[Note to readers: This blog was one of a select few blogs to be invited by General Motors to a behind the scenes opportunity at the current Chicago Auto Show to meet and interview top management.  As far as GM knew or I could discern, they were the only major auto company to reach out to the blogosphere and they should be given credit for that.  What follows in this and a subsequent post or two are some highlights, headlines and ruminations from this day long experience.  Of course my focus was and is on what I write about here: alternative energy, and new advanced technology that might change our lives in the years ahead. Seen through the filter of global warming, there are few more important objectives than greatly reducing the use of the internal combustion engine around the world.] 

The good news from the Chicago Auto Show is that hybrid and electric cars and innovative technologies are clearly being embraced by the large companies.  Yes, there are the cool and innovative concept cars scattered around the floor that may never come to market, but are used by the auto companies for positioning.  I wanted to see what is real, what will actually come to market and how an auto company, in this case GM, is truly reacting to the global warming reality we all now share.  I was impressed, and I learned some interesting things.

I was extremely interested and curious about the Chevrolet Volt.  I had seen the …

In my post on predictions for 2007, I made a specific prediction that the current Internet 2.0 boom would continue and that eyeballs, dollars and influence would migrate from old media to the Internet.  Now this isn’t crystal ball stuff.  Media and advertising professionals live this reality every day.  Just look at your own life.  How much more time do you spend on-line that you did 10, 5 or even 2 years ago?  The debate is around how fast and how much, not if or when.

I read a news item the other day that was, for me, a historically and hugely symbolic underscoring of this flow of power to the Internet.  The world’s oldest newspaper announced that it was ceasing publication on paper and would be only available on-line.

The Swedish newspaper PoIT – which stands for Post och Inrikes Tidningar – is the world’s oldest newspaper still in publication.  It has been continuously published since 1645.  1645!  That is just 90 years after Gutenberg printed his first bible.  The paper was founded by the Swedish Queen Christina and her chancellor during the Thirty Years War.

The Editor, and only employee of PoIT,  Roland Haegglund,   was quoted as saying “The change in format is, of course a major departure for some, possibly a little sad, but is also a natural step”.  Evidently PoIT, had long ago ceased to be a real newspaper, and had become an announcement vehicle for financial. legal and corporate institutions.  When it published its final print version …

In a recent post, I again touched on the theme of reaching a tipping point  in consciousness regarding Global Warming.  In that post, I mentioned early speculation about the up coming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Well, the other day, evidently after a lot of last minute back and forth on language and tone, the Panel went public with their front page findings.

This leading group of climate scientists  concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and went further to say that human activity, what we do every day, is ‘very likely’ the main factor in the rise of global temperatures since 1950.  [This should further confirm that Michael Crichton, is a novelist and a writer of fiction. I have heard one too many people source “State of Fear”, his novel about global warming as substantiation that global warming is a myth.  Please stop now.]  This was the panel’s fourth report since 1990 but was the first time stated with great certainty that the carbon dioxide and other emissions from human activities have been the main cause of warming during the past 50 years.

For all intents and purposes, the argument around the issue of human contribution to global warming is now over. Even the Texas oil man sitting in the White House embraced the findings of the panel.  Does any one want to be behind Bush on the global warming curve?  We are the primary cause.  What we all do every day, more or …

As most of you know, Moore’s law is named for Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel.  In the mid 1960s he predicted that transistor computing power would double every 24 months.  Ultimately, the popular translation of this hypothesis, and subsequent predictions he made, was that in the development of computers, the power of the computer would double every 24 months and the price would decrease by half.  This became a truism in the PC business and for three decades proved to be true.

In recent years people started to suggest that perhaps Moore’s law had run its course.  Such exponential growth could not go on forever.  It started to settle in as fact that we were coming to the end of this remarkable development cycle.  We all now had computers that were infinitely faster and more powerful that the ones we first used 20-30 years ago and we were paying a fraction of the cost of these early machines.  So if Moore’s Law had run its course, that was ok as the low cost speed and power at our finger tips was just fine, thank you very much.

I have written here and here in this blog about innovations and breakthroughs that perhaps suggested that Moore’s Law was not yet dead and that burial was premature.  This week gave strong evidence that the ‘Law’ continues onward.  Intel announced that it has made a breakthrough that would allow chips to leak less current, paving the way for a new generation of …