Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Ford and other automobile company’s efforts to entice young drivers into buying their products by offering vehicles that can stream Internet music, access news and podcasts, and even “send a tweet.” I’m sure some consumers will be intrigued by the ability to have their car send a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m in Dallas today to deliver a keynote presentation to the National Multi-Housing Council. The title of the talk is quite lengthy, “How the Internet is Creating a New Type of Consumer; Why Social Networks are Essential Anchoring Tools; and How Great Storytelling and Extended Relationships Will Enable Businesses to Engage with Customers in New [...]
Yesterday, I was in Minneapolis where I delivered a presentation on future trends in healthcare at United Healthcare’s first-ever Health. Inspired! event. Today, I’m in Nashville, Tennessee to deliver a keynote on “Why Future Trends in Healthcare Will Require Unlearning.” The two issues really fit together and this recent Technology Review article (The Virtual Nurse [...]
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 [...]