Happy New Year to all of you that are regular readers of this blog and to those of you who might be coming to it the first time.  May 2008 be a happy year for everyone.  I can promise that it will be another year of upheaval and change, probably exceeding 2007 in that regard.  I will submit to you my annual predictions, both general and specific, for the year within the next two weeks.  Right now I would like to take a quick look at several late in the year developments of 2007 that provide indication as to where we are going and what will lay ahead for us in 2008. 

As I have stated here several times, a fundamental aspect of being a futurist is to look for patterns to discern the dynamics that will shape our collective future.  Events, inventions, social, cultural and economic developments, trailblazing efforts by individuals and small groups, when looked at collectively can reveal underlying patterns and trends, both macro and micro.  Here are some notable developments that point into our future, some of which will be looked at in greater detail in future columns.
Writers’ Strike
 
The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it has engendered and the immediate consequences of it are significant.  It has within it the seeds of structural and permanent change in the entertainment business. The annual …

Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell …

There is no question in my mind but that oil will rise to at least $100 a barrel within the next year. It is easy to see a scenario of $125 a barrel price in the same time frame. The triple digit price of oil will become the norm. Recently it has been trading in the $80-90 range, and as it approached the upper end of that range the media began again covering the story with “sky is falling” concern about what this might mean for the economy. This reminded me of the comment that James Schlesinger, the first U.S. Secretary of Energy made about the country’s approach to energy: “We have only two modes – complacency and panic”.

At the beginning of this year, when oil was trading in the $50-60 price range, I was on a television program and predicted that the price would be up dramatically in 2007 and could easily top $80. That statement came not from any expertise about an ability to correctly predict commodity prices but from the fact that, as a futurist, I look at the long term, at overarching trends and patterns. The price of oil is on a long term up trend and will continue that way for years into the future.

Some historical perspective will be helpful. The price of oil from 1900 to the early 1970s was single digit. Then the OPEC oil embargo quickly quadrupled the price of oil. The price of oil hit a then all-time high of $41/barrel …

Recently, I have been struck by the number of anniversaries of significant events that have been acknowledged this year.  This past summer was the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”.  August was the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan.  This week marked the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock Arkansas.  This year is also the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.  Next week is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik.  All of these events were very significant events.

Why is a column with the tag line “A Future Look at Today” taking a look back on significant events?  The accelerating speed of change is the reason.  It is clear that, in the past 200 years, the speed of change has been accelerating.  During the 1800s, the first full century of the industrial revolution, the rate of change was noticeably faster than the 1700s.  The amount of change that occurred in the 1900s dwarfed that of the prior century.  The speed of change coming into the current century is much faster than it was coming into the last century, perhaps ten times faster.    In the Shift Age we are now in, the speed of change has literally become part of our environment.

What all this means is that the next 10, 40, 50 and 60 years will all encompass more change, more innovation, more acceleration than in the same amounts of time looking back to the …