Yesterday, after delivering the opening keynote (on future trends) at Beyond 2010 in Edmonton, I had the pleasure of also delivering the closing remarks. Not surprisingly, I discussed the importance of unlearning. In between, however, I had the immense pleasure of listening to a wonderful speaker, Peter Hinssen, who is the author of a new…

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…

I live in a major metropolitan area and the traffic situation drives me crazy. If someone then told me that they were going to close a road in order to reduce traffic congestion, I’d likely think they were either crazy or stupid. As I mention in my book, Jump the Curve, emerging technologies can, however,…

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…

Technology Review has an insightful article on the power of social networking entitled "How Obama Really Did It."  What is interesting about the article is that many top leaders within the Hillary Clinton campaign dismissed the power of the Internet and social networking because Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign — which relied heavily on the Internet …

Technology Review has an insightful article on the power of social networking entitled "How Obama Really Did It."  What is interesting about the article is that many top leaders within the Hillary Clinton campaign dismissed the power of the Internet and social networking because Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign — which relied heavily on the Internet …

It is easy to believe that having more choices will lead to a greater level of happiness. However, as this new study suggests, people may be more satisfied when selecting from a smaller set of options. There are a couple of reasons for this somewhat counter-intuitive finding, but the most poignant seems to be that…

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…

Computer World has an interesting article discussing the CIA’s use of Intellipedia — a Wikipedia-like project for its analysts. As a former naval intelligence officer, I think this is a fantastic idea but — perhaps not unsurprisingly — the idea has been met with some resistance from within the intelligence community. According to the article,…

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…