Look Ma no more texting and driving:

I am a huge fan of TED and it’s educational videos. I have now learned that TED is allowing independent groups to sponsor TEDx events in a series of different locations, including my hometown of Minneapolis. It is a wonderful example of “jumping the curve” because rather than trying to tightly control its image and…

With something which has been touted and even hyped for more than 50 years—as has the field of artificial intelligence—it is easy to dismiss predictions from proponents that “this time it is different.” But one of the funny things about the future is that sometimes (not always, however) “this time” really is different. To this…

As a professional futurist my job is not to predict the future. Instead, I offer my clients a range of possibilities about what might happen in the future. As a starting point for these “possibilities, I always begin with those trends that are already here. (As I have said before ”the future is here, it…

The following TED presentation by Kevin Kelly is now more than a year old, but for anyone interested contemplating where the future of the Internet is headed I highly recommend it. I especially like Kelly’s statement, which he makes early in the presentation, that we “have to get better at believing the impossible.” I’ve written…

At the time this section of my book went to press (2008), Apple’s most recent iPod was capable of storing 80 gigabytes–or approximately 20,000 songs. Assuming that one had the all free time to listen to that much music–and a person very well may if she or he has a daily commute in one of…

As you can see from the chart to the right, Twitter—like Google, Wikipedia and, most recently, FaceBook—is experiencing exponential growth. I have recently become enamored of Twitter and it is why I’m sponsoring this contest. After reading this piece in Techcrunch the other day I have, however, begun wondering more about what direction(s) the platform…

In my new book, Jump the Curve, I cite Reed Hastings — the CEO of NetFlix—as an individual who was able to “jump the curve” because of his ability to understand in the mid-1990s that eventually advances in data storage technology would allow his company to send movies through the mail (in the form of…

Knowledge, it has been said, is the key to success. It is a statement that is hard to disagree with unless you buy into that old adage that ignorance is bliss. Proceeding on the assumption that if you believed the latter you probably wouldn”t be reading this blog, I will go farther out on a…