are a critical time, a time of potentially great peril unless we have visionary leadership and full scientific and entrepreneurial mobilization toward […]
Modern man has moved through three different ages in the last 10,000 years. The Agricultural Age was from around 8,000 BC until the 1700s. The Industrial Age was from the 1700s to the last two decades of the 20th century, when the Information Age began. The great Alvin Toffler referred to these ages as the […]
Yes, Dachau, the first major concentration camp opened by the Nazis. As a futurist visiting Dachau, I had a similar viewpoint that I touched upon in the recent post on Berlin: how looking back at awful events can help us today and that the awful events of today, when taken in a historical perspective, are […]
It is easy for us all to get caught up in our lives. It is also very easy to think that times have never been worse in the world, that the world problems of ‘our time’ are more serious than in the past. As a futurist, I try to look closely at the present, but […]
All the yellow cards, red cards, fake injuries and head butts aside, the recently completed World Cup was a magnificent global phenomenon. The world came together around the single biggest sporting event on earth. It has always been the quadrennial big event, but this time there was a certain amplification that was different. The first […]
Earlier this week I made a post on William Yeh, a man who personifies disintermediation, in this case the final step of disintermediation in the stock brokerage business. Since that time, people have asked me about why he could do what he is doing, how he could stay in business with prices that are more […]
As regular readers of this blog know, I have been exploring the subject of disintermediation. It is a dynamic force that has and will be reorganizing our culture and economy. In an early post on the subject, I pointed out that in the late 1990s the Internet acted as the agent of disintermediation for the […]