This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post. The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising. Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people. The title of the conference was “The Internet: Back on Speedâ€, […]
In the last half of the twentieth century many of the major social, political and cultural trends in the United States started in California. The worship of the car and the surrounding car culture, the glorification of suburbia via sitcoms, surfing, music, the drug and counter-culture, free speech and student protest, progressive public higher education, […]
Just when you thought you had caught up with the ever increasing speed of technology, along comes another breakthrough to make you feel unnerved by the speed of change. This week it was the stunning announcement of a breakthrough in chip technology that turned my head. As I read the articles about this, the thought […]
[Last week I wrote a commentary piece for Media Daily News, a well respected on-line newsletter for media and advertising professionals, and a publication of MediaPost Communications. As a futurist, with extensive experience in the fields of media and entertainment, I think that there is a new era we have entered in the world of […]
Steve Jobs made the expected announcement that Apple would market the iTV , the gadget that will link the Apple computer in the den to the television set in the living room. Most of the reporting on this announcement was around the coming wave of downloading movies onto the computer and then transferring them to […]
A couple of months ago I made a post with this same title. I opened that post with the following language: “Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be […]
As readers of this blog know, I believe that, in many large and significant ways, disintermediation is a fundamental force of reorganization in the world today. We live in one of those eras of disintermediation. If you are new to this blog, check out the archive on this subject. We all have our guilty pleasures […]
In one of my posts on disintermediation, I stated that the residential real estate industry is and will be undergoing restructuring due to this force. In that post and in another, when I defined disintermediation, I warned the real estate brokers that this was historically inevitable and that they needed to develop ways to be […]
The first post I made here was about the significance of the MIT Media Lab and the fact that its founder, Nicholas Negroponte was taking a leave of absence to launch the noble effort of supplying $100 laptops to children in the Third World. In the six months since that post, the $100 laptop has […]
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 […]