What if you could be enticed into saving more money just by being made to look older? What if you could be encouraged to exercise with greater regularity by appearing to be more overweight, and what if you could be made to become more environmentally-conscious by cutting down “virtual” trees. The aforementioned ideas might sound [...]
Data mining is going to be big business in the near future. To understand why, consider that the food retailer, The Schwan Food Company, has used data mining to bolster its revenue by 3 to4 percent. That might not sound like a lot but in the retail industry, it’s huge. According to this insightful article, [...]
“Necessity is the mother of invention” or so it is said. I believe “necessity is the mother of innovation” and if U.S. and Western European companies wish to remain competitive in the future they’ll need to look to China, India, Brazil and Africa not just for new markets but for new ideas! In the food [...]
We’ve all heard and suffered through “commercial breaks.” Well, the commercial–that annoying staple of modern television–is about to become seriously broken. If you have a DVR you’ve probably been fast-forwarding through commercials for some time. What happens, however, when Apple introduces its Siri (voice recognition) technology to a next generation television set? (As is widely [...]
For some time now, I have been advocating (here and here) the idea of getting a reverse mentor. (In fact, I even have a reverse mentor. His name is Simon Anderson and he is one of the most promising young futurists I know.) Why a reverse mentor? The world is moving so fast that it [...]
A series of recent articles suggest that future earnings for “20-somethings” may be depressed in the future. That might very well be the case, but economists are historically awful at predicting how future technologies will disrupt old industries and jobs, create entirely new ones as well as change human behavior in some unexpected ways. Regardless [...]