This was a very interesting year from this futurist’s point of view.  It felt like a year of transition, of new beginnings and of breakthroughs.  New and clear trend lines were started in several areas that will continue next year and beyond.  Starting next week I will take a predictive look forward to 2007 and suggest trends and dynamics that will help shape the months and years ahead.  This post however will take a look back to point out developments that occurred as a preamble for the predictive look forward.
2006 will be looked back upon as the year where a tipping point of sorts was reached regarding alternative energy and global warming.  Twenty years ago, global warming was a high level concept that only committed environmentalists understood.  Now, in 2006 it has become a personal experience for us all.  Record heat waves in the summer?  Global warming. Warm weather in December?  Global warming.  At year end the term is even used to discuss the stock market and what companies and industries will benefit from global warming.  Sure Al Gore helped us develop this perception with “An Inconvenient Truth”, but we have all felt, and many of us have seen the effects of this warming.
This sense of global warming combined with record high gasoline prices and the now widely understood connection between our addiction to oil and the funding of terrorism has really helped to bring about the early tipping point in the US regarding alternative energy.  Daily and weekly news …

The last time a human being walked on the Moon was in 1972.  Close to half of the U.S. population has been born since then.  It therefore falls to people over the age of 50 to recall the incredible excitement and sense of discovery and adventure that was the NASA Space program up to that year.  There were few things in my lifetime that both excited and united humanity as much as the first 15 years of space exploration that started with Sputnik in 1957. I remember the day when John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth and how there were transistor radios everywhere at school, and even the teachers devoted time during class for us to listen in on the news reports of this journey.  I remember when Neal Armstrong first set foot on the Moon.  The whole world was watching as a member of our species did something that had never been done before. 

Discussions of space exploration are now back in the news.  Recently, in just a matter of days NASA announced first that it was firming up plans for America’s return to the Moon and then, days later, the startling discovery that water had flowed on the surface of Mars within the past seven years.  Days later a crew went into space to work at and on the space station.  It was kind of triple hit of space news that brought back to mind the great adventure of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  Sure the …

One of the trade offs we seem to have accepted during the past 20 years is a loss of privacy.  None of us say we approve of that, but we have embraced technology in such a way that a diminished sense of privacy has occurred.  The portability of storage and computing, as discussed on this blog in earlier posts, is a major reason.  The easier small storage devices and laptops are to carry, the higher probability of theft.
It was revealed the other day that a laptop, with personnel records for 382,000 Boeing employees was stolen.  This was the third time in 13 months that this has occurred with Boeing.  Of course Boeing is not the only company where this has happened.  Laptops are portable and easy to put into a briefcase or bag.  Someone goes up for another cup of coffee at Starbucks or leaves their desk to go to the bathroom and in a few seconds the laptop and all the data on it is stolen.  We all enjoy the fact that we can have a computer with us wherever we are.  The freedom to work wherever and whenever we want is a very empowering thing, something that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

In the 1960s and 1970s, computing equaled mainframe computing.  Companies and universities all had these large machines that were in air conditioned, controlled access environments.  Access was highly monitored, records were kept for all activities and people even dressed in white …

In a post two days ago I suggested that the Wii Video Game console from Nintendo was the clear winner in the new console competition with Sony’s PlayStation 3.  I based this on the fact that the Wii was an innovative product that both opened up the gaming space to new participants and was highly desired by experienced gamers.

Since that post I have come across sales numbers that emphatically point to the fact that consumers have embraced the new, innovative vision of the Wii.  The PlayStation debuted on November 17 and the Wii on November 19 and the November sales figures for the PlayStation were 197,000 while the Wii sold 476,000.  Of course the lower price point of the Wii helped in these numbers, but the buzz has not been about price, but about the radical new and innovative approach the Wii has taken, described in the earlier post.

A new product in a competitive marketplace that is completely innovative wins.  When the price point for this innovative product is lower than the price for the competition, it wins big.  As mentioned in the earlier post, innovation in such an influential field as video gaming will inevitably flow into other areas of our lives in the near future, and that is a very good thing.

It is sad to see Sony on the back slope of the innovation curve. It was Sony of course that created the ‘personal music player’ market with the release of the Walkman in 1979.  Where were …