As something of a grand finale to their 11-week, full-immersion Ruby on Rails class, our first graduating class of DaVinci Coders took the stage on Demo Day to talk about the projects they worked on.

To me it was quite remarkable listening to the stories of transformation that occurred as students with no coding background whatsoever managed to immerse themselves in this new field and produce some extraordinary apps.

This class represents the next generation of “builders” who are taking over the world, because inside these lines of code lies the foundational underpinnings of the future.

Builders of the past have included people like architects, manufacturers, construction workers, and material fabricators. However, people in those professions are passing the baton to a new breed of builders skilled in things like digital architecture, intelligence work, and information fabrication.

To paraphrase the famous words of President Kennedy, “We choose to go to the moon, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” Creating a digital foundation for our future will indeed be hard, but here’s why we should be welcoming this challenge.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the late 1990s business and industry began to panic over the issues surrounding Y2K, which later turned out to be mostly manufactured fear.

In the chaotic world around us, it has become increasingly difficult to separate genuine problems from manufactured fear. And it is especially difficult to make plans for the future when we can’t properly gauge the severity of a legitimate issue we know we’ll have to deal with.

As we begin to wrestle with “2 billion jobs disappearing by 2030,” clearly a subject we’ll need to deal with sooner rather than later, it’s easy to get lost in the problems instead of the solutions.

That said, gauging a proper response is not easy. On one hand, dealing with the Y2K issue will seem like child’s play compared to this kind of massive job loss. However, throwing trillions of dollars at it, as we did with the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis, may indeed be a wrongheaded overreaction.

For this reason I’d like to talk through the coming era of automation and point out some of the hopeful signs I see for the brighter future that lies ahead.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the late 1980s I was still working at IBM, but had taken on a number of side projects to expand my horizons. One of those projects was working with the City of Denver on the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport.

At the time Stapleton was still in operation, and the new airport, DIA, was little more than a politician’s dream with a bunch of drawings and reports being pitched to the media.

Leading the charge was Denver Mayor Fedrico Pena who had decided to make the new airport the centerpiece of his administration, and several staffers were working full-time to make sure this dream would become a reality.

While most people were focused on the issues and opportunities surrounding the new airport, I was focusing on what I believed was an even bigger opportunity – redeveloping the 4,700 acres of prime real estate in the heart of Denver that would come available once the airport was moved.

To me, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to create something remarkable, and I was working overtime to help make it happen.

So what is it that separates a great community from a remarkable one? And more importantly, how will these criteria for “being remarkable” change in the future? Follow along as I fill you in on the rest of the story.

Read the rest of this entry »

In July, David Kappos, Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, announced expansion plans for the USPTO that would involve opening satellite offices in Denver, Dallas, and San Francisco. These coupled with the previously announced office in Detroit would draw on a diverse new talent pool for future examiners.

Last year’s “America Invents Act” that was signed into law in September 2011 has paved the way for a dramatically different intellectual property system to emerge.

Perhaps the biggest change is that the organization now has control over its own budget, a key factor driving the expansion process. Just in the past year the patent backlog has been reduced from over 700,000 to 640,000.

With plans to expand each of the satellite offices to 1,000 employees over time, the USPTO plans to whittle away this enormous patent logjam and create a response time that’s far better aligned with the industries it’s designed to support.

So how will businesses react if patents are granted in 3 months instead of what currently takes over 3 years? And what will it look like if patents are as easy to license as music and photographs.

Here are four key trends that will drive the world of intellectual property over the coming years.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you had a choice of flying from Boston to San Diego in a plane piloted by a single machine or the combined intelligence of 3,000 people, which would you choose?

Perhaps you would want more information before making that decision.

If the machine piloting the aircraft was a well-designed piece of equipment that had been used as an autopilot for thousands of successful flights, and the 3,000 people were of average intelligence living in the Midwest, which would you choose?

What if the 3,000 people consisted of the combined intelligence of the best airline pilots in the aviation industry?

When working with large groups of people online, the wisdom of crowds is neither elevated to the smartest among them, nor is it diminished to the lowest levels. It hoovers somewhere in the middle.

But the cumulative influence of crowds, in today’s society, is very influential. And there is a pervasive notion that the crowd is always right. But what happens when it is wrong?

Read the rest of this entry »