As readers of this blog know, I believe that, in many large and significant ways, disintermediation is a fundamental force of reorganization in the world today.  We live in one of those eras of disintermediation.  If you are new to this blog, check out the archive on this subject.

We all have our guilty pleasures in life.  The trashy shows on TV that we watch but don’t really talk about, the Internet sites that we go to in private moments of mindless fun, the celebrity filled magazines that fill us up with the seemingly glamorous lives of celebrities. 

The other day …

In one of my posts on disintermediation, I stated that the residential real estate industry is and will be undergoing restructuring due to this force.  In that post and in another, when I defined disintermediation, I warned the real estate brokers that this was historically inevitable and that they needed to develop ways to be creative and add value within this new dynamic.

All this came back to me in a form of confirmation when I read a great article in the New York Times called “The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters?”.  Please read this article and see …

The first post I made here was about the significance of the MIT Media Lab and the fact that its founder, Nicholas Negroponte was taking a leave of absence to launch the noble effort of supplying $100 laptops to children in the Third World.  In the six months since that post, the $100 laptop has moved toward becoming a reality.  It has also started to affect the computer marketplace in beneficial ways.

Last month the prototype of the $100 laptop had its public unveiling at a computing conference. It is about the size of a hardback book, has an …

As a futurist I spend a lot of time looking for patterns — pattern recognition — and forces that may develop into trends.  This is just the way I look at the world, trying to connect the dots into patterns and directions that suggest the future.  However, in some cases it doesn’t take a futurist to spot linkage between certain developments.  Let me take you back a few days to a walk on the beach.

I was in Sarasota, Florida to take care of some stuff regarding  my condo and to do a lot of writing and reading.  As I always …