The Internet, the real estate market, fuel cell technology, nanotechnology and, now, "clean tech" have all experienced an investing "bubble." In retrospect, it is easy to point to signs that the market was inflating to dangerous levels. It is even easier to suggest that such bubbles are a bad thing — precisely because so many…

All-State Insurance is now sending video games to customers between the ages of 50 and 75. According to this article, “ten hours of game playing turns the clock back 10 years in terms of memory, useful field of view, processing visual information, and general cognitive functions.” More important, the technology could reduce the risk of…

Personally, I’m not a big fan of meetings. I understand that some serve a real purpose, but in this age of accelerating technological change is it really necessary that as many face-to-face meetings take place? According to this new study, it is possible some issues can just as easily be resolved using video-conferencing and virtual…

Last week, a colleague of mine at Future Blogger, Alvis Brigis, suggested that the coming reign of online video broadcasting as the "most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication" may be short-lived. In its stead, he suggested that brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) may replaced it. To many people the idea of brain-to-computer or even brain-to-brain communication…

Think that video games lead to violence or anti-social behavior? Or that only male teenagers play video games? Or perhaps you are of the opinion that video games have no educational value . Well, think again and prepare yourself to unlearn. I strongly encourage you to read this post which highlights many of the recent…

When contemplating the future, people need to keep a very open mind about what might be possible. Consider this article which describes how researchers at UC San Diego are developing facial recognition technology that can recognize if a person is having trouble understanding an educational lesson—say in mathematics or biology. As the technology continues to…

It has been said that the reason doctors and surgeons have not embraced simulated training to the same degree as airline pilots is because they don’t “go down” with their patients. The implicit message is that pilots have an incentive to utilize the very best training tools. This distinction is important because as 3-D display…

Yesterday, I watched this five-minute video of futurist Patrick Dixon discuss why the future of paper is bright for the foreseeable future. He could very well be correct, but if you watch the video below it is possible to envision a scenario in which the future of paper is not so rosy. As flexible electronic…