It was twenty-five years ago this month that the PC was born.  In August of 1981 IBM launched the Personal Computer.  This of course was five years after Jobs and Wozniak came out with the Apple 1, but it was the PC, and it’s rapid acceptance first in the corporate world and then in homes that ushered in the explosive growth of personal computing.  The importance of the introduction of the PC cannot be overstated from the vantage point of 2006.

Prior to 1981 computing basically was mainframe computing.  Corporations and universities had air conditioned rooms housing large computers that were …

On a recent trip to Europe I was reminded of the fact that Europeans are so much more conservation oriented and energy efficient than Americans.  The lights in hotel hallways are off until you walk by the sensor or push a button; they go on for two minutes and then go off again.  Motion sensors everywhere that turn lights on in hallways, stairwells and public spaces. In Munich I saw something for the first time: public escalators that don’t move until someone walks onto it and passes the motion detector.  All over downtown Munich there were non-moving escalators, waiting.

Then of …

In this space I have been clear about where the price of gasoline is going and, more importantly, what Americans and all global citizens need to do regarding energy.  The next twenty years are a critical time, a time of potentially great peril unless we have visionary leadership and full scientific and entrepreneurial mobilization toward first reducing and then replacing our consumption of petroleum based energy.

The reality is that we are now living in a country of $3.00 plus gas in the United States, with $4.00 likely by the end of the year. This has become a catalyst …

Modern man has moved through three different ages in the last 10,000 years. The Agricultural Age was from around 8,000 BC until the 1700s. The Industrial Age was from the 1700s to the last two decades of the 20th century, when the Information Age began. The great Alvin Toffler referred to these ages as the First Wave, Second Wave and Third Wave. Each wave or age had different economic characteristics. The dominant economic structure in Second Wave societies was a centralized hierarchy. The dominant structure in Third Wave societies are flat networks.

In …