I’m traveling to Atlanta today to keynote the Urban Land Institute’s annual meeting. The theme is: A Region at the Crossroads.
One of the main themes of my presentation will be that the future will arrive sooner than expected. As a metaphor for how fast things can change, I intend to point out that just last week it was announced, for the first time, that Amazon.com is selling more electronic books than actual print editions.
Considering how the first commercially-successful e-books only came out three years ago, this is a rather extraordinary development.
For another image of how fast the future can arrive, watch this video showing how Google’s Android has been activated over the past three years. Note how it starts very slowly and then suddenly explodes. (In this way it is similar to the lilly pad analogy I shared last month).
