Last Friday, June 15, 2007, a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere was lifted out of its’ underground vault near Tulsa Oklahoma.  It had been buried on June 15, 1957 to both commemorate the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma becoming a state, and to serve as a time capsule for the  100th anniversary in 2007.  This led me to immediately think about what might be put into the ground today that would be unearthed in 2057.

First however, some interesting facts about the unearthed Plymouth. The car had been buried in a structure that was built to withstand a nuclear blast.  When the car was unearthed, it was discovered that this structure was no barrier to ground water, which had seeped in and converted the dirt around the car into mud, making it look like a victim of a flood.  This of course made me think about all the nuclear fall-out shelters that were being built in the late 1950s and early 1960s when a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real perceived threat. An ever present threat far greater in scope than the terrorist events we are fearful of today. Well, since radiation moves quickly into water, it looks like the shelters that were going to save the survivors of a nuclear holocaust wouldn’t have done much good.  This suggests that our general perception of our ability to protect against bad events can be woefully over confident.

The time capsule aspect of the Plymouth was of obvious interest.  The car had been buried …

As mentioned in the last column I have had the opportunity to attend several conventions this year.  In January I attended the Consumer Electronic Show and the NATPE television conference, both in Las Vegas and in February the Chicago Auto Show.  This past weekend I was in New York attending the BEA book publishing convention.  I have attended a number of NATPE conventions, having been in the television business, but the other three were new to me to attend as both a futurist and as a member of the press.  Inevitably I spent a bit of time thinking comparatively on all four conventions. 

The CES show is a reflection not only of what is going on in the world, but was also what will be going on.  Given the speed and high level of innovation that technology and particularly the technology that people use for communication, entertainment and work, this convention has become a directional sign post on the future of the world. The media covers this convention excessively, telling its readers and viewers what they will be seeing, buying and using in the months and years ahead. [The comparison of the press rooms of these four conventions was startling.  At any one time there were 50-75 people furiously typing on keyboards in the press rooms of the CES, NATPE and Auto Shows.  I never saw more than 4 or 5 people doing so in the small press room at the BEA].

The NATPE convention is widely …

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 …

In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade.  In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear.  I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation of a number of social trends and cultural dynamics that are fundamentally changing our society.

Starbucks [for this post I will use them, the biggest brand, as the representation of all the new wave of coffee houses] is often thought to be brilliant because they persuaded tens of millions of people to spend $4 for what had been a $1 product.  I personally have always thought that the other brilliant thing they did was to create unlimited choice in a category that hardly had any choice.  What this means is that everyone, no matter how conformist or bland their daily life may be, can, for a couple of minutes, live in their own uniqueness.  “I’ll have a double decaf soy cappuccino”, or “I’ll have a venti skim vanilla latte, no foam”  In that moment, they have carved out their identity.  Do they really need a decaf soy cappuccino?  Of course not. But practically unlimited choice has allowed everyone to identify themselves by the small choices they make everyday.  Self definition in small ways allows us all to think we are living large in the landscape of free will.

In the last 30 years we have gone …

This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post.  The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising.  Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people.  The title of the conference was “The Internet:  Back on Speed”, which of course references the fact that we are now in the Internet 2.0 stage of development when broadband and video have started to deliver the promise of the Internet that was first glimpsed in the late 1990s before the bubble burst on Internet 1.0.  Because of that crash, there is still a bit of nervousness about the current explosive growth, but the general consensus, certainly seconded by this observer, is that this time it is not only for real but it is transformative.

A dominant theme put forth was the speed of change.  One of the most respected thought leaders in the industry, Rishad Tobaccowala, suggested  that making long range plans was no longer valid.  With a slide that showed everything that has happened in the last three years on the Internet, and then a slide showing all that has happened in the last three weeks, he made it clear that it is impossible to have a three year plan, let alone a five year plan.  Improvise, adapt and go with the flow is what is now called for to stay up with such rapid change.

This struck a particular chord with me.  …